Golamur Rahman Maizbhandari

Gulamur Rahman (1865–1937), known with his honorifics as Gausul Azam Syed Gulamur Rahman Maizbhandari, and affectionately as Baba Bhandari (বাবা ভান্ডারী), was a Sufi saint from Bangladesh who succeeded his uncle Syed Ahmad Ullah as head of the Maizbhandari Sufi Order, the first such Sufi order in Bangladesh.

Gulamur Rahman was born in Maizbhandar village on 14 October 1865, corresponding to 27 Ashvin in the Bengali Calendar and to 12 Jumada al-Thani 1284 AH. His father was Abdul Karim Shah, Syed Ahmad Ullah’s youngest brother, and his mother was Musharaf Jaan.

His uncle, who called him “the rose of my garden”, entrusted him with the teaching of students, particularly adepts. He spent time wandering alone in the woods as part of his spiritual journey.Around 1914 he entered a state of meditation and stopped speaking except on rare occasions, thus becoming known as a magdub pir. In 1928 he moved out of his father’s house into his own, where disciples and his four sons assumed responsibility for the order’s administration.

According to German scholar Hans Harder,

The type of spiritual mandate Gholam Rahman had received from Ahmadullah and his status as a saint are a matter of dissent to this day. Writers from Rahmaniyya Manzil, the house of the descendants of Gholam Rahman, class him as a ġawṯ al-aʿẓam, the highest category of a walī Allāh, side by side with Ahmadullah, and sometimes claim that he was installed by Ahmadullah as his spiritual successor (sağğādanašīn). The position held by the descendants of Ahmadullah or Ahmadiyya Manzil, by contrast, is that he was Ahmadullah s main delegate (pradhān khaliphā), and the title of a ġawṯ al-aʿẓam is usually denied to him even if it does appear in one of Delawar Hosain’s writings.