The Third Authority: ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh and Spiritual Sovereignty in ʿAlawī Morocco

In the topography of Moroccan Sufism, sainthood often appears in pairs. In the 7th/13th century, we encounter ʿAbd al-Salām Ibn Mashīsh (d. 622/1225) and his disciple Abū ʼl-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī (d. 656/1258); five centuries later, the couple Abū Fāris ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Masʿūd al-Dabbāgh (d. 1132/1720) and Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak al-Sijilmāsī (d. 1156/1743) occupies a structurally similar place. Both pairs enact the same spiritual drama: a "hidden" Moroccan pole (quṭb)—noble in lineage (sharīf), socially marginal, and portrayed as unlettered—whose authority rests on sainthood (wilāya) and Muhammadan inheritance (wirātha); alongside a highly trained jurist-scholar, often emerging from rural environments, who translates that ineffable experience into disciplined discourse, devotional liturgy, and institutional memory.

Yet the case of al-Dabbāgh exceeds the purely dyadic model. His emergence in early 18th-century Fez must be situated within a triple field of authority that defined ʿAlawī Morocco: the empire centered in Meknes, commanding military force and administrative apparatus; the scholarly establishment of al-Qarawiyyīn, wielding juridical legitimacy and intellectual prestige; and the Idrissid sharifian lineages of Fez, whose claims rested on genealogical proximity to the Prophet ﷺ and the charismatic distribution of baraka. Al-Dabbāgh's appearance introduced what this study terms "the third authority": a form of spiritual sovereignty that operated outside formal institutions yet claimed jurisdiction over the invisible architecture of the cosmos itself.

When al-Dabbāgh declared that the entire heavenly council (dīwān al-ṣāliḥīn) was gathered within his chest, or that his inner self (dhāt) encompassed the Throne and the worlds beyond it, these were not merely mystical metaphors but assertions of a spatial and ontological sovereignty that subtly repositioned the axis of power in a city torn between competing claimants. His statements that he bore within himself "robes" of divine energy capable of dissolving Fez itself, or that he had surpassed the great saints of earlier centuries, carried unmistakable political resonance in a Morocco where saintly prestige could rival—and occasionally threaten—royal authority.

Several elements intensified the potential challenge this third authority posed. First, his spiritual initiation came not through traditional silsila but through direct encounter with al-Khiḍr, effectively bypassing the established shaykh-murīd structures that regulated Sufi authority and suggesting that authentic wilāya could manifest through divine appointment alone. Second, his claims to khatmiyya—the sealing or culmination of sainthood—positioned him as the final synthesis of Muḥammadan inheritance, a station that required no external validation. Third, as an Idrissid sharīf whose lineage connected him to the founding dynasty of Fez itself, his authority resonated with the city's deepest historical memory, positioning him as heir to a spiritual sovereignty that predated the ʿAlawī state.

The original title of Ibn al-Mubārak's work—al-Tāj wa-al-Ibrīz (The Crown and Pure Gold)—encoded this dual claim: the crown signifying sovereignty over the invisible hierarchy of saints, and the pure gold representing the uncorrupted essence of prophetic inheritance transmitted directly through wirātha Muḥammadiyya. The title's invocation of "the Crown" carried another profound symbolic weight in Fez, where Mawlāy Idrīs II—the city's founder and patron saint—was popularly known as Moul al-Tāj (The Owner of the Crown), signifying his spiritual sovereignty over the empire and its inhabitants. By naming the work al-Tāj wa-al-Ibrīz, Ibn al-Mubārak implicitly positioned al-Dabbāgh's authority within the same register of spiritual sovereignty, suggesting that the "crown" of saintly jurisdiction had passed from the founding Idrissid pole to his descendant, while the "pure gold" represented the unalloyed prophetic knowledge that authenticated this transmission.

The collaboration with Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak represents the moment this third authority achieved textual permanence and scholarly legitimation. Yet the significance of this partnership extended beyond the mere transcription of charismatic utterance: the pairing of al-Dabbāgh (descendant of the Prophet ﷺ through al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī) and Ibn al-Mubārak (descendant of Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq) created a symbolic convergence at the level of lineage that lent their collaboration a legitimacy that neither genealogy alone could have secured. Al-Dabbāgh's illiteracy was not merely a marker of spiritual authenticity but a strategic positioning that allowed him to transcend the jurisdictional boundaries separating sultanic, scholarly, and sharīfian forms of legitimacy. His authority was deterritorialized—anchored not in land, zawiya endowments, or institutional structures, but in a claim to immediate cosmic perception.

Through Ibn al-Mubārak's al-Tāj wa-al-Ibrīz, later known as Al-Ibrīz Min Kalām Sayyidinā ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (Pure Gold from the Words of Our Master ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz), the teachings of an illiterate Moroccan saint became one of the densest and most ambitious syntheses of late pre-modern Sufi thought. This collaborative project offers a rare model in which ʿilm ladunī (divinely-bestowed knowledge) is not merely narrated but structurally naturalized within academic, juridical, and scholarly discipline, effectively translating cosmic sovereignty into scholastic currency and securing al-Dabbāgh's third authority a permanent place in the transmitted tradition.

By situating al-Dabbāgh within this triangulated field—between throne, university, and shrine—this study reveals how Moroccan Sufism developed a sophisticated architecture of power that neither simply accommodated nor directly opposed political authority, but rather operated on a parallel ontological plane. The paper maps the tripartite structure of authority in ʿAlawī Morocco, examining how Mawlāy Ismāʿīl's centralizing project (1672–1727) created pressure on alternative centers of legitimacy; analyzes al-Dabbāgh's cosmological claims, Khiḍrian initiation, khatmiyya declarations, and Idrissid heritage as constituting a form of invisible sovereignty; and examines how Ibn al-Mubārak's transcription project transformed charismatic utterance into canonical text. Al-Dabbāgh's life and legacy demonstrate that in contexts where multiple forms of sovereignty compete, sainthood can constitute not merely a spiritual status but a distinct mode of governance—one whose jurisdiction extends over domains (the heart, the cosmos, the invisible council of saints) that remain permanently beyond the reach of sultans and scholars alike.

1. The Five-Century Journey of a Sharīfian Lineage Between Fez and Granada

Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was born in Ḥūmat al-ʿUyūn, the "Quarter of Springs," in the Qarawiyyīn ʿAdwah of Fez on the evening of Saturday, 12 Ṣafar 1095 AH (30 January 1684 CE), in the shadow of Sultan Mawlāy Ismāʿīl's reign (r. 1083–1139/1672–1727)—an era of political consolidation, strict discipline, and a flourishing but tense scholarly life. The year of his birth coincided with the young sultan's expulsion of the English from Tangier, marking the beginning of the Alawid systematic campaign to reclaim Moroccan territory from European powers and assert absolute sovereignty over the empire's coastal frontiers. He entered the world in Fez as the firstborn son, a long-awaited child whose birth the family remembered as a moment of radiant promise. His lineage was Idrissid, carried through the noble Dabbāghī branch descending from al-Muntaṣir Billāh Abū al-ʿAysh ʿĪsā ibn Idrīs ibn Idrīs ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (233/847)—an ancestry that placed him within the oldest sharīfian bloodline of Morocco.

Yet the path that brought his family to Fez traced a geography of exile and return that spanned five centuries. His ancestors had ruled from the highland fortress of Āyt ʿAtāb in Tadla, but the collapse of Idrissid sovereignty and the campaigns of Umayyad-allied forces drove them—along with other Idrissid branches—from their ancestral territories. They fled first to the mountain stronghold of Qalʿat al-Nasr, then scattered: some settled in Sabta, while a crucial ancestor—Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān [al-Dākhil] (fl. 479/1086)—crossed to al-Andalus at the explicit invitation of the Almoravid sultan Yūsuf ibn Tāshfīn, who brought him along bi-qaṣd al-tabarruk bihi (for the purpose of seeking blessing through him).

The genealogist Sulaymān al-Ḥawwāt, in his treatise Qurrat al-ʿUyūn fī al-Shurafāʾ al-Qāṭinīn bi-Ḥūmat al-ʿUyūn (The Delight of Eyes Concerning the Sharīfs Residing in the Quarter of Springs), preserves this detail as evidence of the family's standing: they crossed not as refugees but as consecrated figures whose baraka was solicited by the very sultan who was unifying the Maghrib and defending al-Andalus. Al-Dākhil settled in Granada, where his descendants would achieve prominence as judges, scholars, and occasionally diplomats. The most celebrated among them was Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad, known as al-Sharīf al-Gharnāṭī (d. 760/1359), who served as chief judge (qāḍī al-jamāʿa) of Granada and khaṭīb of the Alhambra mosque under the Naṣrid sultans. His teaching circle included some of the most luminous intellects of the Islamic West: Ibn al-Khaṭīb, Ibn Khaldūn, al-Shāṭibī, and Ibn Juzayy.

Yet even this eminence could not withstand the tightening grip of Christian reconquest. According to al-Sulamī’s al-Ishrāf ʿalā Baʿḍ man Ḥalla bi-Fās min Mashāhīr al-Ashrāf (Supervision of Some Celebrated Sharīfs Who Settled in Fez), his direct ancestor, Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad [al-Qādim] (fl. 796/1393), departed Granada and returned to Morocco, settling in Salé on the Atlantic coast. There, the Marīnid sultan al-Mustansir Billah (796/1394) bestowed upon the family a privilege that would mark them for generations: control over the revenues of the city's tannery (Dār al-Dabbāgh). This was no ordinary craft workshop but a major state enterprise, its leather goods supplying markets across the Mediterranean and generating substantial income for the empire. From this fiscal connection—not from any involvement in the actual labor of tanning—the family acquired the name al-Dabbāgh, transforming a mark of Marīnid patronage into a lasting surname.

Only in the early ninth/fifteenth century did the family patriarch, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn al-Qāsim [al-Jāmiʿ] (fl. 900/1494), lead the clan back to Fez—the city their Idrissid forebears had founded and from which they had been expelled centuries before. His return was not an isolated act but part of a broader movement: as the Marīnid state weakened and the Waṭṭāsid dynasty prepared to ascend, Idrissid shurafāʾ began flowing back to Fez from their scattered refuges across Morocco. According to ʿAbd al-Salām al-Qādirī in al-Durr al-Sannī, the Dabbāgh family were among the very first of the Idrissid lineages to make this return, preceding the larger wave of sharīfian resettlement that would transform Fez's social landscape in the late fifteenth century. The significance of this moment was such that al-Qādirī commemorated it in verse in his Durrat al-Mafākhir:

وَقُرْبَ تِسْعَمِائَةٍ بِلَا خَفَا
كَانَ دُخُولُ فَاسْ جُلّ الشُّرَفَا
"Near the year nine hundred, without exception,
was the entry into Fez of most of the shurafāʾ."

Over the two centuries separating ʿAbd al-Raḥmān [al-Jāmiʿ] from his great-great-great-grandson Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, the Dabbāgh family established a pattern that would define their presence in Fez: a quiet synthesis of sharīfian descent, juridical learning, and Sufi inclination, rooted in the same narrow streets of Ḥūmat al-ʿUyūn where their patriarch had first settled. Generation after generation produced jurists, grammarians, and men of letters who moved through the madrasas and mosques of Fez without seeking prominence, their scholarship solid but never spectacular, their piety evident but deliberately concealed. They witnessed the collapse of Granada in 897/1492 from across the strait—and shortly thereafter, watched the last Naṣrid sultan, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad al-Zughbī (r. 887–897/1482–1492), arrive in Fez as a refugee, the kingdom their ancestors had served now reduced to memory.  They lived through the rise and fall of the Waṭṭāsids, the meteoric ascent of the Saʿdid shurafāʾ from the Draa Valley, and finally the consolidation of ʿAlawī rule under the ruthless efficiency of Mawlāy al-Rashīd (r. 1075–1082/1664–1672) and his brother Mawlāy Ismāʿīl.

