Bringing the spirit back to its origin, by Faouzi Skali
Contents
“Do you want to bring the spirit back to its origin?” That was the first question Shaykh Sidi Hamza put to Faouzi Skali, who would go on to become one of the best-known disciples of the Qadiriya Boutchichiya path in the West. Memories of a journey that began with the questionings of an anthropology student in Paris, and the rediscovery of the spiritual heritage of his native Morocco.
In the seventies, one could believe, in student circles, that politics explained everything. But seen through ideology, human destiny no longer made much sense, in the end. It was absurd, yet everyone settled for it, accepted it. Whilst I was training in political analysis at the University of Paris, other questions arose in me, relayed by a few books.
I had never read the Qur’an, knowing just the words needed to say the prayer. I said to myself: “This text has touched humanity for more than a millennium, and I don’t even know what is in it!” So I bought a French translation of the Qur’an. In parallel, I began reading Martin Lings’s A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, which I had come across by chance. I also read Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch’s translation of Rumi’s Livre du dedans, and Henry Corbin’s Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’Arabi. Little by little, I came to understand that in so vast a field, there was a whole journey to be made.
I was thus not coming into contact with these traditions through the Arabic language, and I was struck, whilst reading that translation of Rumi, to find that a Western woman could make such wisdom available to people from every background. My search was not bookish only, however, for I was possessed by genuine inner questions.
One evening, walking through Paris, I suddenly felt something like a certainty imposing itself with force: there was a choice of life or death to be made. On one side, everything appeared utterly black to me, whilst on the other, everything seemed luminous. It was as simple as that. I then began to say the prayer again. Something in me had tipped over despite an enormous resistance, and I felt an inner cataclysm that prayer was far from soothing.
Not long afterwards, at a family dinner, my father spoke of an uncle, Sidi El Hajj Tahar, a businessman, who had entered the Qadiriya Boutchichiya path. His decision had surprised everyone: “how could a responsible man enter a path where people cried out and regarded their shaykh as a prophet?” According to the rumour of the day, many young people were entering this path, abruptly renouncing their dissolute lives and giving up drink. It left me perplexed, and more impressed than I would have thought possible.
I belong to a liberal family and went to the French school in Fez. My father worked in the medical corps and was completely bilingual. My grandparents were people affiliated to the Sufi brotherhoods, but I had never made the connection with the Sufism I had discovered in the books of Rumi or Guénon. I thought that Sufism existed only in the East, and that you had to travel far to draw near to it. With the book Le soufi marocain Ahmad Ibn ’Ajiba et son mi’raj, in which Jean-Louis Michon discusses the Darqawiyya path in detail, I acquired new landmarks. I now had access to the real history of Sufism in my native country, Morocco.
Dreams and visions
As I began to go deeper into my reading of the Sufi masters, I had for the first time visions I was not used to, images of Ottoman-style sanctuaries that made me think of Rumi. That summer, I had gone home to Fez determined to set out in search of a Sufi path like Ibn ’Ajiba’s. I imagined that the south of Morocco was certainly the most favourable place to meet such masters.
That was when I had my most significant dream. I was in a mosque courtyard, with a small adjoining minaret, and I saw approaching from afar a majestic figure, with a fine beard and black eyebrows, large eyes and tortoiseshell glasses. The closer the figure came to me, the more dazzling I found his beauty. I was fascinated by that spiritual splendour and I said to myself: “I hope I’ll be able to keep looking at him without his seeing me!” Then he passed me and, having reached a certain distance, he turned round, looked at me and began to smile, a very broad smile which said that he knew what I was thinking. I was infinitely moved and very shaken. He then climbed up into the minaret, his head emerged from a window and he began to recite the call to prayer. I thought this was an extraordinary figure and, as I was then reading Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’Arabi, I believed it was Ibn ’Arabi. But in his day, people did not yet wear tortoiseshell glasses.
Later, at another family meal, the conversation came back to the Qadiriya Boutchichiya path and to that uncle who had entered it, still in a mocking tone. My family members considered his act madness, enumerated the consequences for his children and his wife, voiced criticisms and invented a good deal. Only one of the guests contented himself with saying of the shaykh: “Do stop talking such nonsense, for he is a holy man!” As for me, I wanted to know more. The next day, I went to meet a member of the Qadiriya Boutchichiya path who got me into a zawiya where people were doing dhikr. Among them was precisely that uncle, Sidi El Hajj Tahar, about whom the others had so amused themselves. On seeing him sitting there invoking, I was at once struck by his laughing eyes. He seemed fulfilled, very joyful, whereas I had kept the memory of an extremely tense man, a stressed industrialist who frequented sleep clinics.
