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Sidi Mounir al-Qadiri Boutchich

Sidi Mounir al-Qadiri Boutchich, guide of the Qadiriya Boutchichiya path

Sidi Mounir al-Qadiri al-Boutchichi is the current guide of the Qadiriya Boutchichiya tariqa. The eldest son of Sidi Jamal (1942-2025) and grandson of Sidi Hamza (1918-2017), he grew up in the zawiya of Madagh, in the Berkane plain of north-eastern Morocco, and is the fourth generation to guide the path since Sidi Abu Madyan reintroduced the transmission of the secret there in the mid-twentieth century.

An education at the heart of Madagh

Sidi Mounir grew up inside the zawiya at Madagh, the seat of the path, educated by his grandfather Sidi Hamza as much as by his father Sidi Jamal. In the documents of the path, his first name is preceded by the title ‘Moulay’, which marks the family’s descent from the Prophet Muhammad through his grandson Hasan. He belongs to the generation that watched Madagh grow from a regional centre into an international spiritual capital: it was during his childhood and youth that the retreats expanded, the zawiya was enlarged and the first European and American disciples arrived in growing numbers.

In initiatory terms, the path presents him as the holder of the sirr (the secret) and the idhn (the authorisation) transmitted by his father, in keeping with the initiatic chain that binds each guide to the one who came before him.

A university career between Oujda, Rabat and Paris

Sidi Mounir’s education was not confined to the teaching of the zawiya. His university career, which can be traced in the academic authority records, brings Islamic law together with the humanities:

The choice of subject is telling. Abu Talib al-Makki (d. 996), author of The Nourishment of Hearts (Qut al-Qulub), is one of the major sources of the spiritual psychology of classical Sufism, and the ‘heart’ is precisely the organ of knowledge that the path places at the centre of its teaching. Sidi Mounir’s doctoral choice illuminates the continuity of his work: to read the early centuries’ science of the heart afresh with the tools of contemporary scholarship.

The World Meeting of Sufism and the Al Moultaqa Foundation

Since 2007, Sidi Mounir has directed the World Meeting of Sufism (Rencontre mondiale du soufisme), the annual conference held at Madagh which, by its organising committee’s count, brings together more than eighty researchers and academics around a topical theme: peace among civilisations, ethics, the social economy and, in 2024, the impact of artificial intelligence on human values. The meeting has made Madagh a place of dialogue between the Sufi tradition and academic research, notably in partnership with the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for the Study of Contemporary Islam.

In 2015 he founded the Al Moultaqa Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation under the patronage of King Mohammed VI, of which he is president. The foundation works in four areas: responsible citizenship, the social and solidarity economy, ecology, and intercultural dialogue for peace. Among other projects it runs the Village solidaire, a programme of social action run on the margins of the path’s major gatherings.

During his father’s lifetime, Sidi Mounir was already shouldering the bulk of the brotherhood’s leadership, notably through these two institutions. The themes chosen for the Meetings, which he chairs each year, reveal his reading of the path: ‘Sufism and the culture of peace’ in 2016, the balance between heritage and modernity in subsequent editions, and most recently the question of artificial intelligence. Sufism is never treated there as a museum piece, but as a science of ethics confronted with the problems of the present.

Designated in the testaments

Sidi Jamal’s succession had been prepared publicly. In his spiritual testament, written at Madagh on 5 December 2024, Sidi Jamal designates his son in terms that leave no room for doubt:

‘This secret, which was granted to me and has become firmly established in my heart, is the same secret granted and established in the heart of my son, the glad tidings foretold by the knowers of Allah, Sidi Mounir.’

The same text calls him ‘a shining moon in the sky of the path’ and ‘one who unites the science of the shari’a with the reality of divine knowledge’. At the dikra of 2025, the annual commemoration of Sidi Hamza, Sidi Jamal had already renewed before the assembly the formula by which his own father had designated him: ‘What I hold, Sidi Mounir holds too.’

When Sidi Jamal died on 8 August 2025, Sidi Mounir took over the leadership of the brotherhood, in continuity with the testaments of his father and grandfather.

Guide of the path since August 2025

Sidi Mounir’s profile suggests continuity rather than a break. Trained by the two previous guides, a doctor of religious studies, long the organiser of the zawiya’s intellectual and social life, he continues the teaching of his forebears along three lines that were already his own: the universality of the path, open to every social and cultural horizon; ethics as the concrete expression of spirituality; and the development of ‘human capital’, that is, the shaping of people as much as their inner awakening.

In France, where the path gathers practitioners in eight cities, his French university education and his knowledge of the West make him particularly well placed to continue the dialogue that Sidi Hamza began with European culture. The path does not ask the disciple to change his outward life: one remains a student, an employee, a parent. What the guide trains, through dhikr, suhba and example, is the inner disposition: the ‘fine point of being’ that his grandfather used to call the seat of spiritual perception.

Further reading

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