ABOUT
I return today with DAR.SIRR as a writer who has chosen responsibility over immediacy, silence over repetition, and depth over visibility. This space gathers more than ten years of retreat, research, field immersion, and intellectual maturation. It is not the continuation of a project, but the articulation of a position.
I am Mawlay El Hassane Debbarh, born in Fez, descending from the Idrissid House through the ancient al-Dabbagh lineage. Lineage, for me, is not a claim to authority but a burden of continuity: an obligation to think rigorously, to write carefully, and to confront Moroccan history where spirituality, power, and genealogy have always been entangled. DAR.SIRR emerges from this responsibility.
My work approaches Moroccan Islam as a living structure shaped simultaneously by taṣawwuf, makhzan (political authority), territorial organization, and inherited sanctity. I read Moroccan history not as a sequence of dynasties or schools alone, but as a slow intelligence formed through ribāṭs, saints, zawāyā, routes, and lineages that preceded and conditioned later juridical and institutional frameworks. Central to this reading is an unresolved fracture within Islam itself—the Sunni–Shīʿi divide—and its decisive role in shaping authority, madhhab growth, and the politics of sanctity in the Maghrib.
DAR.SIRR is therefore not neutral. It reflects a personal, critical reading of Islamic development, grounded in Moroccan experience, attentive to Ahl al-Bayt heritage, and resistant to both apologetic historiography and abstract academic distance. Here, spirituality is not separated from power, nor is history stripped of metaphysical depth. Moroccan Sufism is treated as a civilizational force that shaped governance, legitimacy, ethics, and collective imagination.
This site functions as a living archive. It brings together research, long-form writing, and critical inquiry, alongside guided spiritual itineraries and scholarly safaris across Morocco’s sacred towns and luminous shrines. These journeys are not devotional tourism. They are disciplined encounters with landscape, memory, and transmission—where knowledge is tested by presence, and history is read on the ground rather than abstracted from it. What is sought is an encounter with al-asrār: the hidden continuities that still structure Moroccan religious and political life.
At the heart of my work stands the legacy of Shaykh Abd al-Aziz al-Dabbāgh (d. 1132/1717)—my great-grandfather and one of Morocco’s supreme spiritual figures—whose unveiled knowledge (ʿilm ladunnī) was transmitted by Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak in Al-Ibrīz min Kalām Sayyidinā ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. My ongoing scholarly commitment includes the critical edition (taḥqīq) of Al-Ibrīz, alongside broader studies on Idrisid lineage, Fez as a spiritual capital, and the transmission of Ahl al-Bayt heritage within Moroccan Sufi thought.
My intellectual method combines historical criticism, textual philology, and comparative Sufi anthropology. Philosophically, my work is informed by Plotinus, Pythagoras, Ibn Sabʿīn, Ibn ʿArabī, al-Ghazālī, and early Shiʿi–Sufi currents, without subordinating Moroccan experience to imported theoretical models. The aim is not synthesis for its own sake, but clarity—restoring Moroccan Sufism to its proper historical, metaphysical, and political depth.
Alongside this scholarly path, my professional background spans organizational transformation, digital strategy, and AI-driven content systems. I hold an MSc in Organization and Management from Hanken School of Economics and a BBA in International Business from Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences. These tools serve the work; they do not define it. They allow DAR.SIRR to exist with precision, reach, and structural coherence in the contemporary world.
I named this work DAR.SIRR because it names the condition from which I write. Dār is a dwelling—one inhabits it, carries its weight, and is answerable for what unfolds within it. Sirr is the inner dimension of knowledge, formed through transmission, silence, experience, and risk, and inseparable from the one who bears it. What appears here reflects my own readings, my own crossings, and my own risks—because the secret is never neutral, and never free of consequence.
Helsinki, January 2026
DAR.SIRR