Through these upheavals, the family maintained its position not through courtly ambition or military service but through a calculated invisibility—what later sources would describe as istithār bi-al-khumūl, the deliberate embrace of obscurity as a mode of survival and spiritual refinement. Yet this obscurity was never total. The family remained connected to the city's scholarly networks, their names appearing occasionally in ijāzāt and fahrasa literature, their presence noted by contemporaries as men of learning and baraka even if their works rarely circulated beyond Fez. The family's rootedness in Ḥūmat al-ʿUyūn became almost symbolic: their first house, acquired by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, remained in family possession across the centuries, a physical anchor in a city where political power shifted violently but sharīfian prestige endured.

It was into this inheritance—two centuries of accumulated learning, lineage, and deliberate hiddenness—that Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz’s father, Masʿūd ibn Aḥmad (d. 1111/1699), was born. A respected Mālikī jurist and accomplished grammarian, Masʿūd authored a commentary on Ibn Mālik's Alfiyya that survives in the Ḥasaniyya Library, along with other works on grammar, morphology, and literature. His scholarship placed him within the long Dabbāgh tradition of linguistic expertise that stretched back to al-Sharīf al-Gharnāṭī's commentaries on prosody and rhetoric. Yet his true orientation lay elsewhere. Sources describe him as drawn to Sufism, inclined toward khumūl (withdrawal from public life), and marked by a baraka that his contemporaries recognized even as he refused to cultivate it.

The family's standing received formal recognition in 1082/1672, when Sultan Mawlāy al-Rashīd issued a ẓahīr sharīf granting Masʿūd control over the endowments (futūḥāt) and gifts (hadāyā) of the shrine of the saint ʿSidī Alī ibn Ḥarazim (d. 559/1163)—one of the most venerated burial sites in Fez. This was no minor administrative appointment but a recognition of the family's spiritual authority and their role as custodians of sacred space. The timing was significant: that same year, Mawlāy al-Rashīd died in Marrakech, and his brother Mawlāy Ismāʿīl—who would go on to build the most centralized state Morocco had seen since the Almohads—transported his body to Fez and buried him at the shrine of ʿAlī ibn Ḥarazim on Monday, 17 Ṣafar 1083/10 June 1672. From that moment, the site became a royal mazāra, reserved for sultans, scholars, and members of the royal household. The Dabbāgh family, entrusted with the shrine's administration, thus found themselves positioned at the intersection of ʿAlawī dynastic authority and Fāsī saintly prestige—stewards of a space where political power sought legitimation through proximity to baraka.

He married Fāriḥa, the daughter of ʿAllāl al-Qamarshī, a wealthy merchant from an Andalusian Khazrajī family. This family had fled Málaga after the Catholic Monarchs confiscated their properties, eventually settling in Meknes, where they established themselves in commerce. Together they had three sons: ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, al-ʿArabī, and ʿAlī. When Masʿūd died—relatively young, leaving his eldest son ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz barely sixteen—he was buried beside the tomb of ʿAlī ibn Ḥarazim, the very shrine his family had been appointed to oversee. His grave, modest and unmarked in the style he had cultivated in life, lay within a necropolis that now included an ʿAlawī sultan, a testament to how far the family had come from their exile in Salé.

Yet destiny had prepared something else entirely for his eldest son. For two centuries—from the family's return to Fez in the early 800s/1400s through Masʿūd's own generation—every male Dabbāgh of note had been a scholar: jurists, grammarians, men who moved fluently through the transmitted sciences and contributed, however modestly, to the intellectual life of Fez. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz would be the exception—the only illiterate member of the family in this entire span. And this was not mere misfortune. Destiny seemed to have seized him deliberately, stripping him of the very tools that had defined his lineage: literacy, formal education, access to the madrasas where his father and grandfather had studied. His father's early death left him responsible for his younger brothers while still a boy himself. Instead of studying in the madrasas of Fez, he worked—weaving, small trades, any task that paid enough to feed the house.

The city's scholars saw him as another poor boy from the quarters of Fez al-Bālī, destined to labor rather than to learn. Nothing suggested that this youth, who could barely read or write, would become the spiritual axis of his generation. Yet the very shrine his father had overseen—the tomb of ʿAlī ibn Ḥarazim, where an ʿAlawī sultan now lay and where his own father rested—would become the site of his transformation. It was there, outside that blessed mausoleum, that the orphaned craftsman would encounter al-Khiḍr, the Green Guide who appears to those chosen for knowledge that bypasses books, masters, and all the apparatus of formal learning. What his family had cultivated through two centuries of scholarship, he would receive in a single meeting with a figure who stands outside time itself.

2. The Ṭarbūsh and the Twelve Years

The destiny of Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz unfolded in the realm of al-bushrā and glad tidings long before his birth. His mother’s uncle, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-ʿArabī ibn Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Fishtālī (d. 1090/1679), received a vision from the Prophet ﷺ announcing the coming of a great walī, a child who would rise from his sister’s daughter Fāriḥa and bear the name ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. With this prophecy, an unseen current of baraka began tracing its way toward a child yet unborn.

Al-Fishtālī, who had studied under the great masters of his age—Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Dirʿī (d. 1085/1674), ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn al-Qāḍī (d. 1082/1671), and ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Fāsī (d. 1091/1679)—and had refused all offers of judgeships, understood what was required of him. He raised his niece with profound care, sheltering her in his modest household, providing for her from his own earnings. He had settled in Raʾs al-Jinān, where he served as imam and teacher, instructing children in Qurʾān recitation in his small mosque. And when the time came, he called aside one of his students—a young sharif named Masʿūd al-Dabbāgh—and proposed a marriage.

The convergence of names alone seemed to carry a hidden message: Masʿūd, "the fortunate one," would marry Fāriḥa, "the joyful one," daughter of Rāḍiya, "the contented one." The proposal was direct, unadorned. Masʿūd, perhaps startled that a man of al-Fishtālī's station would offer him such a match, accepted immediately. The walī insisted on bearing all expenses himself: the dowry, the preparations, every detail. After the wedding, he continued his care, summoning Masʿūd daily to his shop in Simāṭ al-ʿUdūl and placing two small silver coins in his hand—a quiet subsidy, sustained over months and years, to ensure the young household's stability. Witnesses remembered seeing Masʿūd arrive each afternoon after ʿAṣr prayer, waiting as al-Fishtālī finished his work, then receiving the coins that would feed his family for another day. It was an act of tarbiya disguised as generosity, a shaping of circumstances that would allow the prophesied child to be born into the right lineage, the right household, the right conditions.

Before al-Fishtālī departed this world—five years before the child's birth—he prepared two objects: a ṭarbūsh and a pair of ṣabbāṭ. These were not heirlooms in the ordinary sense but vessels charged with baraka, physical objects that had absorbed the spiritual presence of the man who wore them. He entrusted them to the family with instructions that they be given to the boy when the time came, when the hidden inheritance could be activated. Then he died and was buried outside Bāb al-Futūḥ, near the tomb of ʿAlī Aḥmāmūsh, leaving behind a set of instructions that would take years to fulfill.

ًWhen the boy was born in al-ʿUyūn, the quarter his ancestors had settled two centuries earlier, his father named him ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, fulfilling the prophecy. For the first years of his life, nothing suggested he was anything other than what he appeared: the eldest son of a respected but modest scholar, a boy growing up in the narrow streets of Fez al-Bālī, learning the rhythms of prayer, family, and the markets. And then, one day, his mother gave him the objects al-Fishtālī had left behind. When he placed the ṭarbūsh on his head and slipped his feet into the ṣabbāṭ, something erupted. Heat tore through his body—so fierce, so overwhelming, that his eyes filled with tears and he could not speak. The baraka that had been promised before his birth, that had moved through marriages and deaths and whispered instructions, suddenly ignited.

From that moment, he was no longer the boy who worked in the workshops. A hunger opened inside him that nothing in Fez could satisfy—not the mosque lessons, not the dhikr circles, not the respected shaykhs whose zāwiyās dotted the city. He began to wander. Twelve years of wandering, from one shaykh to another, adopting litanies and abandoning them, sitting in majālis that promised illumination but delivered only formulas. Every master he met seemed to offer a piece of the answer but never the whole. Every wird he recited opened a door but led only to another locked gate. The constriction grew tighter, the yearning sharper, until he became a figure suspended between two worlds: his hands still worked wool and silk, but his heart had already crossed into the realm of meanings. He was searching, though he did not yet know for whom. Destiny had arranged everything—the marriage, the death, the ṭarbūsh, the hunger—but the final meeting, the one that would unlock what had been placed inside him, still lay ahead. Somewhere in Fez, unseen and waiting, was the master for whom all of this had been prepared.

3. from Hidden Saints to Prophetic Presence

The twelve years that Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz spent searching across Fez unfolded within a precise framework of places, relationships, and inner signs. His wandering was not aimless; it developed within a constellation of scenes that destiny placed around him—his early marriage, his inherited bond with the shrine of Sīdī ʿAlī ibn Ḥarazem, and a circle of hidden saints who did not guide him through formal teaching but through encounters that opened new interior capacities long before the arrival of al-Khiḍr:

1. ʿUmar ibn Muḥammad al-Hawwārī ( 1125/1713)
   He was the first of the three. An ascetic from the Hawwāra lineage of the Sous, he served as the caretaker of the very shrine tied to al-Dabbāgh’s family. Their acquaintance grew through quiet exchanges, and although al-Hawwārī rarely spoke of his state, al-Dabbāgh later affirmed that his station was immense. When al-Hawwārī passed away and was buried outside Bāb al-Futūḥ, al-Dabbāgh remarked that had people known his reality, “they would not have visited anyone else from among the living.” Three days after his death, the first subtle movements of unveiling began.

2. Manṣūr ibn Aḥmad ( 1125/1713)
   A few years later came his meeting with Manṣūr ibn Aḥmad, around the age of twenty-three, seven years before the great opening. Their first encounter happened inside a weaving workshop into which al-Dabbāgh had entered to arrange training for his younger brother al-ʿArabī. Manṣūr called him aside, questioned him with simplicity and insight, and then placed thirty silver coins in his hand, sealing a recognition that deepened over the years. Al-Dabbāgh would later say that many extraordinary events occurred in Manṣūr’s company, though Al-Ibrīz recorded only a few. Manṣūr’s passing marked the end of an era of preparation.

3. Muḥammad al-Lihwāj ( 1125/1713)
   The third was Muḥammad al-Lihwāj, whom he met even earlier, around 1112/1700, in another workshop linked to relatives of the saint. Each time al-Lihwāj visited, he would sit beside the young ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and engage him in private conversation as though recognizing a hidden potential that had not yet emerged. Their familiarity grew until, upon al-Lihwāj’s death—shortly after Manṣūr.

One Friday, Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz approached the Ḥarāzimī sanctuary—the same spiritual axis that had shaped Abū Madyan (d. 594/1198). There, in the depth of night, the veil lifted. The Green Guide appeared to him, not as a teacher of tablets but as the inheritor of the hidden knowledge once granted to Moses: the knowledge of divine arrangement, the unseen weave of decree, and the inner architecture by which the soul is led from bewilderment to certainty.

From that nocturnal encounter, al-Dabbāgh received a sacred litany—seven thousand invocations directed toward the Prophet ﷺ—a devotional current that reshaped the composition of his inner life. "O Allāh, O my Lord, by the status (Jāh) of our Master Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh, unite me and our Master Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh in this life before the Hereafter." For four uninterrupted years (1121–1125/1709–1713), he carried this wird with unwavering exactitude, reciting it until its rhythm became inseparable from breath, heartbeat, and consciousness. 

