Already during his lifetime, or soon after, Abu’l-Wafaʾ's influence seems to have expanded beyond Iraq, gaining a footing on the eastern and southern edges of Anatolia through his associates and descendants who settled in northern Mesopotamia as far as Hakkari and various localities in the Levant. During the first half of Abu’l-Wafaʾ's Sufi career, Anatolia proper, however, was still part of Byzantine territory, with its southeastern rim forming the frontier between Christendom and Islamdom. Established in the seventh century, this frontier would eventually shift further to the west after the Seljuk commander Alparslan defeated the Byzantine imperial army in the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. With this victory began a new era in the ‘lands of Rum’ – that is, the ‘lands of the Romans’ – as Muslims called Anatolia at the time. Recently Islamised Turkmen tribes poured into the region, inaugurating a new chapter in its history with the overarching themes of Turkification and Islamisation. These two mutually reinforcing trends carried further and solidified with the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. The latter triggered a second influx from the east that brought a group of people more socially and ethnically diverse than their mostly Turkmen and nomadic predecessors, who had entered Rum with Alparslan's armies less than two centuries prior.

With these successive political and demographic developments, an extraordinarily complex and fluid socio-cultural landscape was established in Anatolia over the four centuries between the initial arrival of the Seljuks and the entrenchment of a pax Ottomanica circa 1500. Muslims of different ethnic and social identities, and religious orientations and temperaments – ranging from madrasa-centred Sunni juridical Islam to normative ṭarīqa Sufism and antinomian dervish piety with Shiʿi-ʿAlid tinges – commingled and cross-pollinated with an equally heterogeneous indigenous Christian population in this western-most frontier of Islam. Of these diverse social groups, the Sufis and dervishes were arguably the most palpable and ubiquitous representatives of Islam during the period under consideration.