After this period of retirement and spiritual discipline he...

After this period of retirement and spiritual discipline he came back to Baghdad and adopted the career of a preacher to the people in response to what he calls the “inner command.” The students and the people in large numbers began to gather round him and within a short time the premises where he had started lecturing had to be enlarged and expanded. At the age of 51, he got married, and died at the ripe age of 91.

He was a man of charming personality and by his eloquent speech exerted great influence on the people. He stands in the forefront of the Muslim mystics of all ages, and is the founder of the Qadirivyah school of Sufism which includes within its fold many renowned Sufis of the Muslim world. Futuh al-Ghaib (Revelations of the Unseen), a collection of eighty sermons which he delivered on different occasions, reflects the unstable condition of the times.

He emphasizes in almost every sermon that social ruin and instability is the result of excessive materialistic outlook on life; true well-being is the result of a harmonious development of an individual's personality whose material as well as spiritual demands are being properly looked after. But as a reaction against the prevalent materialism he emphasizes religious values to an extent which seems to be exaggerated.

In the fifty-fourth Discourse, for instance, he advises people in general to adopt an attitude of total and com­plete indifference towards the world, to kill desires and ambitions of all kinds.

In order that his indifference in worldly life may become complete and un­alloyed, it is proper for an individual to remove all things from his heart and cultivate pleasure in annihilation, abiding poverty, and want, so that there may not remain in his heart even so much pleasure as that of sucking the stone of a date.[^1] With regard to the question of free-will he adopts an attitude of determinism, though sometimes he tries to avoid the extremes of deterministic position by resort to what has come to be known in Muslim scholastic circles as acquisition ( kasb ).

He says, “Do not forget the position of human efforts so as not to fall a victim to the creed of the determinists (Jabriyyah) and believe that no action attains its fulfilment but in God. Nor should you say that actions of man proceed from anything but from God, because if you say so you will become an unbeliever and belong to the category of people known as the indeterminists (Qadariyyah).