Throughout this period, he remained in the quiet orbit of the three hidden saints of Fez—al-Hawwārī, Manṣūr, and al-Lihwāj. Their companionship did not provide instruction in the conventional sense; it functioned instead as a silent confirmation, a spiritual climate in which the litany could mature into vision. Each of them recognized the inward ascent taking shape within him, even as its final form remained veiled.

As the fourth year drew to its close, and with the passing of al-Hawwārī on Thursday, 8 Rajab 1125 / July 31, 1713, the inward edifice completed itself. The long discipline of the litany, the quiet companionship of the concealed saints, and the unseen promise carried through his lineage converged—preparing the ground for the great opening that would descend upon him at Bāb al-Futūḥ. 

After the passing of al-Hawwārī, the custodian of the Ḥarāzimī sanctuary, on Thursday, 8 Rajab 1125 / July 31, 1713, and at exactly thirty years of age, the divine disclosure unfolded. Approaching Bāb al-Futūḥ, his senses dissolved; light surged through him; creation appeared as a single, seamless unveiling—the earth and its layers, the heavens and their orders, the seas and their depths, all perceived with a clarity that felt like remembrance rather than discovery.

“… When I reached Bāb al-Futūḥ, a shiver entered me, then intense trembling, then my flesh began to tingle greatly. I kept walking—while in that state, and the condition kept increasing. My chest began to heave violently, until my collarbone was striking my beard. Then something emerged from my inner being (dhāt), like the steam from a couscous pot. Then my inner being began to elongate, until it became taller than anything tall. Then things began to unveil themselves to me and appear as if they were right before me. I saw all the villages, cities, and hamlets. I saw everything on this land. I saw a Christian woman sing her child in her lap. I saw all the seas. I saw the seven earths and everything in them of creatures and created beings. I saw the sky as if I were above it, looking at what was in it.And behold, a great light like flashing lightning that comes from every direction—that light came from above me, from beneath me, from my right, from my left, from before me, and behind me. A tremendous cold struck me from it, until I thought I had died. I rushed and threw myself face-down so I would not look at that light. But when I lay down, I saw that my entire being had become eyes: the eye sees, the head sees, the foot sees, all my limbs see. I looked at the clothes I was wearing and found they did not veil that sight which had spread through my being. I knew then that lying face-down and standing upright were equal.Then the state continued with me for an hour and ceased, and I returned to the condition I had been in at first. I returned to the city—I was unable to reach Sīdī ʿAlī ibn Ḥarazim—and I feared for myself and occupied myself with weeping.. Then that state returned to me for an hour, then ceased. It kept coming to me for an hour and ceasing for another hour, until it became familiar with my being (dhāt). Then it would disappear for an hour during the day and an hour during the night, then it stopped disappearing altogether.”

— al-Dabbāgh in the introduction to al-Ibrīz describes the first moment of his fatḥ as a sudden, unearned unveiling bestowed directly by God, marking the beginning of his spiritual authorization.

The day of the great opening marked a decisive rupture in the life of Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. Its force overwhelmed the limits of the physical body, driving him into movements that revealed the dominance of spirit over form. The experience announced the beginning of a new mode of existence in which the boundaries separating the sensory world from the unseen no longer held their conventional meaning.

When dawn came, he sought grounding in the ancestral axis of Mawlāy Idrīs II. On the road, the notable jurist-saint Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad al-Jīrūndī ( 1125/1713) recognized the extraordinary nature of what had occurred and directed him toward the tomb of the ancient ascetical Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Tāwudī ibn Sūdah (580/1184), outside Bāb al-Jīsa. This guidance initiated a chain of events that would bring him to the figure destined to stabilize his unveiling.

As he approached Bāb al-Jīsa, a stranger of striking presence appeared: ʿAbd Allāh al-Barnāwī (1126/1714), a figure of the Qādirī Sufi lineage who had traveled from the region of Bornu in Sub-Saharan West Africa. His arrival in Fez had been governed by spiritual intention, and the convergence with al-Dabbāgh revealed that his journey had been oriented entirely toward this encounter. 

Al-Barnāwī accompanied him to his residence in Rās al-Jinān. Over the following months—through the remainder of Rajab and the successive months of Shaʿbān, Ramaḍān, Shawwāl, Dhū al-Qaʿda, and the first ten days of Dhū al-Ḥijja—he fulfilled a precise role. He stabilized the young saint’s inner state, eased the turbulence produced by the great opening, and helped his consciousness adapt to the continuous influx of light. His influence was not pedagogical in the conventional sense; it was a presence that harmonized, grounded, and refined.

Al-Dabbāgh later described al-Barnāwī as a pole among the cosmic hierarchy of saints, nourished by the radiance of more than seventy of the Divine Names. Through him, the final purification required for the Muhammadan unveiling took place. The four years of reciting the Khidrian litany had prepared the heart; the great opening had unveiled creation; but the clarity necessary for direct vision of the Prophet ﷺ required a final calibration that al-Barnāwī alone was able to transmit.

When the appointed day came — the third morning after ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā — the Khidrian litany reached its destination. While still in Fez, al-Dabbāgh’s inward sight oriented itself spontaneously toward the precinct of the Prophet’s sanctuary in Madinah. The noble chamber came into view, the light intensified, and out of its radiance the Prophetic form manifested directly, in waking awareness. This was not a dream, nor an internal image, but the full encounter of ruʾyat al-Nabī fī al-yaqaẓa—the definitive awakening of the Muhammadan inheritance within him.

“When Allāh willed to grant me the opening and to unite me with His Mercy, I looked—while I was in Fez—at the Noble Tomb, then I looked at the Noble Light. It began to draw near me—while I was looking at it—and when it came close to me, a man emerged from it, and behold! it was The Prophet ﷺ!”

— Dabbāgh in the tenth chapter of al-Ibrīz recounts his first encounter with his great-grandfather, the Prophet ﷺ.

The transactional logic of sainthood under Ismāʿīl was otherwise brutally clear. Those who aligned their spiritual authority with dynastic ambition prospered; those who did not were erased. Shaykh ʿAlī al-Lawātī stood as the exemplary case. His rise to prominence came not through years of ascetic discipline or volumes of legal scholarship, but through a single prophetic utterance: he delivered glad tidings (bushrā) proclaiming the divinely ordained ascent of ʿAlawī rule. That pronouncement—interpreted by the regime as celestial confirmation of its legitimacy—earned him immediate royal patronage. Zawiyas were endowed in his name, disciples flocked to his teachings, and his reputation spread not because of what he knew but because of whom he had endorsed. His trajectory revealed the new economy of sanctity: baraka aligned with the throne was rewarded with land, wealth, and institutional support; baraka that remained neutral or, worse, attached itself to defeated rivals, was suppressed. Saints who had cast their lot with the Dilāʾī cause found their zawiyas dismantled, their properties confiscated, their names excised from the litanies of blessing recited in mosques. The message was unmistakable—in Ismāʿīl's Morocco, sainthood that served dynastic legitimacy flourished; sainthood that did not, vanished.

This consolidation unfolded alongside relentless warfare across the frontiers. Mawlāy Ismāʿīl waged military campaigns against the Ottomans, defending Morocco's eastern border and asserting that the Sharifian throne would not accept subordination to Istanbul. On the Atlantic coast, he fought to reclaim Moroccan cities from European occupation; victories against Spain and Portugal restored ports and trade routes that had long been lost. These triumphs fortified the dynasty's legitimacy, uniting imperial ambition with the language of religious duty. Yet as the empire expanded militarily, it entered deeper into diplomatic and commercial negotiations with European states. Treaties were drafted, prisoners exchanged, and maritime accords proposed. Some offered genuine strategic benefit, securing naval materials and trade privileges, but not all were welcomed in Fez. The jurists of the Qarawiyyīn, guarding the moral and legal integrity of the realm, resisted agreements they saw as ethically compromising. In this tension between imperial pragmatism and scholarly vigilance, one sees how Fez remained the moral axis of Morocco, even while Meknes claimed political supremacy.

But Fez’s resistance to Meknes was never limited to moral objection or scholarly critique; it could erupt with sudden, organised, and lethal determination. Barely months after Mawlāy Ismāʿīl ascended the throne and buried his brother Mawlāy al-Rashīd at the sanctuary of Sidi ʿAlī ibn Ḥarāzim, the city rose in open revolt. The townspeople turned against the Makhzan garrison, killed the sultan’s appointed commander, and in the course of a single night drove the royal forces from Fez. What followed was even more striking: the city issued a formal bayʿa to the sultan’s nephew, Aḥmad ibn Muḥriz, proclaiming him ruler and inviting him to establish his authority from Taza. This was no riot, no passing disturbance—it was a constitutional act, a deliberate assertion that Fez still claimed the right to determine the legitimacy of kingship in Morocco. Ibn Muḥriz, whose rebellions in the south had hitherto been episodic and unsupported, now possessed what no military campaign could grant him: the sanction of Morocco’s oldest, most prestigious, and most politically conscious city.

Mawlāy Ismāʿīl's response revealed both his ruthlessness and the limits of his power. He laid siege to Fez, and the siege lasted fourteen months and eight days—longer than any of his campaigns against European fortresses, longer than his suppression of tribal revolts. The city's defenses were not primarily military but social and economic: Fez controlled trade routes, commanded the loyalty of surrounding tribes, and possessed provisions and resolve enough to outlast a royal army. When the city finally opened its gates in Shawwāl 1084 (late October 1673), it was not through conquest but through negotiated reconciliation. The sultan pardoned the inhabitants, reappointed officials, and received renewed oaths of allegiance. But the terms were telling: Fez had forced the sultan to the bargaining table. The city could not defeat Meknes militarily, but neither could Meknes simply impose its will. The balance was struck not through submission but through mutual recognition of limits.

Yet the truce was fragile and repeatedly tested. Ibn Muḥriz, emboldened by Fez's earlier support, seized Marrakesh again in Muḥarram 1084 (May 1673) with the backing of his Saʿdī wife and the Shabanāt tribes. His presence in the south, sustained by hopes that Fez might once more rise in his favor, forced Ismāʿīl into a grinding series of campaigns that consumed years and thousands of lives. Not until Dhu'l-Qaʿda 1098 (October 1687)—fifteen years after the initial revolt—did Ibn Muḥriz finally die, killed in a skirmish near Taroudant. Even then, the resistance he embodied was less a product of his own charisma than of Fez's persistent refusal to accept Meknes' absolute sovereignty. The city's willingness to recognize a rival claimant, to expel a royal garrison, and to endure a year-long siege announced a structural reality: Fez possessed a sovereignty of its own, rooted not in military strength but in its status as the symbolic heart of Moroccan Islam.

This duality—imperial consolidation from Meknes, spiritual and political autonomy from Fez—produced a landscape of permanent tension. The sultan relied on Fez's scholars for moral legitimacy; their fatwas sanctioned his rule, their prayers in the Qarawiyyīn lent his reign divine approval. Yet he could never fully trust them, for their authority derived not from his appointment but from centuries of accumulated prestige. The jurists shaped public sentiment, arbitrated disputes that royal courts could not touch, and preserved a vision of Islamic governance that predated the ʿAlawīs and would, they presumed, outlast them. Fez was honored in official rhetoric, granted privileges and exemptions, yet never subdued. The killing of Ibn Zaydān, the sultan’s administrator who attempted to enforce the conscription of the Ḥarāṭīn—the Black free communities—into the ʿAbīd al-Bukhārī, the slave-army engineered to serve the throne alone, offered a stark reminder that certain boundaries between Meknes and Fez could not be crossed without igniting revolt. When Meknes pressed too far, Fez killed the messenger and dared the sultan to answer. And Mawlāy Ismāʿīl, formidable as he was, calculated that the price of crushing Fez outright exceeded any advantage to be gained. The city remained, therefore, a zone of negotiated domination: loyal in appearance, but autonomous in practice—acknowledged by the throne, yet never fully subdued by it.

