Najmuddin Kubra

Najm al-Din Kubra (1145-1221) was a Sufi mystic born in Khiva, in the Khwarezm region of Central Asia, and one of the founders of a Sufi tradition centred on visionary experience. He worked in the thirteenth century, and his influence reached later dynasties such as the Ilkhanate and the Timurids.

He began as a scholar of hadith and kalam, and his interest in Sufism grew in Egypt, where he became a disciple of Ruzbihan Baqli. After years of study he set aside the religious sciences to live fully as a Sufi, and later received his khirka from another master. He gathered a large circle of followers and Sufi writers, who gave him the nickname "manufacturer of saints" and whose order came to be known as the Kubrawiya.

His thought centres on the analysis of visionary experience: dreams, visions, the degrees of luminous epiphany and the so-called subtle centres of the human being. For him the Quran was in a sense a visionary text, and the practice of zikr was the means of perceiving such visions. He died during the Mongol invasion after refusing to leave his city. His influence spread through Central Asia and the Middle East, and the order later split into the Nurbakhshiyya and the Dhahabiyya, while the Naqshbandiyya eclipsed it across much of the Islamic world.