Najm al-Din Kubra

Najm al-Din Kubra — in full Abu al-Jannab Ahmad ibn Umar al-Khiwaqi al-Khwarazmi — was born, according to tradition, in 540 AH (1145) in Khiva, in Khwarazm. The date is only approximate: accounts that he was about eighty at the time of the Mongol invasion make scholars treat it with caution. He grew up in a merchant family that valued religious learning. His byname Kubra is short for the Qur’anic phrase al-tammat al-kubra, “the greatest catastrophe”, one of the names of the Day of Judgement; his teacher is said to have given it to him because no one could beat him in a debate.

As a young man he left home to study and heard hadith from scholars in Nishapur, Hamadan, Isfahan, Mecca and Alexandria. By his own account, the Prophet appeared to him in a dream in Alexandria and gave him the kunya Abu al-Jannab, “the one who keeps away from the world”. At about thirty-five he gave up the outward sciences and began looking for a spiritual guide. The sources tell the story of his Sufi training in two ways, but both name the same three masters: Ismail al-Qasri of Dezful, Ammar ibn Yasir al-Bidlisi, a successor of Abu al-Najib Suhrawardi, and Ruzbihan al-Wazzan al-Misri, who lived in Cairo. According to one version, Ruzbihan gave him his daughter in marriage, and in Tabriz, where he was studying hadith, the ecstatic dervish Baba Faraj turned him wholly to the Sufi path.

In 580 AH (1184) Najm al-Din returned to Khwarazm, built a khanqah in its capital Gurganj (Urgench, today Konye-Urgench in Turkmenistan) and spent the rest of his life training disciples. The Kubrawiyya order dates from that year. The sources name some sixty of his successors, among them Majd al-Din Baghdadi, Najm al-Din Daya Razi, Radi al-Din Ali Lala, Sa’d al-Din Hamuya and Sayf al-Din Bakharzi; because he raised so many masters he was called wali-tarash, “the shaper of saints”. Abd al-Rahman Jami also counts Baha al-Din Walad, the father of Jalal al-Din Rumi, among his disciples, but neither Baha al-Din Walad’s writings nor Rumi’s bear this out. Najm al-Din was on good terms with the court of the Khwarazmshahs and met the philosopher Fakhr al-Din al-Razi in Khwarazm. According to legend, when Khwarazmshah Muhammad had his disciple Majd al-Din Baghdadi put to death, the shaykh never forgave the sultan and foretold disaster for the country.

At the centre of Kubra’s teaching is the analysis of the visions a Sufi sees during dhikr and spiritual exercises. In “The Fragrances of Beauty” he described them from his own experience: the seeker sees lights of different colours, and each colour points to a state of the heart — green light means the heart is alive, yellow light that it is sick; when the light rising from the heart meets the light descending from the Throne, the Qur’anic “light upon light” is reached. He held that man is a small world containing the whole universe. He set out his views in several treatises in Arabic, the best known being “The Ten Principles”; quatrains in Persian are also attributed to him. Late in life he was working on a commentary on the Qur’an.

In 618 AH (1221) the armies of Genghis Khan besieged and destroyed Gurganj. According to Rashid al-Din’s “Compendium of Chronicles”, Genghis Khan allowed the shaykh to leave the city, but he refused to save his own life while the city burned. The historian al-Yafi’i writes that he ordered his disciples, among them Sa’d al-Din Hamuya and Radi al-Din Ali Lala, to leave, then went into battle himself and was killed. Rashid al-Din reports that his body was never found among the many dead; another account says he was buried in his ruined khanqah.

A tomb attributed to him and a Sufi lodge beside it survive in Konye-Urgench. In the 1330s the traveller Ibn Battuta visited the shaykh’s mausoleum and noted that travellers were fed at the lodge. The present mausoleum was built in the first half of the 14th century and restored in the 19th by Muhammad Amin Khan of Khiva; in 2005 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of the monuments of Kunya-Urgench. In 1995 Uzbekistan marked the 850th anniversary of his birth, and his quatrains have been translated into Uzbek several times.