Mawlāy Ismāʿīl's wariness of alliances between religious authority and political ambition was not abstract paranoia but bitter experience. Over the course of his reign, he executed three of his own sons for precisely such conspiracies. Each had attempted to mobilize regional scholars and saints, believing that spiritual endorsement could translate into viable claims to the throne. The first was Mawlāy Muḥammad al-ʿĀlim, widely regarded as capable and learned, who governed Marrakesh with such justice that his reputation threatened to overshadow his father's. When he rebelled in 1114/1703, drawing support from southern scholars and rural saints who saw in him a more pious alternative to Mawlāy Ismāʿīl's brutal pragmatism, the sultan moved decisively. Al-ʿĀlim was captured, and in a public demonstration meant to erase any ambiguity about the consequences of rebellion, Mawlāy Ismāʿīl ordered his right hand and left foot severed. The young prince bled to death within days, and the sultan forbade funeral prayers, a final humiliation that denied him even the mercy of communal mourning. The scholars who had supported him faced similar fates: some were imprisoned, others exiled to remote garrisons, still others executed quietly to avoid creating martyrs.

The second and third executions followed similar patterns, each targeting sons who had cultivated ties with influential jurists or charismatic saints in provinces distant from Meknes. Mawlāy Zaydān, despite being the son of Ismāʿīl's favored wife ʿĀ'isha al-Mubāraka, was strangled in 1120/1708 after his networks in Taroudant and the Sous were judged too dangerous. His crime was not military incompetence but political ambition dressed in religious garb. And later still, Mawlāy al-Ḥafīẓ, who had cultivated support among Qarawiyyīn scholars in Fez itself, was quietly poisoned before his conspiracy could mature. In each case, the sultan's response was surgical: the prince was eliminated, his clerical and saintly backers hunted down, and their networks dismantled. The executions served a pedagogical purpose—they announced to every scholar, every saint, every aspiring prince that the one unforgivable act was to combine royal blood with spiritual charisma. Separately, these forms of authority could be managed; together, they could fracture the empire.

Yet the very severity of these measures revealed an underlying dependency. If scholars and saints posed such mortal danger, it was because they retained the power to confer or withdraw legitimacy. Sultanic violence acknowledged what it sought to deny: that spiritual authority remained a currency the throne could suppress but never monopolize. Ismāʿīl could kill princes and exile scholars, but he could not rule without their prayers, their fatwas, their public endorsements. Every Friday sermon that named him as Commander of the Faithful, every legal ruling that upheld his decrees, every saint who refrained from denouncing his policies—these were negotiations, not givens. The throne's power was real but not absolute; it operated within a field of religious authority it could dominate but not erase.

Into this charged landscape of competing and overlapping sovereignties, Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh emerged as a figure who defied every available category. He was born into an Idrissid family of quiet distinction, his lineage tracing back through centuries to the founder of Fez itself. That ancestry granted him a prestige the ʿAlawīs could not ignore—to persecute an Idrissid saint was to call into question one's own claim to sharifian legitimacy. Yet al-Dabbāgh leveraged none of the institutional possibilities his lineage afforded. He founded no zawiya, gathered no formal circle of disciples, sought no endowments or royal patronage. He worked as a weaver, his hands shaping wool and silk while his inner vision, he would later claim, encompassed celestial hierarchies. His authority, when it became known, derived not from textual mastery, but from what he described as direct, unmediated spiritual unveiling (kashf).

The claims attributed to him were of a kind that made both palace and madrasa uneasy, though for different reasons. He declared that the Dīwān al-Ṣāliḥīn was "gathered in my chest." If true, this located the spiritual administration of creation not in some inaccessible metaphysical realm, nor in the institutions of Fez or Meknes, but within the being of an illiterate craftsman. More provocatively still, he spoke of bearing multiple spiritual "robes" (ḥulal), each embodying a divine attribute of such overwhelming intensity that, were even one placed upon the city of Fez, its walls, its markets, its scholars, its multitudes would dissolve instantly into nonexistence. These were not the pieties of a conventional saint currying favor, nor the polemics of a rebel seeking to delegitimize the sultan. They were utterances that bypassed the entire architecture of political and religious authority, asserting a form of sovereignty that operated on a plane where neither throne nor Qarawiyyīn held jurisdiction.

For the palace, such claims were unsettling not because they directly challenged Mawlāy Ismāʿīl's rule—al-Dabbāgh made no political pronouncements, endorsed no rival claimants, built no networks of armed followers—but because they implied the irrelevance of sultanic authority. If ultimate governance resided in an invisible council that convened in a saint's chest, what did it matter who sat in Meknes? For the scholars of the Qarawiyyīn, the discomfort was different but no less acute. Al-Dabbāgh's authority derived from Muhammadan inheritance, not from legal training or textual transmission. He claimed to perceive realities—angelic hierarchies, the inner structure of prophethood, the mechanics of cosmic governance—that no amount of study could access. This was an implicit critique of the entire scholarly enterprise, suggesting that the highest forms of knowledge lay beyond the reach of those who had spent lifetimes mastering the transmitted sciences.

Yet neither palace nor madrasa moved against him. His Idrissid lineage provided one layer of protection; the fact that he made no bid for institutional power provided another. But there was something else, harder to name—a sense, perhaps, that his claims, however audacious, operated in a register where coercion was beside the point. One could imprison a scholar, exile a rival saint, execute a rebellious prince. But how does one coerce someone who claims to contain the Dīwān? The very assertion created a kind of inviolability, not through strength but through sheer categorical incommensurability. Al-Dabbāgh's authority, if it existed, was of a kind that sultanic power could neither grant nor revoke.

This untouchability manifested concretely in an incident involving Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak, then a scholar of grand standing in Fez. During Ismāʿīl's reign, the sultan dispatched a written command summoning Ibn al-Mubārak to Meknes to serve as imam at the newly constructed Jāmiʿ al-Riyāḍ in the elite quarter housing the regime's senior officials. Two of the sultan's men were sent as escorts, ensuring compliance. To refuse such a summons was to invite catastrophe—imprisonment, confiscation of property, exile, or execution. The historical record was filled with scholars who had disappeared for lesser acts of defiance. Ibn al-Mubārak understood the stakes. So did his father-in-law, the respected jurist Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Sijilmāsī, the Imam of the Mosque of Mawlāy Idrīs in Zerhoun, who upon hearing that Ibn al-Mubārak had returned from Meknes without meeting the sultan, wrote in panic: "You departed without audience, without resolution. You cannot know what will now descend. You must return immediately, accept the appointment, demonstrate your willingness to serve."

This was the counsel of institutional religious authority navigating sultanic power through pragmatic accommodation. It was the voice of survival, learned through generations of scholars who had preserved their independence by knowing when to bend. But Ibn al-Mubārak had sought other counsel. When the summons first arrived, he had gone to al-Dabbāgh, consumed by dread. The saint's response was immediate and absolute: "Do not fear. If you travel to Meknes, we travel with you. But there will be no harm upon you, and what they request will not occur." Ibn al-Mubārak traveled to Meknes with the sultan's escorts, navigated whatever formalities were required, yet somehow avoided the audience and returned to Fez. When his father-in-law's urgent letter arrived, Ibn al-Mubārak returned to al-Dabbāgh with the message. The saint's response did not waver: "Remain in your house and fear no misfortune."

And nothing happened. No royal guards arrived to drag Ibn al-Mubārak back to Meknes. No order came for his arrest. No messenger delivered a reprimand. The matter simply dissolved, as if the sultan's will had encountered an invisible boundary and dissipated against it. The strangeness of this outcome was not lost on witnesses. One of Ibn al-Mubārak's associates in Meknes, astounded, later remarked: "We have seen nothing stranger than what you accomplished. The sultan sent you a written decree, reinforced it with his own hand, dispatched two officers to escort you—and you simply refused and returned home. And nothing befell you. This is beyond comprehension." The incident made no sense within the logic of sultanic authority. Mawlāy Ismāʿīl, who had executed his own sons for far less, who had destroyed zawiyas and ruined scholars, took no action against a man who had publicly ignored a direct royal command.

Thus, in a Morocco unified through the machinery of the Makhzan, legitimized through sharifian lineage, and governed through the uneasy partnership of throne and madrasa, al-Dabbāgh emerged as a third kind of authority—living proof that sovereignty possessed dimensions no sultan could map and no scholar could codify. His influence did not flow through fatwas, armed followings, or endowed institutions, but through the simple, inexplicable fact that when he said "remain in your house," those who heeded him were not harmed—even when defying the most powerful monarch Morocco had ever known.

6. The Scholar Who Crossed the Threshold 

Before one can understand how al-Dabbāgh's voice penetrated the citadel of Fez, one must first understand the citadel itself. Al-Qarawiyyīn was not merely a mosque nor an academy; it was the oldest functioning university in the world, a sacred Idrissid institution built beside the shrine of Mawlāy Idrīs II, and expanded over centuries by dynasties who saw in Fez the heart of the western Islamic world. Its origins were royal, not private. It was founded by the Idrissid rulers when they built Fez itself, completed in 263/876 under Dāwūd ibn Idrīs II, as confirmed by the marble inscription once adorning the old miḥrāb and now preserved in Rabat. The Merinids transformed it into a full university: adding chairs of learning, endowed madrasas, vast libraries, astronomical clocks, gilded lamps, and hundreds of satellite mosques whose classrooms overflowed with students from Morocco, al-Andalus, and the Bilād al-Sūdān.

For all this, al-Qarawiyyīn was more than architecture. It was the guardian of Morocco’s Sunni intellect, a fortress of Mālikī orthodoxy whose legitimacy rested on its Idrissid foundations. The sword of Imām Idrīs still crowns its minaret—a reminder that dynasties might rise and fall, yet the sacred authority of Fez flowed only through the House of Imām Idrīs. It was also the great filter of historical memory: while Idrissid sources affirmed its royal foundation, later chroniclers—many shaped by anti-Idrissid narratives—popularized the legend of Fāṭima al-Fihrī. Archaeological and epigraphic evidence restores the truth: al-Qarawiyyīn was an Idrissid institution, tied to their capital, their shrine, and their vision for Morocco. 

Long before al-Dabbāgh’s light appeared in Fez, another revolution had occurred far to the east, in a city whose fate shaped the entire Sunni world: Baghdad. It was here, amid the flames of sectarian conflict and the collapse of rational theology, that the Sunni curriculum took the form that would eventually penetrate al-Qarawiyyīn. By the 5th/11th century, the Abbasid Caliphate was weakened politically and overshadowed spiritually by the Fatimid Imamate of Cairo. The Muslim world stood divided between: Sunni Abbasids in Baghdad, Shi‘i Ismaili Fatimids in Egypt, and an intellectually fractured Muslim world.

The Abbasids, desperate to revive their legitimacy, turned toward a centralized intellectual project—one that would define, discipline, and unify Sunni identity. At the same time, Sunni thought was recovering from its own internal traumas: the collapse of Muʿtazilite rationalism under al-Mutawakkil (247/861); the rise of literalist traditionalism under Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (241/855); the decline of philosophical inquiry; and the triumph of ḥadīth-centric epistemology. Reason, which once nourished early Islamic philosophy, had been progressively curtailed, leaving the Sunni world intellectually disarmed in the face of Fatimid philosophical sophistication. Into this vacuum stepped a new architect.

