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Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani
Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani
1077 CE–1166 CE · Baghdad
Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (c. 470/1077–561/1166 CE) was a Hanbali jurist, preacher, and Sufi who was born in the Persian province of Gilan, south of the Caspian Sea, and spent his career in Baghdad. He is best known as the figure after whom the Qadiriyya, one of the most widespread Sufi orders, is named, and his reputation rests on his sermons and on his effort to hold together Islamic legal observance and Sufi piety; sermon collections such as Futuh al-Ghayb and Al-Fath al-Rabbani, along with a Diwan and a Quran commentary (Tafsir al-Jilani), are among the works attributed to him, though the authenticity of several is debated. A Sunni figure, he is venerated across much of the Muslim world and is buried in a shrine in Baghdad that remains a pilgrimage site.
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BaghdadIraq
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About Baghdad
Baghdad, on the Tigris, is the capital of modern Iraq. The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded it in 762 as his capital, and for five centuries it was a leading centre of Islamic learning, with the House of Wisdom, the Nizamiyya madrasa and many jurists, Sufis and scientists; Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, eponym of the Qadiriyya order, is buried there. The Mongol sack of 1258 ended the caliphate, and the city later passed to Ottoman rule. It was also a seat of the patriarchs of the Church of the East and of the exilarch who headed Babylonian Jewry. Its Jewish community, whose foremost nineteenth-century rabbi was Yosef Hayyim (Ben Ish Chai), almost entirely emigrated to Israel in 1950-52.
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.