Sidi Ali al-Qadiri 'al-Boutchich', the ancestor of the path
Sidi Ali al-Qadiri, nicknamed ‘al-Boutchich’, is the eponymous ancestor of the family from which the Tariqa Qadiriya Boutchichiya descends. His life is poorly documented in the historical sense of the term: what the family tradition has kept of it says the essential about the way this path understands sanctity.
A descendant of ’Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani in the Beni Snassen
In the mid-eighteenth century, Sidi Ali, a descendant of the Sufi master of Baghdad Moulay ’Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (1077-1166) come over from Iraq, settled in a village of the Beni Snassen massif in north-eastern Morocco, and built his zawiya there. The family tree goes back to the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) through his grandson al-Hasan: the Boutchich are Hassani sharifs.
The Beni Snassen massif was then a meeting ground between Berber and Arab tribes, and Sidi Ali’s zawiya soon became a refuge there. His descendants enjoyed for generations the veneration due to the offspring of the great shaykh of Baghdad.
‘The soup man’
During a famine that struck the region, Sidi Ali had dshisha, a crushed-barley soup, distributed to the poor. The people nicknamed him ‘Sidi Ali Boutchich’, the soup man. The nickname stayed attached to the family and to the whole path: it says, better than any speech, what this tradition means by service.
The secret lost, then found again
Sidi Ali held the sirr, the spiritual secret that makes a tariqa a path of guidance and not merely of piety. After him, that capacity to transmit the initiation was lost in the line: only a sainthood of blessing (tabarruk) remained, honoured but deprived of the function of guidance. It took Sidi Abu Madyan al-Qadiri (1873-1957), a distant cousin withdrawn in the Beni Snassen mountains, for the sirr to be reintroduced into the family, then transmitted to Sidi al-Hajj al-Abbas and to Sidi Hamza.
The full succession of the masters appears on the page of the initiatic chain.