Fakir (in Arab means poverty), in Islam,usually an intimate in a sufi order. This term along with its Persian equivalent,dervish,was extended in western usage to Indian ascetics and yogis, and incorrectly used traces its ancestry to a mystic teacher and, beyond him, through a chain of transmission (silsila) to the prophet Muhammad and ultimately to God. Sufi orders began to organize in the tumultuous 12th century although their histories claim to emanate from the formative period of Islam, with its ecstatic and literary sufi figures. The oldest attested extant order is probably the Qadiriyya, founded by Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (d.1166) in Bagdad; it is currently one of the most geographically widespread. Other important orders include the Ahmadiyya (notably in Egypt).