The Seljuk vizier Niẓām al-Mulk (485/1092), perhaps the most influential statesman in medieval Islam, engineered a bureaucratic response: State-funded universities (al-madāris al-niẓāmiyya); a standardized Sunni curriculum; a chain of certified scholars; and institutional Sufism anchored to a Sunni shaykh. These schools were not neutral; they were explicitly designed to counter Fatimid Shi‘ism, independent Sufi circles, Muʿtazilite rationalism, and the philosophical tradition of Ibn Sīnā (428/1037) and al-Fārābī (339/950). Within their walls, a new Sunni identity was engineered—one that combined strict theology, ḥadīth, Shāfi‘ī jurisprudence, and a controlled form of Sufism. This curriculum was given its final shape by one man.

Al-Ghazālī (526/1111)—a direct student of al-Juwaynī (478/1085), who was elevated to the title Imām al-Ḥaramayn to consolidate Seljuk-Sunni authority—was himself granted the emblematic designation Ḥujjat al-Islām by Niẓām al-Mulk as part of the same legitimizing project. Though al-Juwaynī, his prestige provided the intellectual capital the system needed; al-Ghazālī, appointed to the Niẓāmiyya of Baghdad, transformed that capital into a coherent synthesis. In his work, he fused the three domains of Sunni thought into a single architecture: fiqh (outer law), Ashʿarī uṣūl and logic (method), and Taṣawwuf (inner purification). The synthesis was powerful—yet it imposed clear boundaries on what Sunni orthodoxy could become.

For in this integration, al-Ghazālī decisively redirected the trajectory of Sunni thought: he condemned the philosophers as heretical, dismissed key natural sciences—mathematics, physics, and cosmology—as spiritually perilous, dismantled the remaining pillars of Muʿtazilite rationalism, and marginalized traditions of critical inquiry, experimentation, and intellectual openness. He refashioned Sufism into an ethical discipline rather than a metaphysical exploration, and fused Sunni identity with a tightly regulated mystical ethos.

Thus, for all its sophistication, the Ghazālian framework embalmed Sunni intellectual life within a fixed architecture: a chain of teachers, a chain of certificates, a chain of orders, a chain of lodges, a chain of obedience, and finally a chain of imitation — all converging upon a Sunni shaykh who functioned as a Sunni imām. It was an elegant system, but a closed one: self-replicating, self-policing, and designed to reproduce a single orthodoxy rather than to cultivate new horizons of thought. 

This was the “Sacred Sunni Madhhab”—distinct from the strict Almoravid Mālikī tradition and from the Mahdist doctrine of the Almohads, whose founder Ibn Tūmart (524/1130) is said to have studied under al-Ghazālī himself. It was a Baghdad-born orthodoxy disseminated through the Niẓāmiyya institutions: not a Maghribī creation, but a meticulously exported Seljuk-Sunni project.

Its shortcomings were clear to later observers: It froze intellectual movement. It prioritized transmission over inquiry. It condemned philosophical sciences as dangerous. It replaced creative thought with curated orthodoxy. Yet despite these limitations, the Ghazālian program conquered the Muslim world: from Baghdad to Nishapur, from Cairo to Damascus—and finally, to Fez.

“Look at this still, abiding light within the essence that holds it — the light in my outward form and in my inward reality. Look at this immense good my essence has been given, by which the cosmos is sustained. For by this light, all worlds are purified of evil. Every good in the heavens, the earth, and all realms flows from this light in my essence.” [Ibn al-Mubārak later wrote: “In that moment he spoke to me in a manner that revealed he was the one through whom the worlds are governed].”

— Al-Ibrīz, ch. 2 (Ibn al-Mubārak)

It was here — not in argument, nor in books, nor in the disciplined logic of the Niẓāmiyya — that the scholar’s world shifted. The man formed by Baghdad’s triangular curriculum met a light that refused to be measured by syllogisms or uṣūl. From that moment, as he writes in Al-Ibrīz: “I heard from him knowledge I had never heard from any human being nor seen in any book.” This was the moment of surrender — the moment when the universe bent around a saint who had never studied a page.

The scholar was conquered—not by argument, but by the light of al-ʿilm al-ladun. What began as curiosity became astonishment.  What began as astonishment became surrender. Al-Dabbāgh solved for him, without studies or books, the most arcane puzzles of Qur’anic sciences: the opening letters (ḥurūf al-muqaṭṭa‘āt), the ḥadīth of the Seven Letters, the inner meanings of Divine Names, the spiritual ontology of prophets and messengers. 

To understand the magnitude of this surrender, one must recall who Ibn al-Mubārak was. His cousin and first teacher, Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Ḥabīb al-Ghumārī (d. 1165 AH), was a renowned Sufi master of Sijilmāsa. Yet Ibn al-Mubārak himself was a prodigy of the rational and transmitted sciences. His biographers testify:  “A master of logic, rhetoric, uṣūl, ḥadīth, qirāʾāt, tafsīr.” “A mujtahid muṭlaq who declared his own capacity for independent reasoning.” “A scholar whose grasp of ‘illa and qiyās exceeded his peers.” “In speed of memorization and precision he had no equal.” His classroom produced giants: Ibn Sūda, Ibn ʿAzzūz, al-Bannānī, al-Hilālī, al-Wurshānī, and many others who shaped 18th-century Moroccan scholarship and politics.

This brilliance, however, provoked resentment. Some traditional Malikis attacked him, especially when he revived the study of uṣūl and challenged idle taqlīd. The historian Ibn Zaydān even claimed Sultan Sīdī Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh  (r. 1171-1204 / 1757-1790) would not accept his testimony—an accusation rooted not in piety but in rivalry. Yet through all this, Ibn al-Mubārak had already crossed another threshold: the scholarly mastery of the entire Baghdadian triangular system. He was the embodiment of Ghazālian Sunni orthodoxy in its most rigorous Moroccan form.

When Ibn al-Mubārak attached himself to al-Dabbāgh, Fez changed. The Qarawiyyīn, fortress of Malikī-Ghazālian orthodoxy, found one of its greatest jurists carrying the words of a man who had never held a book. The Idrissid shrine beside the university bore witness to the meeting of two galaxies: the rational, systematized Sunni curriculum of Baghdad, and the raw, cosmic spirituality of the Moroccan saint. No zawiya, no lineage, and no political faction had achieved what this alliance achieved. This was not discipleship. This was penetration—the moment a saint born in the alleys entered the halls of the world’s oldest university, carried by the scholar formed in its logic. And Moroccan Sufism was never the same again.

Al-Ibrīz became the vessel of this transformation: a work in which the cosmic unveilings of an illiterate saint were disciplined, structured, and immortalized by the very man who would later become Fez’s shaykh al-jamāʿa. It marks the moment when ʿilm al-ladunī entered written scholarship, when the alleyway reached the university, and when the Idrissid city absorbed a new current of sanctity. Through the hand of Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak, the light of al-Dabbāgh crossed the threshold of al-Qarawiyyīn—turning a private encounter of kashf into one of the most enduring intellectual legacies of Moroccan Sufism.

7. From a Hidden Pole to Printed Classics

From the moment Ibn al-Mubārak recognized al-Dabbāgh’s station, love seized him with an annihilating intensity. He brushed aside the objections of jurists and the warnings of colleagues; no argument could detach him from the saint whose presence had overturned his inner world. Al-Dabbāgh’s affection met this devotion with equal depth, surrounding the jurist with a vigilance and intimacy that left no hour of day or night untouched. Al-Dabbāgh declared his unwavering presence to his disciple: "Hold me accountable before God if I do not attend to you five hundred times in a single hour!" and "I do not leave you night or day!" Ibn al-Mubārak reported a vision of their two selves in a single garment, a sign of their profound spiritual unity. The Shaykh confirmed the exclusivity of this bond, telling him: "You are my fortune and my portion; others are like the rest of the people to me!"

It was within this complete surrender of one heart to another that Al-Ibrīz Min Kalām Sayyidinā ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh (“Pure Gold from the Words of our Master ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh”) took shape. Authored with al-Dabbāgh's permission, Al-Ibrīz is more than a mere hagiography; it is a scholarly testimonial of the divine knowledge that flowed from the unlettered Shaykh. It stands as a critical work of Gnostic Jurisprudence (Fiqh 'Irfānī), using the analytical rigor of an Ijtihād-level scholar to systematically record and validate the secrets of a great saint, thereby immortalizing the Shaykh's spiritual station through the lens of academic verification.

Where al-Dabbāgh’s teachings were fluid, spontaneous, and overwhelmingly experiential, Ibn al-Mubārak imposed order: introductions, thematic chapters, logical divisions, and cross-references. He took a living torrent and set it into the channels of scholastic clarity. The book’s twelve chapters reflect this ambition. They move from prophetic sayings to cosmology, from the nature of the saintly hierarchy to the mysteries of creation, from the afterlife to the structure of paradise and hell. Each section captures a different aspect of the saint’s multidimensional teaching:

• Chapter 1: Hadīth—Questions Posed by The Compiler, Answered through Unveiling.

• Chapter 2: Qurʾān—Syriac Etymologies, Secrets of The Abbreviated Letters, Esoteric Exegesis.

• Chapter 3: The Metaphysics of Spiritual Darkness.

• Chapter 4: The Dīwān of The Saints and Its Unseen Operations.

• Chapter 5: The Meaning of Taking a Shaykh and The Dynamics of Spiritual Will.

• Chapter 6: The Inheritance of Earlier Shaykhs, The Transmission of Litanies, The Nature of Divine Names.

• Chapter 7: Interpretations of Difficult Sayings By Earlier Masters.

• Chapter 8: The Creation Of Adam, Human Form as The Summit Of Divine Artistry.

• Chapter 9: Luminous and Dark Openings, The Difference Between Majdhūb And Fool, And Types Of Spiritual Illumination.

• Chapter 10: The Barzakh and The Movement of Souls.

• Chapter 11: The Structure of Paradise and Its Hierarchy.

• Chapter 12: Descriptions of Hell and Its Metaphysical Realities.

Far from serving as a mere transmitter of his master's words, ibn al-Mubārak positions himself as a critical scholar and textual analyst. His methodology involves several distinctive features. First, he demonstrates particular concern for establishing correlations between al-Dabbagh’s statements and the opinions of jurists. This comparative approach serves a dual purpose: it validates the soundness of the master's pronouncements and highlights his remarkable rank in divinely-bestowed knowledge despite his ummiyya. Second, when transmitting his shaykh’s Quranic exegesis or derivations from prophetic traditions, the author follows a consistent pattern: he presents al-Dabbagh's interpretation, then subjects it to scrutiny by citing the opinions of eminent scholars, before ultimately defending and advocating for his master's position. He establishes himself as a rigorous critic and examiner of every opinion and statement, adding clarification and explanation that demonstrate correctness through both spiritual taste and rational proof.

The diversity of Al-Ibrīz’s source material reveals the breadth of this enterprise. Across its pages, Ibn al-Mubārak draws on hadith collections and their commentaries, works of uṣūl, manuals of fiqh, Sufi treatises, studies of Qurʾānic readings, and tafsīr. Quantitatively, he cites ninety-nine hadith-related works forty-eight times, forty-two citations from twenty-three works in uṣūl, thirty-nine citations from twenty-four juridical works, thirty-seven references from nineteen Sufi texts, twenty-two citations from eleven works on qirāʾāt, and eighteen citations drawn from five exegeses (tafsīr). In total, he engages 139 distinct works, producing 266 citations. Yet what matters truly is not only the quantity but the pattern. His hadith sources range from foundational compendia to specialized commentaries, including al-ʿAsqalānī, al-Nawawī, al-Suyūṭī and Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr. His work in legal theory shows particular depth, frequently invoking al-Ghazālī in disputes, alongside al-Juwaynī and al-Subkī. The text thus situates al-Dabbāgh’s words within a densely populated intellectual universe. The saint does not float above tradition; he speaks from within it, and the jurist ensures that every echo and resonance is audible.

