Murshid in the context of "Tariqa"

Ahmad Yasawi (Kazakh: Қожа Ахмет Ясауи, romanized: Qoja Ahmet Iasaui, قوجا احمەت ياساۋى; Persian: خواجه احمد یسوی, romanized: Khwāje Ahmad-e Yasavī; 1093–1166) was a Turkic poet and Sufi, an early mystic who exerted a powerful influence on the development of Sufi orders throughout the Turkic-speaking world. Yasawi is the earliest known Turkic poet who composed poetry in Middle Turkic. He was a pioneer of popular mysticism, founded the first Turkic Sufi order, the Yasawiyya or Yeseviye, which very quickly spread over Turkic-speaking areas. He was a Hanafi scholar like his murshid (spiritual guide), Yusuf Hamadani.

In Sufism, a murīd (Arabic مُرِيد 'one who seeks') is a novice committed to spiritual enlightenment by sulūk (traversing a path) under a spiritual guide, who may take the title murshid, pir or shaykh. A sālik or Sufi follower only becomes a murīd when he makes a pledge (bayʿah) to a murshid. The equivalent Persian term is shāgird.

The initiation process of a murīd is known as ʿahd (Arabic: عَهْد) or bai'ath. Before initiation, a murīd is instructed by his guide, who must first accept the initiate as his disciple. Throughout the instruction period, the murīd typically experiences waridates like visions and dreams during personal spiritual awrads and exercises. These visions are interpreted by the murshid. A common practice among the early Sufi orders was to grant a khirqa or a robe to the murīd upon the initiation or after he had progressed through a series of increasingly difficult and significant tasks on the path of mystical development until attaining wāṣil stage.

Gongbei (Chinese: 拱北; pinyin: Gǒngběi; from Persian: گنبد gonbad, meaning "dome", "cupola"), is a term used by the Hui and Uyghur Muslim populations of China in the Northwestern region to indicate an Islamic shrine complex centered on the grave (qabr) of a Ṣūfī Muslim murs̲h̲id ("master") or walī ("saint"), typically the founder of a menhuan (a Chinese Ṣūfī ṭarīḳa, or "saintly lineage"). The grave itself usually is topped with a dome. Similar Islamic facilities with the same purpose, known as dargāh or türbe, can be found in several other regions of the Muslim world.

Between 1958 and 1966, many Ṣūfī shrines and tombs in Ningxia and throughout Northwestern China in general were destroyed, viewed by the Chinese Communist government and authorities as relics of the old "feudal" order and symbols which the Chinese Communist Revolution (1946−1950) had attempted to eradicate through a series of atheistic and anti-religious campaigns, as well as for practical reasons ("wasting valuable farmland"). Once the right to freedom of religion became recognized once again in the 1980s, and much of the land reverted to the control of individual farmers, destroyed gongbei were often rebuilt once again.