Sayings of Sidi Hamza

A collection of the words of Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri Boutchich (1918-2017), guide of the Qadiriya Boutchichiya path, reported by his disciples.

True knowledge is only obtained with humility. The approach to reaching it is like that of a person who wants to drink from a stream: they will have to bend down to drink. Water always lies in the lowest place; we must be like water.

Observing the prescriptions of the divine Law (shari’a) plays the same role as the wax on a stopper, which keeps the liquid from spilling out of the bottle. A vessel may be full of water, but if its bottom is breached, all the liquid escapes: you may try to fill it again, nothing will be kept. This image illustrates the situation of the disciple who no longer applies the divine Law.

Nothing is outside God. He encompasses all things. One contemplates this after realisation. That realisation is something given. In this domain, the outward sciences are of no use. A scholar is in the habit of measuring everything, assessing everything, weighing everything. The one who stands beyond that approach no longer asks himself those questions.

Whoever tries to find a way through the writings of Ibn Arabi or the other Sufi masters of the past is merely following their ‘jellabas’. He will stay on the surface of things. Methods vary with the conditions of the age in which we live. Only a living master holds the keys of initiatic progress.

At a certain degree, the need for God becomes comparable to the need for help felt by a drowning person calling desperately for rescue. That need destroys every desire other than God.

Wisdom is in the heart: he who wants water in his well must dig; the more he digs, the more abundant the water; if he stops digging, the water never rises above its first level. The one who digs this well must not say or believe that the water has reached its highest level; he must keep digging, for this well has no limit.

Everyone must watch over their heart. Every suggestion must be rejected. One must reject what is unhealthy in oneself and try to open to all the divine graces, to what is positive and furthers the journey and the progress. But how does one reject negative suggestions? When you feel them coming, tell your ego that it is wrong, that it is the one who has all the faults and not the others: ‘It is I who am at fault. If I see the fault in the other, it is because it is in me; otherwise I would not have seen it!’

Invoke until people say: he is mad! (Hadith)

Dhikr practised regularly gradually makes impure desires and thoughts disappear. In the same way, if hunters go into the forest every morning and fire their guns, all the frightened animals flee at the sound of the shots, then come back a little later in the day. But as the hunters return every day, the animals end up changing ground.

The spiritual state is the manifestation of the disciple’s attraction, including that of his body, towards the Spirit. The heart reacts in this way because it is not accustomed to the divine light, and the effect rebounds on the whole being, the body included.

You have different spiritual states. The water is one, but the flowers are many.

The opening (fath) is the sudden unveiling of the divine Reality, and so the end of illusion. It is like a snowball thrown into the ocean: the snowball is the ego (nafs), and the ocean, the divine Reality. The snowball is nothing but frozen water; once thrown into the ocean, it becomes liquid again. The ego has only an ephemeral, illusory existence when considered in itself, cut off from its origin. There is only one water, and different states of that same water.

There is no reality other than the divine Reality (la ilaha illa Allah).

It is not possible to lay claim to divine love so long as attachments to the goods of this world remain in the heart. This is how the lover is tested: true love goes hand in hand with true generosity. Sidi Boumedienne often told this story: a man laid claim to the love of God and of His Prophet. God willed to test him and sent him an angel in human form, who said to him: ‘You who claim the love of God and of His Prophet, give me your jellaba!’ The man gave it to him. ‘Give me your robe!’ the angel said again; the man gave him that too. He had only his trousers left, which the angel asked him to give. The man went into a hidden place, took off the garment and threw it over. He had nothing left at all. Then he heard a heavenly voice: ‘If you claim to love God and His Prophet, your claim is true.’ He was therefore accepted in that state.

I hold to love more than to anything else. Let us pray that God does not take it from us. The love between the disciples, and between the fuqara and the master, is infinite, it grows ceaselessly. One would wish never to part. This love is due to the spiritual secret (sirr) and exists because we are gathered for God alone. This love makes all cultural differences fall away. It is love that sets hearts in motion, that makes them act. Love is the mount of the spirits: it is through it that one knows everything.

When love dwells in the heart, nothing seems difficult any more, and we profit from everything that happens to us. Thanks to love, the veil that separates us from the Reality grows ever thinner; one then feels a deep joy in that nearness and is invaded by the perception of beauty.

It is love that causes a wound, a cry. Only the one whose master is drunk cries out.

Love all creatures, whatever their religion, their race or their opinions! Each one is in the place where God has put them, and it is not for us to judge.

Sidi Boumedienne forbade his disciples any reading about Sufism, except the Hikam of Ibn Ata’ Allah: it is better to experience things directly than to hold a preconceived idea of them, which might itself become a veil.

Our path is a path of the middle.

When God loves His servant, He covers his qualities with His own qualities. It is as if a king invited us to his home and we had no clothes clean enough to be worthy of his dwelling: the king then clothes us in his own garments and brings us in.

Everyone clings to the qualities that are theirs: the scholar believes himself superior to everyone through his learning, the rich man draws his glory from his wealth; so they remain with their illness. Only spiritual education can help them to be free of it.