A striking feature of ibn al-Mubārak's methodology concerns his treatment of Sufi topics. Despite the work's mystical content, he notably refrains from extensively supporting his master's statements with citations from earlier Sufi authorities. The major exception occurs in the sixth chapter on the spiritual guide (shaykh al-tarbiya), where he quotes from al-Suhrawardī's ʿAwārif al-Maʿārif while completing his commentary on verses that the Shaykh had not addressed. This selective citation pattern suggests ibn al-Mubārak's confidence in the self-authenticating nature of his master's inspired knowledge, requiring validation primarily through juridical and scriptural sources rather than mystical precedent.

A particularly striking feature of Ibn al-Mubārak’s method lies in his treatment of Sufi precedent. Despite the work’s mystical content, he is notably restrained in citing earlier Sufi masters as external support for his master. The major exception is the sixth chapter on the spiritual guide (shaykh al-tarbiya), where he draws on al-Suhrawardī’s ʿAwārif al-Maʿārif to complete commentary on verses the Shaykh had not addressed. This relative silence is deeply revealing. It suggests that Ibn al-Mubārak considered al-Dabbāgh’s inspired knowledge to be self-authenticating, needing validation primarily through juridical and scriptural sources rather than mystical quotation. The omission becomes a statement: Sufi authority here does not require a chain of Sufi texts; it requires alignment with Qurʾān, hadith, and the principles of fiqh.

Analysis of his citation patterns shows that Ibn al-Mubārak typically references each work only once or twice, with rare exceptions in discussions of foundational theological issues. This economy of citation signals a concern for concision and textual clarity. He is thorough without being verbose, dense without being burdensome. The effect on the reader is subtle: confidence in the author’s learning without exhaustion. The jurist’s erudition serves the saint’s presence rather than overshadowing it.

The most complex issue in studying Al-Ibrīz, however, is the multiplicity and variety of its titles. This is fundamentally rooted in the author's oversight in explicitly mentioning the title in the book's opening sermon (khuṭbat al-kitāb) or conclusion. This omission, which the author is criticized for, was the direct cause of the diverse names circulating for the same text. The proliferation of variant titles is not merely a technical bibliographic curiosity but reflects deeper questions about the work's intended nature and scope.

Three principal titles have dominated the manuscript tradition and modern editions, each encoding a distinct interpretive framework:

1. Al-Ibrīz min Kalām Sayyidinā ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh ("Pure Gold from the Words of Our Master ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh"): This formulation, appearing as the core element across nearly all versions, privileges orality and direct transmission. The term kalām (speech, discourse) positions the text explicitly as transcription—a written monument to oral teaching, emphasizing fidelity to the shaykh's actual utterances rather than biographical reconstruction or systematic theology.

2. Al-Dhahab Al-Ibriz fī Manāqib al-Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh (“The Purest Gold on the Narratives of our Master ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh”): The substitution of manāqib (virtuous deeds, hagiographical narratives) fundamentally reorients the text toward the genre of saintly biography (sīra), foregrounding miraculous acts (karāmāt), exemplary conduct, and the construction of sanctity rather than doctrinal exposition.

3. Al-Tāj wal-Ibriz fī ʿUlūm Mawlānā ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (The Crown and Pure Gold on the Sciences of our Master Abd al-Aziz): This version, adopted by the scholar al-Murābiṭī in Taysīr al-Mawāhib—the second major hagiographical work celebrating al-Dabbāgh's life—recasts the text as systematic knowledge (ʿulūm), presenting it as an organized repository of mystical sciences rather than spontaneous oral instruction or narrative biography. The addition of al-tāj (“the crown”) heightens the work’s honorific register, subtly aligning it with al-Dabbāgh’s third authority—the supra-scholarly rank poised between sainthood and political legitimacy—thus marking the text as the sovereign summit of Moroccan Sufism.

What decisively transforms this bibliographic puzzle into compelling historical testimony is the substantial body of elegiac and commemorative poetry composed by al-Murābiṭī and other disciples, which repeatedly and explicitly invokes the work's title, al-Tāj wa-al-Ibrīz.

Al-Murābiṭī, in his jīmiyya (rhyming in jīm), declares:

وَلَنَا قَدُّ الْعُلَمَاءِ نَجْلُ مُبَارَكِ
فِي التَّاجِ مَا يُشْفِي الصُّدُورَ وَمُثْلِجِ
”And we have the foremost among scholars, the son of Mubārak,
In the Crown [al-Tāj] is what heals hearts and brings coolness.”

In al-Shanqīṭī's zayniyya (rhyming in zayn), the title appears with even greater specificity:

مَنْ يُرْوَى وَيَرِدْ مَعَالِيهِ يَنْظُرْ
بِحَجَاهُ فِي التَّاجِ وَالإِبْرِيزْ
”Whoever seeks to drink and attain his lofty stations, let him look
With his discernment in the Book of the Crown and Pure Gold.”

The jurist Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Tāzī, in his elegy, celebrates the work's uniqueness:

كِتَابُ التَّاجِ وَالإِبْرِيزِ تُلْفِي
بِهِ الْهُدَى وَالْبُعْدَ عَنْ ظَلاَمْ
”The Book of the Crown and Pure Gold—you will find in it
Guidance and distance from darkness.”

Another poet invites readers to the text as a spiritual watering-place:

فَيَا ظَامِئًا بِاللَّهِ مَنْهَلَ تَاجِ رِدْ
تَنَلْ مِنْهُ مَا أَحْلَى مِنَ الشَّهْدِ وَالسَّكْرِ
”O you who thirst—by God, come to the watering-place of the Crown,
You will obtain from it what is sweeter than honey and sugar.”

The jurist Adawsh, in his rāʾiyya, provides critical testimony to Ibn al-Mubārak's scholarly credentials:

كَفَى شَاهِدًا عَدْلاً لَنَا ابْنُ مُبَارِكٍ
مُرَصِّعُ تَاجِ الْعِلْمِ مِنْ خَالِصِ التِّبْرِ
”Sufficient for us as a just witness is Ibn Mubārak,
Who adorned the Crown of knowledge with Pure Gold.”

The hypothesis that al-Tāj wa-al-Ibrīz represents Ibn al-Mubārak's original conception thus gains substantial evidentiary support. This poetic corpus—spanning multiple compositions and meters—provides contemporary witness to how the text circulated and was recognized within al-Dabbāgh's immediate community, strongly suggesting that Al-Ibrīz had achieved sufficient recognition to warrant formal literary commemoration, possibly indicating that drafts or completed sections were known to the shaykh's followers during his lifetime or immediately after his death in 1132/1720.

What remains certain is that this titular multiplicity, far from mere bibliographic confusion, opens a window onto the sociology of knowledge production in early modern Morocco: a text composed through oral dictation, transcribed across years of accumulated sessions, circulated in recognizable form among disciples who celebrated it in formal verse, yet transmitted through manuscripts that encoded competing interpretations of its essence—whether as faithful transcription, hagiographical narrative, or systematic exposition of mystical sciences. The poetic archive proves what the manuscripts obscure: that Al-Ibrīz, under whatever name, was recognized as extraordinary from its earliest circulation.

By the time Ibn al-Mubārak completed the final edition of al-Ibrīz in 1136/1724—four years after al-Dabbāgh’s passing—he was only forty-two years old. This date coincided with a critical phase of spiritual and intellectual resurgence in Morocco, granting the book immediate and unparalleled recognition. It enjoyed total acceptance among both the elite and the general public, and its reputation spread rapidly by travelers (tatāyarat bihi al-rukbān).

This widespread reception, achieved immediately upon its release from the scholarly and religious capital of Morocco, Fez, demonstrates that the city’s status as a global center for Mālikī jurisprudence and Sufi schools served as a multiplier for the text's authority. Emerging from the strict academic environment of the Idrissian Presence, and overseen by a jurist like Ibn al-Mubārak , the text secured immediate diffusion and legitimacy within the network of scholars and saints across all regions. 

The influence of Al-Ibrīz was such that it soon generated its own refined “political“ tradition. The Fāsī jurist Muḥammad b. ʿĀmir al-Muʿaddanī al-Tādilī (d. 1234/1819) produced an abridgment titled al-Qawl al-Wajīz fī Tahdhīb al-Ibrīz, composed at the request of the Salafī-leaning Sultan Mawlāy Sulaymān (r. 1206–1238/1792–1822). The work opens with a substantial four-part introduction, including an expanded biography of Ibn al-Mubārak. Its purpose was clear: the sultan had expressed concern over certain ecstatic utterances attributed to al-Dabbāgh, and he instructed al-Muʿaddanī to remove them in order to make the text more accessible—and less troubling—to a broader readership.

All of this—the love, the structure, the reception, the titles, the acceptance, the refinement—must be read together to understand what Al-Ibrīz does to its readers. It is not simply a book about a saint; it is a machine for producing a saintly image inside the reader’s imagination. The author writes as jurist, reporter, and storyteller at once. He frames scenes with the clarity of a novelist while maintaining the precision of a scholar. The effect is powerful: al-Dabbāgh becomes distant enough to be revered, close enough to be loved, miraculous without estrangement, simple yet inexhaustible. Through this weaving, the reader does not merely observe Sufism—he begins to inhabit its consciousness.

The index sketches a conceptual cartography—spiritual opening vs. withdrawal (salb), hidden vs. cultivated shaykhs, sincere vs. utilitarian disciples, luminous vs. dark veils, beneficial vs. harmful invocations, heavenly vs. infernal architectures—yet none of these axes circumscribe al-Dabbāgh himself. Rather than delimiting him, this map expands the points of entry into his figure, allowing the reader to approach his presence from multiple, unfolding angles. Each reader chooses, consciously or unconsciously, the aspect that resonates most deeply with his own state. One reader enters through the fear of death and discovers in the Shaykh a guide across the barzakh. Another approaches through the dilemma of true and false teachers and encounters in him a criterion of discernment. A young murīd arrives by way of the tales of companionship and sees in him the master he longs to meet. The same text, the same chapters—yet each unveils a different Dabbāgh.

Ibn al-Mubārak writes with this multiplicity in mind. He does not present a flat, unilinear portrait. Instead, he alternates between intimate scenes and cosmic teachings, between Fez as a concrete city and Fez as a spiritual axis, between small miracles and vast theophanies. He describes the Shaykh laughing, traveling, correcting, consoling, suffering, unveiling, and teaching. He allows al-Dabbāgh to speak of ascent  (tara’qqī) in sainthood, in a tone that transforms abstract doctrine into inhabited worlds. He reports the Shaykh’s discourse on the types of visions, the marks distinguishing authentic unveiling from false imagination, the features separating a true spiritual guide from a false one. He lets the reader feel the terror of being stripped after a gift, and the mercy that can follow. At the same time, he warns him against sinking into the chronically recycled, folkloric conditions of sainthood that tradition often repeats, and prevents him from falling into the trap of karamāt-literature that fashions mythical, unreachable figures. Reading these passages, the seeker does not simply “learn” about the unseen; he feels brushed by it.

