Khwaja Muhammad Islam Juybari
Khwaja
Ḵᵛāja Moḥammad Eslām Juybāri (Ḵᵛāja Moḥammad Eslām b. Ḵᵛāja Aḥmad; “Ḵᵛāja-ye Juybāri”) is the eponym of the Juybāris, the foremost family of Bukhara for more than five centuries, and the Naqšbandī shaikh who made the family a powerful force in the Bukharan oasis. He was one of the successors (ḵalīfas) of Maḵdūm-e Aʿẓam Sayyed Aḥmad Ḵᵛājagī Kāsānī. The source gives his life as 1482-1563. The name “Juybāri” derives from the family residence in Juybār, a village just west of Bukhara that was brought within the city walls in the late 16th century. The family’s first public role was as caretakers of the Čār Bakr shrine at Somitan, west of Bukhara, a sacred site of some antiquity. In the 16th century the tomb was in the care of Moḥammad Eslām. The source writes that only with him did the family emerge as a powerful force in the Bukharan oasis as a whole and in Uzbek-Chingizid politics, which made him, rather than one of his forebears, the “founder” of the Juybāri dynasty. Ḥāfeẓ-e Taniš’s Šaraf-nāma-ye šāhi places him at the centre of the struggle for Bukhara that ended with the dominance of the Jāni-Begid clan led by ʿAbd-Allāh b. Eskandar, and portrays him as mediator, facilitator and supporter; ʿAbd-Allāh captured Bukhara in late spring 1557. The Englishman Anthony Jenkinson, who arrived in Bukhara in December 1558, calls him the “Metropolitane” of the city (most likely his understanding of the title šayḵ-al-eslām) and writes that he was “more obeyed than the King.” For most of the period the Juybāris also held the office of šayḵ-al-eslām. According to the source, the original source of his wealth cannot now be ascertained; it has been suggested that it derived from the patronage he received as caretaker of the Čār Bakr shrine and as spiritual guide (moršed) to the mother of ʿAbd-al-ʿAziz Khan, who ruled at Bukhara (1540-50). The earliest known document recording a real estate purchase is dated 15 August 1544: two small houses in Juybār for 55 tangas. Less than a month later he bought the village of Qaṣr-e Luṭ in the tumān of Rud-e Šahr for three thousand tangas; the seller was Eskandar Solṭān of the Jāni-Begid clan, later (from 1561) khan. In the thirteen years from his first purchase to the taking of Bukhara he spent some twenty thousand tangas on forty-five properties, and from the conquest until 1563 nearly thirty-five thousand tangas on 137 properties. The source records that from his time onwards much of this wealth was devoted to public works such as mosques, madrasas, ḵānaqāhs, bridges, canals and caravanserais. His Ḵᵛājagān/Naqšbandī affiliation is traced by the family’s 17th-century biographer Moḥammad-Ṭāleb Juybāri from him to Bahāʾ-al-Din Naqšband through Maḵdūm-e Aʿẓam Aḥmad Kāsāni, Mawlānā Moḥammad Qāżi (d. 1515), ʿObayd-Allāh Aḥrār (d. 1490) and Yaʿqub Čarḵi (d. 1447), one of the three main successors of Bahāʾ-al-Din Naqšband (d. 1389). The Čār Bakr article presents him as “head of the Ḵᵛājagī order of Naqšbandī shaikhs.” The source gives his death as 14 October 1563 (971/1563 in the Dahbīdīya article). He left three sons; Ḵᵛāja Saʿd (d. Ḏu’l-ḥejja 997/October 1589), who was in his early thirties at his father’s death, became the unchallenged head of the family for the following quarter century. His Circle of Influence — The source writes that 16th-century contemporaries accorded the family head the title of moršed and that the family’s place in the Ḵᵛājagān selsela ensured that they were thought of as spiritually empowered figures. Neṯāri Boḵāri, a leading arbiter of literary taste, refers to him as his moršed ( Moḏakker-e aḥbāb ), and the Shibanid ruler ʿAbd-Allāh Khan saw him and his successor Ḵᵛāja Saʿd in the same way. Badr-al-Din Kašmiri’s Rawżat al-reżwān contains long sections of the correspondence of Moḥammad Eslām and Ḵᵛāja Saʿd with more than fifty political figures of their time. The hagiographical and biographical works devoted to the family in the 16th and 17th centuries include Ḥosayn al-Saraḵsi’s Saʿdiya , written by 1580, Kašmiri’s Rawżat al-reżwān , and Maṭlab al-ṭālebin , written in 1663-64 by his great-grandson Moḥammad-Ṭāleb. The family remained a social, economic and political force in Bukhara until the Soviet Revolution. His Tomb and Complex — The family’s centre was the shrine and cemetery of Čār Bakr; the source writes that most of its members were eventually interred there, but does not name Moḥammad Eslām’s grave. Čār Bakr, “four Bakrs,” is the family necropolis near the village of Sumitan (Samtin), about 5 km outside the Šīrgarān Gate of Bukhara, which grew up around the venerated tomb of Abū Bakr, to whom the Juybāri shaikhs traced their genealogy. In 966/1558-59 the Shibanid ʿAbd-Allāh Khan instructed that a complex including a mosque, a madrasa and a ḵānaqāh be established there; it was completed by 976/1569, and a tree-lined avenue was laid out from the Šīrgarān Gate to the necropolis. The complex stands on a platform with a central courtyard: the mosque and the ḵānaqāh flank the courtyard and are connected by the madrasa, a long, narrow structure with two tiers of arcades facing the courtyard; the fourth side is open. Its tiled portals and its domes on tall drums loom above the lower monuments of the necropolis; the most noteworthy features of the interiors are the systems of intersecting ribs that divide the cupolas into small facets. Beyond this core lies a sprawling cemetery with family mausolea, small fenced courtyards, paths and many tombstones; a small minaret echoing the Kalān minaret of Bukhara was added in the 20th century. The JUYBĀRIS article notes that the success of the family’s endowment policy is reflected in the survival of large institutions such as the Čār Bakr complex of madrasa, mosque and ḵānaqāh.