Naqshbandia Owaisia - Spiritual Lineage of The Tariqa

Spiritual Lineage of The Tariqa

In Sufism, as in any serious Islamic discipline such as jurisprudence fiqh, Quranic recital tajwid, and hadith, a disciple must have a master or ‘sheikh’ from whom to take the knowledge, one who has himself taken it from a master, and so on, in a continuous chain of masters back to Muhammad. In Sufi tradition, this means not only that the present sheikh has met and taken the way from a master, but that the master during his life­time has explicitly and verifiably invested the disciple — whether in writing or in front of a number of witnesses — to teach the spiritual path as a fully authorized master (murshid ma’dhun) to succeeding generations of disciples.

Such transmission silsila from an unbroken line of masters is one criterion that distinguishes a true or ‘con­nected’ Sufi path (tariqa muttasila), from an inauthentic or ‘dissevered’ path, (tariqa munqati‘a). The leader of a dissevered path may claim to be a sheikh on the basis of an authorization given by a master in private or other unverifi­able circumstance, or by a figure already passed from this world, such as one of the righteous person or Muhammad, or in a dream, or so on. These practices only “warm the heart” (yusta’nasu biha) but none meets Sufism’s condition that a sheikh must have a clear authorization connecting him with Muhammad, one that is verified by others than himself. Many lies are told by people, and without publicly verifiable authorizations, the tariqa would be com­promised by them.