In this sense, Al-Ibrīz is a theatre of presence. The reader becomes one more companion sitting in the Shaykh’s circle, walking the streets of Fez at his side, listening to the currents that pass between master and disciple. The city itself becomes a vast zawiya and a field of inner combat, where perceptions are stripped and rebuilt. As the reader moves through these pages, he shares in Ahmad ibn al-Mubārak’s own awakenings—moments when the Shaykh redirects his gaze away from the glamour of saints and toward the stark truth that love accepts no rivals, that a single heart can be a full portion, and that the seeker brings nothing but receptivity. These subtle disclosures accumulate not as anecdotes but as shifts in awareness, teaching the reader how Sufi knowledge settles into memory: quietly, decisively, and without spectacle.

Because of this, Al-Ibrīz never stabilizes into a single, definitive image. It remains permanently re-readable. The reader who returns to it after years finds a different book, not because the ink has changed, but because his inner state has changed. New chapters come to the foreground; new episodes strike the heart; old stories take on darker or brighter hues. A young disciple recognizes himself in the eager murīd whose questions stumble into wisdom; an older seeker recognizes himself in the one who undergoes salb after fatḥ. The Shaykh remains the same; the reader does not. The book’s narrative philosophy is precisely to exploit this changing subjectivity, to ensure that al-Dabbāgh is never reduced to a fixed icon. He is always a presence in motion.

Because of this, Al-Ibrīz never stabilizes into a single, definitive image. It remains permanently re-readable. The reader who returns to it after years finds a different book, not because the ink has changed, but because his inner state has changed. New chapters come to the foreground; new episodes strike the heart; old passages acquire darker or brighter meanings. A young disciple recognizes himself in the eager murīd who seeks the same Khidr, the same Huwwārī, the same Barnāwī—pursuing the luminous intermediaries whose traces once signaled the beginning of every opening. An older seeker recognizes the fatigue of losing his shaykh, the impulse to cling to physical presence, and the awakening—echoing Ahmad ibn al-Mubārak’s own dream—that spiritual companionship is not confined to graves and that the wali’s presence can be encountered anywhere without confusing it with the divine. The Shaykh remains the same; the reader does not. The book’s narrative philosophy is built precisely on this shifting subjectivity, ensuring that al-Dabbāgh is never reduced to a fixed icon but remains a presence in motion.

In the end, Al-Ibrīz is philosophy disguised as narration. It is a meditation on how divine knowledge enters history, how a hidden pole becomes legible on paper without ceasing to be hidden, how a jurist can write the life of a saint in such a way that no two readers meet the same man. Ibn al-Mubārak wrote with the competence of a scholar, the love of a disciple, and the instinct of a storyteller. That is why his book did not remain a local curiosity or a static monument. It became what the poets called it: a crown adorned with pure gold, a spring for the thirsty, a guide out of darkness, and a work whose pages continue to forge, within every receptive heart, its own unique image of Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh.

8. When Orthodoxy Becomes Miracle

From the outset of his narrative on al-Dabbāgh’s karāmāt, Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak constructs a theological architecture that frames how wonder is to be received. Before describing any breach of natural law or unveiling of hidden realities, he establishes a motto disguised as miracle: the greatest karāma is not luminous phenomena but the soundness of creed. By declaring salāmat al-ʿaqīda wal-istiqāmah—the doctrinal rectitude and stability of Sunnī belief—the supreme wonder, he signals a larger strategy. Ibn al-Mubārak is not merely introducing the sanctity of a man; he is proclaiming the sanctity of a community. In his framing, all fatḥ belongs to the orthodox creed, and all kashf emanates from within Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah. He thus canonizes the community before the saint, making Sunnah the first locus of baraka. Long before al-Dabbāgh speaks, karāma has already been universalized as communal inheritance rather than individual charisma—the karāma of the madhhab before the karāma of the master.

This theological prelude allows him to position tafwīd—consigning divine attributes to God without interpretation—as both the path of the earliest generations and the metaphysical framework through which genuine fatḥ manifests. By privileging tafwīd over taʾwīl, he neutralizes three intellectual competitors at once: the Muʿtazila with their exaltation of ʿaql, the Sufi philosophers shaped by emanationist systems, and the Ismāʿīlī Shiʿa with their hierarchies of intellect. When he insists that no unveiling exists outside the creed of Ahl al-Sunnah, Ibn al-Mubārak is doing more than doctrinal classification; he is pre-emptively delegitimizing any saint or philosopher whose theology departs from Atharī-inflected Sunnism. Unveiling becomes not a universal possibility but a sectarian monopoly.

This strategy intensifies when Ibn al-Mubārak universalizes al-Dabbāgh’s orthodoxy. If al-Dabbagh’s supreme karāma is his sound Sunni creed, and if he is a walī, then every Sunni theoretically partakes in the same light. Karāma, in this framing, becomes trans-local and trans-historical, belonging not to Fez, not to Morocco, but to the “chosen community” itself. By narrating doctrinal alignment as the highest form of supernatural endowment, Ibn al-Mubārak transforms a personal virtue into communal proof. Al-Dabbāgh becomes the exemplary case through which Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah inherits divine proximity. The biography functions less as a record of private illuminations and more as an ideological mirror reflecting the station of the community as a whole. 

Nowhere is this more evident than in the next move: the elevation of al-Bukhārī (256/870). Ibn al-Mubārak reports that when al-Dabbāgh hears prophetic traditions, he smells the scent of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ, and that this scent intensifies specifically with ḥadīths from Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī rather than Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim. This is not a harmless mystical flourish but a sectarian hierarchy encoded as sensory miracle. By rooting this olfactory discrimination in kashf, Ibn al-Mubārak raises al-Bukhārī above all other compilers and binds al-Dabbāgh’s unveiling to the Sunnī symbolic universe. That he places the Ṣaḥīḥ tradition at the apex of prophetic fragrance—through the mouth of an illiterate saint—reveals the sophistication of his rhetorical project. The karāma does not simply affirm al-Dabbāgh’s sanctity; it rehabilitates al-Bukhārī’s authority and anchors it in mystical experience.

The sharpest polemical stroke appears when Ibn al-Mubārak presents al-Dabbāgh as able to identify fabricated hadiths through experiential luminosity, especially the famous tradition:“When God brought the Intellect into being...” This hadith, beloved by Muʿtazilites, Sufi philosophers, and Ismāʿīlīs, is condemned as fabricated by Ibn Taymiyya. By placing its rejection on the lips of al-Dabbāgh, Ibn al-Mubārak enlists kashf as an ally of traditionalism. Mysticism now serves the project of orthodoxy; unveiling destroys opponents of Ahl al-Sunnah rather than transcending sectarian polemics. In this move, the saint becomes a weapon in a theological struggle, and the epistemology of light is used to invalidate the epistemology of intellect. The saint is deployed to “stub the intellect” and undermine rationalist schools, thus polarizing tafwīd and Ahl al-Hadīth at the expense of Muʿtazilites, Sufi philosophers, Shiʿi thinkers, and even Ash'arites.

Placed against al-Ghazālī’s triangle, Ibn al-Mubārak’s strategy in Al-Ibrīz becomes even clearer. Al-Ghazālī argued that religious truth is only complete when law regulates outward conduct, theology secures doctrine, and mysticism perfects inner vision. Ibn al-Mubārak reproduces this triangle almost mechanically, but he reverses the order: instead of mysticism correcting theology, he uses mysticism to serve theology. The first move is legal-theological — establishing al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah as the supreme miracle. The second move is hadith-theological — tying prophetic scent specifically to Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. The third move is mystical — using the saint’s luminous discrimination to reinforce the very doctrines that law and theology already demanded.

Later in al-Ibrīz, Ibn al-Mubārak constructs a carefully tiered allocation of prophetic virtues among the four caliphs. Al-Dabbāgh is portrayed as saying that Abū Bakr inherits faith from the Prophet ﷺ; ʿUmar inherits sincere concern and just governance; ʿUthmān inherits modesty and generosity; and ʿAlī inherits courage. On the surface, this reads as balanced praise. Structurally, however, it establishes an implicit hierarchy: the highest spiritual essence—faith as the inner core of the Prophetic reality—is reserved for Abū Bakr, whereas ʿAlī, later emblematic of esoteric knowledge in both Sufi and Shīʿī traditions, is assigned primarily a martial attribute. This hierarchy is not incidental. It appears precisely where al-Ibrīz defines doctrinal “separation from God” as loving some caliphs and disliking others. At that moment, prophetic inheritance and spiritual continuity are mapped directly onto the caliphal sequence, encouraging the reader to regard fidelity to Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and ʿUthmān as a natural extension of fidelity to the Prophet ﷺ himself.

The architecture is thus double-layered: a theology affirming the companions’ collective uprightness—an axiom of Sunnī doctrine—paired with a more selective hierarchy within that circle. The text mirrors al-Ghazālī’s strategy of redirecting spiritual authority from the House of ʿAlī toward Abū Bakr, thereby preparing the way for later Sunnī Sufi claims that he—rather than ʿAlī—is Islam’s first Qutb. A parallel dynamic appears in the chapter on the Dīwān, where Khadījah’s light is placed beneath ʿĀʾisha’s in a vision, even though the same text elsewhere portrays Khadījah as the ideal spouse of every illumined seeker. Through such assertions and reversals, al-Ibrīz generates controlled paradoxes that reorder authority while maintaining an appearance of harmony.

The dream of the rope, reported in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and reinterpreted in Al-Ibrīz, shifts the tension to a more fundamental question: who is permitted to stand upon the Prophet’s ladder at all: a Companion comes to the Prophet ﷺ describing a canopy dripping ghee and honey, beneath which people gather in varying measures, and a rope stretching from heaven to earth which the Prophet ﷺ climbs, followed by three successive men; the rope then breaks and is reconnected. Abū Bakr interprets the canopy as Islam, the dripping sweetness as the Qurʾān, and the rope as the “truth” upon which the Prophet ﷺ stands, to be held by three successors. The Prophet ﷺ responds that he has interpreted part correctly and part incorrectly. 

Classical Sunnī commentators struggled with the question: in what did Abū Bakr err? Al-Dabbāgh does not limit himself to the question of a single lexical point. Instead, he reconfigures the symbolic universe of the dream itself. For al-Dabbāgh, the rope is not merely the abstract “truth” of which the Prophet ﷺ is an exemplar; it is perfect faith embodied in rulers who fully realize the law in themselves and in their subjects. The rope is connected to the canopy and is the channel through which divine beneficence flows into the world; only those whose rule establishes justice and obedience at that scale can be said to grasp it in the same way. This narrowing of meaning prepares the ground for his most controversial step: the identification of the three ascending figures.

Al-Dabbāgh reports that the Sufi saints themselves are divided into two interpretive parties:

• The Ṣiddīqī party—followers of Abū Bakr, to which he explicitly says his own teachers belong—see the three ascending men as Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and ʿUthmān. In that reading, the breaking and reconnection of the rope allude to the trials surrounding ʿUthmān and his eventual martyrdom.

• Opposed to them stands the Ḥusaynī party, followers of al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (61/680), who maintain that the three figures are noble descendants of the Prophet ﷺ from the House of Prophethood, appearing at the end of time as unifying leaders of the community. The break and reconnection of the rope symbolize cycles of cohesion and fragmentation around these sharifian rulers. This reading does not deny the virtues of the early caliphs, but it displaces them from this particular horizon of prophetic resemblance.

At this juncture, Al-Ibrīz records al-Dabbāgh’s explicit decision: the intended meaning of the dream accords with the second group. The magnitude of the Prophet’s station, he explains,  is such that no one can tread his precise place or ascend his ladder except a prophet or the child of a prophet. Since the rope is one and the mode of ascent identical, the only meaningful “similarity” that can remain between the Prophet ﷺ and the three men is lineage, not degree of faith, which is inimitable. The culmination is striking: al-Dabbāgh concludes that the princes are sharifian rulers, not the first three caliphs, and then adds that he himself belongs to the Ṣiddīqī party—yet “the truth has more right to be spoken.” This self-positioning transforms his choice from sectarian preference into metaphysical necessity.

