The Sufi sanad: the chain of transmission of the path

Literal translation, word for word as far as English allows; the article below presents its meaning and structure.

“[The presenter] …in French. My lords and ladies, we open our blessed night with a first scholarly intervention entitled ‘the Sufi sanad’, whose presentation falls to his excellency the professor and doctor Sidi Mohammed Ouazzani, visiting professor at the Higher School of Education and Training. The floor is his, with our thanks.”

“[Dr Ouazzani] …May God pray over our master Muhammad, over his family, his companions, the followers and those who will follow them in excellence until the Day of Recompense. O God, pray over our master Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah, who stands firm by the truth of God: no affair is straitened without God unbinding it. My master, my support and my shaykh, the doctor Moulay Mounir al-Qadiri Boutchich: may God keep you, protect you, bless you and make firm your steps. My lords, the fuqara’ and the people of dhikr, may God bless our assembly and make it an assembly of good, of blessing and of grace, God willing, He the blessed and most high.

Praise be to God, glorified be His majesty, for having gathered us in these blessed nights: the nights of union, the nights of connection, the nights of intimacy and concord, the nights of love, the nights of company, the nights of rallying to the blessed shaykh, to the elevated sanad, to the bearer of the secret of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, Moulay Mounir al-Qadiri Boutchich, may God keep him and protect him.

O lords of dhikr, our Moroccan society was built fundamentally upon constants of religion and upon a good, blessed, rooted identity, drawn from the Law of the Prophet, peace be upon him: from the Book of God and the Sunna of His Messenger, upon him the best prayer and the purest salutation. This is what we call the constants: the religious and national constants of the Sharifian Kingdom of Morocco.

And if knowledge germinated and was founded in the East, Moroccans have a long reach in it: they spread it, deployed their effort in it and rooted it there. Moroccans have made many contributions, in jurisprudence, in grammar, in doctrine and also in Sufism, which is our subject, God willing, He the blessed and most high.

For the Sufi sanad is the one we follow, the one we practise as a path, the one we receive from elder to elder, from educator to educator, from pole to pole, up to our master the Messenger of God, peace be upon him. This is what the sublime royal letter indicated, addressed recently by our master the Commander of the Faithful, may God keep him and protect him, to the Supreme Council of Ulema and to the academicians, in homage to and in celebration of the life of the Elect, peace be upon him, for the fifteenth centenary of his birth, upon him the best prayer and salutation: in the sixth of those noble points addressed by our master the Commander of the Faithful, he placed the emphasis on the question of the sanad.

And if we speak of Sufism in Morocco, three routes are known. How did Sufism enter, and how did Moroccans practise it? From the East, by scholarly missions and journeys of learning from Morocco to the East: Moroccans would go to the Qarawiyyin to study and learn religious knowledge and instrumental knowledge, jurisprudence, grammar, but also mathematics, medicine, astronomy and what the sciences produced at the Qarawiyyin; or else Moroccans would leave on pilgrimage, meet the scholars there in the East and take knowledge from them. They learned it and followed it as a conduct. For Sufism is that very conduct, the station of ihsan, the station of education and the station of purification: ‘Blessed indeed is he who purifies it; and wretched he who stifles it’; and God the mighty and majestic says: ‘Say: my prayer, my acts of devotion, my life and my death belong to God, Lord of the worlds; no associate has He; this is what I have been commanded, and I am the first of the submitted.’ The thing that gathers the affair of Sufism is that this murid, this faqir, should entrust his heart, his limbs and his entire affair to God the mighty and majestic, taking for that purpose a guide and a sanad, spiritual and scholarly: the educating shaykh.

Moroccans, as we have said, through the ages have known this affair and followed it thus. Then the second route: the route of Ifriqiya, from Tunis, from Kairouan, which was called Ifriqiya before that time. The scholars came and went and went elsewhere still: among them Ibn Khaldun, among them the author of the Risala [Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani], and among them many other scholars; Moroccans profited greatly from them. Then there are other routes, then the route of al-Andalus: they took from al-Andalus, and al-Andalus took from them.

This Sufism bore fruit in Morocco: it gave us the shaykh Zarruq, the shaykh Ibn ’Ajiba, Imam al-Jazuli, Imam al-Busiri, Ibn ’Abbad ar-Rundi, and many other scholars who married the outward sense and the inward, subtle sense of man, with knowledge, jurisprudence, doctrine and the rest. And when we speak of ’Abd al-Wahid, author of the matn al-Murshid al-Mu’in: ’Abd al-Wahid ibn ’Ashir was a scholar in the Qur’anic readings, a scholar in jurisprudence, a scholar in hadith; and we do not merely say that he was a scholar in Sufism, he was a practitioner of Sufism. Ibn Khaldun likewise was a Sufi: when he speaks of the part of Sufism, in the chapter on Sufism of the Muqaddima, he mentions his shaykh Abu Mahdi ’Isa ibn az-Zayyat. And many others besides. Then Abu Madyan, whom they call Abu Madyan the ghawth, and many other figures, as well as al-Shadhili.

Two paths of Sufism thus appeared in Morocco: the path of Imam al-Shadhili and the path of the imam, the majestic scholar ’Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, may God have mercy on him, and it is the Sufi sanad that we receive from our blessed shaykh Sidi Mounir, may God bless him and reward him for us with the best reward.

In sum: Moroccans took knowledge at its sources, worked in it, transmitted it and expanded in it; they did not merely take it, they expanded in it until they had composed a wealth of works and collections, and they excelled in it, in sensibility and in sense. In sensibility, through writing and composition, through the beauty of the sense, the beauty of versification, Sufi literature, the Sufi sense and the language of the people of Sufism, with metaphor, rational metaphor, rhetorical metaphor, comparison and the rest of what its people employ, the people of aesthetic taste, the people of Sufism. Then in sense: when this man, the Sufi jurist, drinks the Sufi sense, when it abides in his intimate conscience, he proves it in his conduct, and his soul overflows with a beauty of behaviour from which the people around him profit.

O my lords, may God bless me and bless you in our shaykh and educator, may God keep him and protect him; may He bless us in these blessed nights, the nights of union; may He bless us in our zawiya Qadiriya Boutchichiya; may God keep you all and reward you for us and for the Muslims with the best reward. Peace be upon you, and the mercy of God and His blessings.”