A Damascus scroll relating to a waqf for the Yūnusiyya

The Yūnusiyya is one of those small-scale, largely family-based Sufi orders which proliferated in the later Middle Ages. Little is known of its growth and development. The eponymous founder, one Yūnus ibn Yusuf Ibn Musā'id al-Shaibānī, was a holy man of the type described as majdhūb, which is explained as meaning that he had no shaikh and was self-initiated into the life of devotion and sanctity. He died in 619 (1222–3), approaching ninety years of age, in the district of the Mesopotamian town of Dara, in a village called al-Qunayya. As our source, Ibn Khallikān, adds, “His tomb there is wellknown and an object of pilgrimage”.