The ego (nafs) often refuses what is imposed on it and begins then to emit suggestions for going further into what may satisfy it. The path has the opposite effect: when something draws us towards the worldly, it prevents us from answering that call. One must avoid becoming stuck on this or that point of fixation; it is better to let events follow God’s will while remaining firmly anchored in one’s practices.

He who does not have a pure intention (niyya) will not progress, even if he spends his whole life in the company of the Prophet.

Each disciple is an antidote for another disciple. Each is strong on a point where the other is weak, and can thus help him to overcome difficulties.

Do not let negative suggestions enter your heart, or it will become like a stable full of filth. Keep your interior clean and pure: the dhikr will bring out whatever impurity remains.

Be assiduous in your personal dhikr and take part in the collective practices! Do not invent excuses for yourselves! True, the professional, family and social obligations are heavy, but that is the law of life and our common lot.

It is important to work in the world, for the divine Law requires that one provide for one’s family’s needs. It is just as important to look after one’s family, one’s husband or wife, one’s children; and of course one must also concentrate on the work of the path. You must reconcile these three domains, which are the landmarks of your life; little by little, thanks to the practice of the dhikr, you will have the intuition of what should be done in each situation.

Look after your parents, even if their convictions are completely opposed to yours. Provide for their needs if necessary. One of the shames of the modern world is putting one’s parents in a home and being rid of them that way.

When one reads the biography of the Prophet, one is struck by the similarity between the bonds that united him to his community and what can be lived today in the path. In reality it is one and the same teaching continued.

This path is the path of God: avoid all hatred and every form of dissension; God does not visit a hateful heart. The conflicts between ethnic or religious communities belong to the past; we must not be concerned by them.

Do not desire the spiritual states, the ecstasies, the opening or the visions! Desire only the knowledge of God. The desire for hal and for visions can veil that knowledge from us.

Inner progress must flow back outward, onto conduct.

One must not point out the faults of others, nor let oneself be drawn into criticism and judgement: one would end up forgetting one’s own faults. How could a sick man reproach another sick man for not being well? It is therefore important to magnify. Look upon your brothers as perfect, for the simple reason that they are joined to the path; little by little, you will come to see that the whole of the divine creation is perfect. He who sees a fault in another is in fact seeing one of his own faults. Be the guardians of your hearts: make them clean and pure like a place of prayer!

The journey must be gradual, lest the disciple become arrogant.

He who gives and says so is worse than he who has done nothing. Boasting amounts to annihilating all the fruits of the gift.

When a beekeeper sees a group of bees, he brings a box in which he puts sweet and fragrant things. When the bees smell the perfume, they enter that hive. If they like it, they settle there; if not, they stay a day or two and leave. It is the same with the divine secret: if it finds the receptacle of the heart clean and perfumed, it will remain there for a long time and produce a divine honey.

We perceive the outside of things, but the inside is hidden and veiled from us. The body is in this world, but inwardness lies in another dimension, another realm. Access to that inwardness is the whole of the path.

Do not seek the truth; seek first to purify yourselves.

On the day God wills to grant His servant His graces, He makes a breath of love penetrate his heart. And so the servant, though engaged in the affairs of this lower world, constantly tastes the flavour of his Lord. The prophets, too, worked as we do; but their work did not rule their hearts, which remained firmly attached to God.

Understanding is not to be had from books. It would be too easy to bend down and gather up all the books dealing with Sufism in order to acquire it. The true science will come to you from within, from your heart. Only the heart understands. It understands that nothing is outside God.

The fault and the ugliness are not in things and beings, but in the impurity of our gaze upon them. The more the soul is appeased, perfect and pure, the more it will be disposed to see in every being a manifestation of the divine light: all is beautiful; only the unpolished heart of the disciple makes things ugly.

The divine light circles around the disciple’s heart. For a plane to land, the runway must be completely clear. Likewise, if our heart is filled with desires or passions, the light will find nowhere to come down.

One must beware of merely mental understanding. There is a sensory mind and a luminous mind. The sensory mind has a limit; to go beyond it, one must work on oneself and frequent the men of God. God alone can transform the sensory mind into a luminous mind, a mind illuminated by the light of the heart.

The two royal doors for reaching God are invocation (dhikr) and generosity.

He who lowers himself, God raises.

Some of you find it hard to place themselves at the service of others; if they make the effort to do so all the same, they will gradually be freed of the bonds that tie their soul.

When one lives a relationship of brotherhood (I do not mean brotherhood in the ordinary sense, but the kind invested with love), the hearts beat in phase, the spirits are in affinity: such a wine of love flows between them! That is God’s royalty!

There exists only the Light. The ego (nafs) has an outer envelope that prevents this light from entering; the ordinary man sees only that darkness. But once that envelope has burst open, the light within the heart mingles with the Light of God, and one sees only It: ‘Wherever you turn, there is the Face of God!’ The world is like a passing shadow: when the sun rises on an object, a shadow appears for a while, then fades away. So it is with this world face to face with the Reality. The knowers of God have no shadow, in truth. It is in this sense that one must understand what is reported of the Prophet Muhammad: that he never cast a shadow.

He who has come to perceive the Unity sees nothing but It. He realises that all the habitual forms, the human forms themselves, are only illusion.

Gratitude and acknowledgement hold grace fast.