Sidi al-Hajj al-Abbas al-Qadiri Boutchich (1890-1972)
Sidi al-Hajj al-Abbas al-Qadiri al-Boutchichi (1890-1972) was the guide of the Qadiriya Boutchichiya path from 1960 until his death. Father of Sidi Hamza and grandfather of Sidi Jamal, he stands at the turning point of the initiatic chain: it was he who, after the death of his master Sidi Abu Madyan, assumed responsibility for the spiritual secret and began the passage from the way of Majesty to the way of Beauty.
The notable who wanted a dhikr
Born into a family of sharifs established for generations among the Beni Snassen, Sidi Abbas was a great landowner, respected throughout the Berkane region. The affairs of this world had absorbed him early: he says himself, in his testament, that the preoccupations of life had prevented him from satisfying his desire to study the religious sciences, and that he had contented himself with knowing the prescriptions of the Law and reading the Qur’an.
The spiritual thirst, for its part, had never left him. As a young man in Oujda he approached a majdhub, one of those beings ‘enraptured in God’, whose heart is plunged in the divine presence without the mind yet being able to relate that perception to life in this world. This one spoke to nobody and refused the money of passers-by. Sidi Abbas stayed near him without daring to speak, until the majdhub addressed him:
- ‘What do you want of me?’
- ‘I would like to receive a dhikr.’
- ‘Why? Do you want to go mad?’
- ‘Is not the man ruled by his ego mad already?’
The majdhub laughed, then gave him this single piece of advice: ‘Listen! Go back where you came from, enter your house, busy yourself with nothing, seek no one out. When the time comes, he who is to guide you will come and knock at your door.’
Sidi Abbas waited thirty-five years. Far from being wasted, those years were for him a time of stripping away which allowed him to receive the secret in full when it came.
The disciple of Sidi Abu Madyan
In 1942, Sidi Abu Madyan al-Qadiri left the Beni Snassen mountains where he had withdrawn and presented himself at Sidi Abbas’s door, who offered to settle him at Madagh. Sidi Abbas took the pact a month before his son Sidi Hamza, then about twenty-four years old. For fourteen years, father and son devoted themselves at the master’s side to the reading of the Qur’an and to invocation (dhikr).
The relationship was a schooling of the ego from the outset. Sidi Abbas, the notable whom nobody could imagine in a servant’s role, would hurry to carry the tea to the fuqara whenever his master asked him. To the people scandalised by the sight, Sidi Abu Madyan would reply: ‘Do you know why I do this? It is to educate him and free him of his ego. There is nothing that frees a man from the vices of the ego like spiritual education.’ That anecdote, reported by Sidi Hamza, sums up the style of the transmission: no speeches, but work.
The three years of silence
When Sidi Abu Madyan died, nobody knew who would succeed him. The master had designated Sidi Abbas as heir to the secret, but the latter had told no one. For nearly three years he said nothing, going on with his spiritual work in silence: ‘I could see no aptitude in myself for educating others. I could not see in myself what he had seen in me. On the contrary, I saw myself as the weakest of his disciples.’
It was during a dhikr gathering, around 1960, that he took up his responsibilities, having witnessed excesses that Sidi Abu Madyan would not have tolerated. He then authorised the public practice of the dhikr and made his master’s spiritual testament known.
A path of spiritual states, of knowledge and of renewal
With Sidi Abbas, the method of education changed register. Sidi Abu Madyan, who had seen him toil at exercises beyond his strength, had told him: ‘We entered through the gate of Majesty and wearied ourselves; you entered through the gate of Grace and Beauty, so do not stop.’ The way of force and seclusion gave way to the way of dhikr and of gathering.
Sidi Abbas himself formulated the identity of the renewed path: ‘a path of spiritual states, of knowledge and of renewal’. He confirmed the transfer of the secret to his son Sidi Hamza, who succeeded him in 1972 and gave it a worldwide reach.
His spiritual testament, addressed ‘to his children and his brothers in God’, remains one of the founding texts of the path: it bears witness to his keen awareness of the responsibility, and defines the relationship between the guide and the disciples as ‘a spiritual and educative relationship, founded on companionship and the love of God’.