After the gathering of invocations, he invited me to his home to talk about the path. He was in such a state of grace that we stayed up until morning. He was glad that a younger member of the family, a university student in Paris, could explain to his wife that Sufism was an authentic path, for people did not take him seriously. I stayed with him for several days; he invited certain fuqara’ who spoke to me at length, and I then asked to meet the shaykh.
We set off in a group, by road from Casablanca towards Oujda. On the way, we had dinner in Fez at the home of another member of my family. He spoke of the path that had been founded within our own family, the Skaliyya. He told me that the founder of our zawiya was called Moulay Ahmed Skali, a saint of the eighteenth century. Both my paternal and my maternal grandfathers were heirs of that path. Theologians of the Qarawiyyin, they had prayer beads and did dhikr. I remembered having seen them as a child, in traditional dress. In our brotherhood there was what is called the ’imara, spiritual intoxication, and I used to watch them entering into ecstasy, dressed in white, the turban coming undone as their state intensified. My host concluded his remarks with these words: “Now you are going to recover everything your ancestors lived. How lucky you are!”
The education
For me, things truly became clear: I had understood that the shaykh of the Qadiriya Boutchichiya path was the one I was looking for. Here indeed was a living path that could fulfil all my hope. I no longer had any doubt about its authenticity. My only fear was of not being accepted by the master.
In the company of my uncle El Hajj Tahar, I arrived very late one evening at the zawiya of Madagh. We were both shown into the room where Sidi Hamza was. His head was bare and he was talking with a few fuqara’.
I remember the electric atmosphere, and a very great joy in the air. From time to time a disciple was seized by a spiritual state. I sat down, deeply impressed. Seyid, as Sidi Hamza is affectionately called, asked a question about me, and my uncle introduced me as a student in Paris interested in Sufism. A little later, without my expecting it, Sidi Hamza turned towards me and said: “Do you want to bring the spirit back to its origin?” I did not know what to reply. He added: “Prepare yourself!”
I spent a week in Madagh. I saw Seyid every day. We had lunch together, went out walking with two or three people. I listened to him at length, talking about the zawiya, the village, the region, the former fuqara’ of Sidi Boumedienne. Little by little I perceived the role of the spiritual guide, the importance of education. “The shaykh is necessary because it is he who perplexes you,” he told me. Indeed, many events would subsequently arise to provoke my perplexity.
In Fez, my family were awaiting my return, very worried. Most feared that I would follow the example of my uncle El Hajj Tahar. My mother imagined me caught in a sect and implored my grandfather, the theologian, to persuade me to come back to the true religion. For that family of Sufi stock, the spiritual guides of former times were familiar figures. But a real shaykh, spiritual states, the emergence of a genuine teaching, people who commit themselves: they saw all that as charlatanism.
During the meal, for the first time in my presence, my grandfather did not stop telling stories about Sufism. An uncle began speaking of the saints he had met. My grandfather, from time to time, put a question to me. I was greatly heartened by the interest he showed in my undertaking. The discussion was not going at all in the direction my mother had planned; she kept prompting my grandfather: “Well then, tell him what you were asked to say!” He would simply reply: “Yes, yes, I am going to say it…” And off we went again into our discussions.
At one point, I found myself alone with my grandfather and he asked me: “How were you received over there?” He spoke to me kindly, asked me one or two more questions about the shaykh, and concluded: “Between you and me, hold on to that man with your whole being!”, using the Arabic expression: “Bite down with your molars!”, the deepest teeth of all.
“The master is the one who brings you there”
Back in France, I practised the dhikr. That was when I made the connection with the majestic figure of the dream I had had during my stay in Morocco. It was not Ibn ’Arabi, but Sidi Hamza. That smile was indeed his. But it was the young Sidi Hamza, for in the dream he had a black beard. He also wore the same tortoiseshell glasses. For me, the common thread was his gaze and his smile, which I would find again on various occasions. I kept preciously in memory that image of the first time, when he had turned towards me and said: “So, do you want to bring the spirit back to its origin?” He had smiled then in the very same way as in my dream.
The master is “the one who arrives and who brings you there”, the one who makes it possible for religion to be not simply a system, but something genuinely lived from within. From the outset, I understood that there was a dimension in this path that surpasses rational comprehension, that touches an extremely deep level and gradually discloses its reality to us. Everything falls into place from that heart-to-heart relationship which establishes itself with the spiritual guide. A kind of knowledge coming from within unfolds. After some time, without my having anything to demonstrate or to prove, those around me were reassured and realised that I was following an authentic teaching, very far from what they had feared. My family saw in me the fruits of spiritual practice, which are conspicuous in one’s everyday way of being. That a path is lived through the heart is perceived intuitively, in the depths of consciousness, far beyond words.
Further reading
- Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri Boutchich (1918-2017)
- Presentation of the Tariqa Qadiriya Boutchichiya
- Meditation sessions in France
