The Dala'il al-Khayrat (Guide of Blessings): 3. The Muhammadan Reality
Taken from the book Le guide des bienfaits et le lever des lumières by Hinda Boudiaf-Agrinier (Marsam). The Dala’il al-Khayrat is a collection of prayers upon the Prophet, may God’s peace and blessings be upon him, and upon the Messengers, composed by Muhammad al-Jazuli, a great fifteenth-century Sufi master: it is commonly read as part of the ritual practices of the Sufi brotherhoods.
An act of faith willed by God and instituted by Qur’anic prescription, the prayer upon the Prophet designates the invocation directed towards the Messenger of God and calling down the divine blessings upon him. Through it, God’s grace is stirred up in the Perfect Being who is the prototype of spiritual realisation. By virtue of tradition, Muhammad is the primordial essence of the whole of creation. Prophetic tradition reports that when God willed to make Himself known, He caused a handful of His Light to appear and said to it: “Be Muhammad!” In the divine order unfolding from the highest heavens down to the world of formal manifestation where the Prophet took bodily form, Muhammad is predestined to praise, and what is praise if not the impulse of love imbued with gratitude, as indicated by the root “hamada” from which the name “Muhammad” is derived. The reality of the Prophet, called the “Muhammadan Reality” (haqiqa muhammadiyya), is the eternal Archetype, the model of perfection created by the Master of the worlds for Himself and manifested out of mercy for the worlds. Muhammad, “the praised one” by essence, is the pure Being. A jewel buried in the depths of hearts, he is the object of God’s unceasing love and benevolence. In Sufi doctrine, he is the single, unique and unifying root of souls. If God asks believers to pray upon the Prophet, in a Qur’anic injunction, is this not then an invitation to meditate on the sacred essence of man? That essence, so jealously hidden, is the object of the quest. To pray for the Prophet amounts to finding one’s way back to that unifying reality and actualising its presence in the universe of the invoker, a universe which, by the grace of principial Unity, gathers together all that is and could be.
The work of the Dala’il al-Khayrat, by the Sufi saint Muhammad ibn Sulayman al-Jazuli, is the quintessence of the invocations dedicated to the Prophet. Its composition is linked to the encounter with a woman, a saint, as the history of Islam is studded with such encounters, and whose identity hagiography has not specified. Deeply moved by the holy woman’s spiritual force and her sincerity, and manifesting the desire to know her secret, she revealed to him: “the spiritual force that is given to me, I have acquired it through abundant invocation of the Prophet”. The work has crossed the centuries, carried by the rituals of the faithful. Commonly called “the Guide” (dalil), it is known throughout the Islamic world and constitutes, after the formula of oneness “la ilaha illa Llah”, the principal support of ritual invocations called “awrad” in many Sufi paths.
The series of invocations is characterised by a musical rhythm which makes it easy to learn and recite, leaving a harmonious imprint in the invoker’s heart. In Sufism, the rhythm always present in traditional texts plays its part in the enchantment of the soul, preparing the reciter’s heart to receive transcendent inspiration (waridat) and progressively transforming it into a receptacle for the flood of divine graces.
Hinda Boudiaf-Agrinier
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