Why Abdulqadir al-Jilani Still Matters When Power Drifts Beyond Conscience

Abdulqadir al-Jilani, may Allah have mercy on his soul, is one of the most beloved figures in Islamic history. His name is spoken with reverence across the Muslim world. For centuries, people have turned to him as a symbol of spiritual depth, humility, and closeness to Allah. And yet, for all this reverence, there is something strangely absent in how we remember him.

We remember who he was — but rarely ask the significance of what he actually did.

The modern Muslim imagination tends to place Abdulqadir al-Jilani in one of two categories. Either he is elevated beyond history as a saint whose role was purely spiritual, or he is quietly sidelined as part of a “Sufi” tradition often reduced to personal piety and ritual practice. In both cases, his legacy is treated as something inward, private, and disconnected from power, institutions, and the shape of civilization itself.

This raises the first question, and it is not a sentimental one:

“Why did a man remembered primarily for spirituality end up shaping institutions that stretched from Mali to China?”

Spiritual charisma alone does not produce durable social structures. Yet zawiyahs linked to Abdulqadir al-Jilani’s legacy fed the poor, protected travelers, mediated disputes, facilitated trade, and created trust across cultures for centuries. Something more than private devotion was at work.

To understand that, we need to look at the world he lived in. Abdulqadir al-Jilani did not live in a moral vacuum. Islamic law existed. Scholars were present. Courts functioned. And yet, moral authority was already drifting. The rulers were becoming more insulated, and increasingly distant from the lives of ordinary people. Moral responsibility was growing costly.

Which leads to the second question:

“What problem was Abdulqadir al-Jilani actually responding to, if the law was already in place?”

If Islam already had its legal and moral framework, why did figures like him feel compelled to build new types of institutions alongside it?

Not against the state. Not in rebellion. But clearly not within its machinery either.

This is where the concept of Abdal becomes difficult to dismiss. They are often treated as mystical figures or symbolic saints. But earlier Muslims took them seriously in a functional sense, as people who carried a responsibility for humanity, so essential, that institutions and ordinary scholars could not.

That leads to a third, more unsettling question:

“When moral action becomes dangerous or ineffective within institutions, where does responsibility go?”

Does it disappear? Or does it relocate — into people, spaces, and practices that remain close enough to the people to preserve conscience?

For centuries, Muslims actually embodied the answer to that question, even if they did not always articulate it theoretically. Today, however, that answer feels distant. Sufism is often dismissed as aesthetic, irrational, or politically irrelevant. The institutions it produced are rarely understood as infrastructure. The mechanisms that once preserved moral coherence under power are remembered as ornamentation.

Which brings us to the final question — one that makes Abdulqadir al-Jilani impossible to leave in the past:

“What happens when power becomes even more abstract than it was in his time?”

We now live in a world governed not only by states and institutions, but by systems, metrics, and algorithms. Authority is mediated. Responsibility diffuses. Feedback is filtered. Conscience is displaced. The conditions Abdulqadir al-Jilani responded to have not disappeared — they have intensified.

This essay does not treat Abdulqadir al-Jilani as a figure of nostalgia, nor as a saint beyond analysis. It approaches him as something far more challenging:

“A man who acutely understood how to live a moral life, when political power drifts beyond conscience, and who helped build structures that carried that burden quietly for generations.“

If we have lost something today, it may not be faith or sincerity. It may be the knowledge of how moral coherence is actually preserved.

The paper below, explores these questions in depth (not devotionally, but structurally) and asks what the “Rose of Baghdad” still has to teach us in an age of institutional and technological power.