The Dala'il al-Khayrat (Guide of Blessings): 4. A cyclical initiatic journey
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.
The text of the Dalil is rich in symbols and anchored in the prophetic tradition (sunna). Allusion (’ishara) is indeed the means of transmitting eminent spiritual truths (haqa’iq) in a language that does not break with the proprieties of the Law (shari’a). The Dalil is divided into 8 sections: the first 7 follow one another in the familiar order of the days of the week, while the last closes the work with a sublime incantation which brings it back to its starting point, closing the cycle and inviting a new recitation. For the reader in search of meaning, each section is a period in the great journey that unfolds through the Dalil, an initiatic journey of a cyclical character, destined to be repeated endlessly.
The sometimes abundant enumerations in the Dala’il al-Khayrat merely express insistently that nothing escapes the divine mercy of which the Prophet is the representative: “We sent you as a mercy for the worlds” (Qur’an 21:107). He who recites the prayers of the Dala’il al-Khayrat petitions divine mercy for all creatures: humans, animals, plants, as well as every form of life, including the men who, through denial, heedlessness or stubbornness, would keep themselves far from grace.
For the master educators of the Sufi path, the prayer upon the Prophet has an operative function. “Continual and ever-renewed prayers”, the invocations of the Dala’il al-Khayrat are the instrument of a spiritual alchemy whose finality is the elevation of the ordinary soul or ego, from a level of consciousness governed by individual and material concerns up to the source of Being, which is pure and universal consciousness. “The first thing created is the light of your Prophet, O Jabir!”, said the Messenger of God. In the course of this inner journey, the noble qualities of the Being and his eminent degree are recalled to the reciter’s remembrance; the invoker calls upon God by His most beautiful Names and asks for His universal grace.
A support on which the Sufi masters make the disciple’s soul travel to awaken it while educating it, the Dalil is a reading often recommended as a necessary and indispensable accompaniment to all esoteric teaching. It has been said that reading the Dalil protects the soul from its excesses by breathing into it the principles of balance: balance between rigour and gentleness in man, between majesty and beauty in God.
Only those who have travelled the way can know its worth, says a Sufi poem. It is in the true knowledge they acquired at a dear price that men such as Jazuli drew, and still draw today, the courage to transmit this spiritual inheritance and to bear forceful witness to it for us. These are true men, in whom the submission of the man-servant of the Unique and the splendour of the Universal Man are the two faces of one and the same reality.
Hinda Boudiaf-Agrinier
Previous part: the Muhammadan Reality; back to the beginning: the prophetic light.
