Yusuf Hamdani

Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf al-Hamadānī, best simply known as Yusuf Hamadani (born 1048 or 1049 / 440 AH - died 1140 / 535 AH), was a Persian Sufi of the Middle Ages. He was the first of the group of Central Asian Sufi teachers known simply as Khwajagan (the Masters) of the Naqshbandi order. His shrine is at Merv, Turkmenistan. Life Born in Buzanjird near Hamadan in 1048 or 1049, he moved to Baghdad when he was eighteen years of age. He studied the Shafi'i school of fiqh under the supervision of the master of his time, Shaykh Ibrahim ibn Ali ibn Yusuf al-Fairuzabadi. He kept association in Baghdad with the great scholar, Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi, who gave him greater deference than to any of his other students although he was the youngest. But he was a Hanafi Maturidi unlike his teachers. According to Ibn Khallikan, he began his religious career with the cultivation of the religious sciences, becoming both a respected scholar of hadith and fiqh and a popular preacher in Baghdad. He was so brilliant a jurisprudent that he became the Marja of his time for all scholars in that field. He was known in Baghdad, the center of Islamic knowledge, in Isfahan, Bukhara, Samarqand, Khwarazm, and throughout Central Asia.