Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad Qazvīnī (d. after 978/1570–1) was a refugee from Ṣafavid Shīʿī rule in Qazvīn who moved with his family to Ottoman Damascus in 973/1565–6. There he wrote the Silsila-nāma-yi kh^vājagān-i Naqshband (“The book of the chain of the Naqshbandī Khvājagānī masters”), a silsila (“chain” representing Ṣūfī initiatic lineage) that serves as our primary source for the history of the Naqshbandī Ṣūfī brotherhood (ṭarīqa) during the first decades of Ṣafavid rule in Iran (the Naqshbandī brotherhood originated in fourteenth-century Bukhara). The Silsila-nāma soon attracted …