Placed alongside the earlier distribution of virtues and the Khadījah–ʿĀʾisha paradox, this dream interpretation reveals a layered and unresolved tension within Al-Ibrīz. On one level, the work sustains a recognizably Sunnī architecture. Yet, on another level, the same text advances principles that pull in the opposite direction. By making prophetic station so singular that only prophets or their children can ascend the same rope, al-Dabbāgh implicitly limits the highest form of spiritual succession to the Prophet’s household. By insisting that the dreamer would have recognized Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and ʿUthmān had they been intended, he removes this canonical dream from the range of proofs available for caliphal legitimacy. And by aligning himself with a Ḥusaynī reading against a Ṣiddīqī one, he allows the Sufi metaphysics of inheritance to privilege lineage over the historical order of rule.

Ibn al-Mubārak’s repeated resistance—his debates, objections, and attempts to dislodge al-Dabbāgh from the Ḥusaynī reading—reveals the limits of what the compiler himself was willing to accommodate within the spectrum of acceptable sainthood. The ṭā’ifa al-Ṣiddīqiyya represented his own doctrinal comfort zone: a Sunnī, non-mahdist, non-lineal reading that safeguarded the conventional caliphal hierarchy. The ṭā’ifa al-Ḥusaynīyya, by contrast, carried explosive implications for authority, lineage, and eschatology. His insistent disputation is thus not a rejection of the Ḥusaynī reading as illegitimate—he records it verbatim—but an effort to keep its implications contained. The tension between what Ibn al-Mubārak argues and what he nevertheless preserves in the text exposes the deeper ambivalence of Sufi Sunnism: the compiler strives to safeguard the Ṣiddīqī interpretation, yet the Shaykh’s own “crown of knowledge wrought in pure gold” overrides his objections, compelling the narrative to admit a possibility that his creed instinctively resists.

9. Karāmāt of Presence

Before any disciple gathered at his door, Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh had already established a zāwiya unlike any in Morocco. It did not stand in stone, nor rise on endowments, nor collect seekers into a ritual enclosure. Its architecture was presence itself. Wherever he walked—markets, orchards, alleyways, or the threshold of his modest home—the space around him thickened into a subtle order, a field in which hearts were rearranged before a word was spoken. To witness him was to feel teaching occur without address, as though the saint’s silence carried a curriculum that the built zāwiyas of Fez could only imitate in form. His zāwiya was the world, and the world was rearranged through him.

From this atmosphere of unbounded presence, the logic of his karāmāt becomes almost inevitable. His life does not display miracles; it proceeds by them. In every account preserved by Ibn al-Mubārak and al-Murābiṭī, al-Dabbāgh appears as a figure inscribed by the unseen long before he appears in the streets of Fez: announced in a daylight vision to al-ʿArabī al-Fištālī, named in the world of spirits before birth, and recognized in childhood by saints who discerned in him the unmistakable scent of wilāya. Even his earliest unveiling—when he wore the relics of al-Fištālī—is framed not as an event but as the quiet ignition of a destiny already in motion. The karāmāt that follow are not exceptions to his life; they are its grammar.

From here, the karāmāt unfold along two axes: vertically, as signs of his insertion into the unseen economy of guidance, and horizontally, as interventions that reorder lives, bodies, and destinies across the social fabric of Fez and beyond.

• Seeing Through Walls and Across Distances

Al-Dabbāgh’s kashf first appears as an assault on privacy itself. After Ibn al-Mubārak’s young son died, he consoled his wife at home by quoting another saint. The next morning, al-Dabbāgh received him by reciting, word for word, that private conversation held behind closed doors. Ibn al-Mubārak understood that his own house had become transparent.

Muḥammad ibn Ḥanīnī reports a more elaborate demonstration. In his courtyard, several graves lay unmarked. Al-Dabbāgh identified the exact location of each, distinguished which deceased were awliyāʾ and which were ordinary believers, named the tribal origin of a man buried there three centuries earlier, and described inner states that no one had disclosed.

The same pattern recurs in subtler forms. Al-ʿArabī al-Zibādī once sat silently outside the shaykh’s door in total darkness, without knocking or speaking. Al-Dabbāgh descended and called him by name, knowing not only that someone was there, but exactly who. ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Ṣabbāghī, sitting by the shaykh while he appeared half-asleep, allowed a fleeting evil thought to pass through his mind; al-Dabbāgh opened his eyes, rebuked that momentary khāṭir, and closed them again.

Distance changed nothing. While four days’ journey away from one disciple’s village, al-Dabbāgh accurately described the layout of his house, a hidden mountain pool known only to specialist hunters, the interior states and hidden sins of visitors, the contents of letters before they arrived, and the conditions of relatives in far-off places.

An early “minor opening” prefigures all this. As a teenage worker in the house of al-Ḥājj ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Tāzī, al-Dabbāgh mentioned the death of a man named Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Dilāʾī during the pilgrimage. He wrote the name and the date—Dhū al-Qaʿda 1018—in a notebook and then crossed the entry out, saying, “I wrote nothing.” When the pilgrims returned, they confirmed both the death and its exact timing. The notebook, which al-Ḥājj later showed to others, became a retrospective proof that kashf had already begun working in the life of an illiterate boy.

• Foreknowledge and the Orchestration of Events

  Al-Dabbāgh’s precognition extends from intimate domestic concerns to the movements of the ʿAlawī state. In the realm of family life, he routinely informed disciples of the sex of unborn children, named them before birth, and predicted their destinies. In one famous case, he named a child “Raḥḥāl” (“the Traveler”), adding that the boy would not live long; three years later, Raḥḥāl died, exactly as foretold.

He distinguished with unsettling calm who would die from illness and who would survive, sometimes contradicting the despair of physicians or the false reassurance of relatives. In political affairs, he predicted appointments and dismissals and even the death of a hostile scribe who had threatened one of his followers.

Even mundane economics became a theatre of prophecy. He instructed one disciple to sell his grain on the fifth day of a particular month; that day proved to be the peak of the market. Two days later, heavy rains struck and prices collapsed. He informed another how much butter remained in his pantry from miles away and predicted precisely when it would run out—at which moment a stranger knocked on the door bringing butter “for the sake of God.”

Most consequentially, he mapped out the eschatological futures of his companions. To those who loved him sincerely, he promised that they would not die outside Islam. For some he guaranteed specific spiritual openings; for others he pledged protection at death, in the grave, and on the Day of Resurrection—spanning the three thresholds most feared in Islamic imagination.

• Bilocation and Elastic Presence

Some of the most striking reports concern a presence that refuses to be confined to one body or one place.

Ibn al-Mubārak noticed that the scent of cloves, which al-Dabbāgh chewed for a chest ailment, would suddenly appear in his own house at night, though the doors were locked and the shaykh lived two miles away. When he asked, “Are you present with us?” al-Dabbāgh replied simply, “Yes,” and later added: “I do not leave you, night or day. Hold me accountable before God if I do not attend to you five hundred times in a single hour.”

On another night, after the shaykh had warned, “I will come to you tonight—be ready,” Ibn al-Mubārak, hovering between sleep and waking, saw him enter, took his hand, kissed it and then his head, and watched him vanish.

For Muḥammad al-Tawātī, the experience was more cinematic. After repeated attempts to visit the shaykh without finding him at home, he lay one night in total darkness, silently lamenting his failed efforts. The wall facing the qibla split open, light poured in, and al-Dabbāgh walked bodily into the room, crossed the floor, descended the stairs—his footsteps audibly striking each step—and departed. The next day, when al-Tawātī finally met him at the door, the shaykh laughed: “Since you saw me, why did you not speak?”

His younger brother ʿAlī spent a night with him in the narrow rooftop ṣuqallābiyya. As the darkness deepened, al-Dabbāgh’s form expanded until it filled the room from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, nearly driving ʿAlī to madness. Only when the shaykh placed a hand on his back and said, “What troubles you? I am your brother,” did the terror recede.

Muḥammad ibn Ḥanīnī also saw him appear suddenly behind a pillar in the zāwiya of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Fāsī. When asked how long he had been there, al-Dabbāgh replied, “Since you began reciting such-and-such dhikr,” a formula that Ibn Ḥanīnī had been repeating silently in his own heart.

Taken together, these accounts present not a magician but a being whose relationship to materiality is unusually fluid—able to dilate his form, erase distances, and step across thresholds of visibility as easily as others cross a street.

• Safeguarding Death, Honor, and Survival

In a world marked by plague, violent politics, and fragile security, al-Dabbāgh’s most coveted karāmāt were those that secured what his disciples feared most: a bad death, public disgrace, or sudden ruin.

His pledge that loving disciples would not die outside Islam receives a concrete illustration in the death of ʿAlī al-Ṣabbāghī. As ʿAlī lay dying upstairs in the shaykh’s house, al-Dabbāgh, sitting in another room, suddenly declared: “ʿAlī has just seen the Prophet and Abū Bakr.” When the others rushed to him, they found ʿAlī speechless but nodding, his face luminous, smiling until his last breath. Later, the shaykh commented that had ʿAlī remained in his village for ninety years, he would not have died in such a state.

Other interventions are preventive. ʿAbd Allāh al-Jarrāwī, on the verge of adultery after being lured into a woman’s house, silently invoked the shaykh. Two mysterious horsemen appeared outside; one called to the other, “Forget the darkness!” The woman heard the words, panicked, and fled; ʿAbd Allāh escaped. Ashamed, he avoided visiting al-Dabbāgh, who later found him and said gently, “What troubles you, my son? You did nothing.” Comparing him to a beloved child who soils himself, the shaykh added: “Do you not simply wash the child? So it is with you—and you did not even soil yourself.”

Travel also exposed disciples to danger. While journeying without provisions, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sharqī and his companions were encircled by bandits. An enormous Atlas lion appeared, pacing the perimeter and preventing attack from every side. The thieves, convinced the group was under supernatural protection, withdrew. Later, al-Dabbāgh described the episode in detail, including the lion’s irritation at a rabbit and its casual killing of the animal “like a man brushing away a fly”—a sign that the beast was operating as an extension of his will.

Ibrāhīm al-Zurrārī, trapped in a cave when boulders collapsed and blocked the entrance, invoked al-Dabbāgh in desperation; a narrow opening suddenly appeared, just wide enough for escape.

In the political sphere, the shaykh’s protection countered the arbitrary violence of the ʿAlawī court. When al-ʿArabī al-Zibādī faced arrest, torture, and possible execution in a commercial dispute involving a powerful scribe, al-Dabbāgh told him: “You will be imprisoned, but you will not die.” Events unfolded exactly as predicted: prison without death, and eventual release. When the sultan later demanded that Ibn al-Mubārak serve as imam in a distant mosque in Meknès—an order that could easily become exile or worse—al-Dabbāgh assured him: “If you go, we go with you. But this will not happen.” Trusting the shaykh, Ibn al-Mubārak stayed in Fez; the matter dissolved without consequence.

• Bread, Butter, and Rain: The Economy of Baraka

Al-Dabbāgh’s karāmāt of provision reveal a theology in which divine care is woven directly into the daily economics of his community.

On several occasions, he fed crowds from quantities that should have sufficed only for a handful. Twenty-two men once ate to satiety from five loaves of bread, leaving leftovers. In another instance, a pot of food prepared for his small circle managed to feed an entire town and visiting Bedouins in waves; each group ate its fill before departing, and still food remained. When ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sharqī worried that a single lamb prepared for four people could not feed twenty, al-Dabbāgh simply pronounced the basmala, took three bites, and sent it out; everyone ate abundantly.

Provision also arrived with uncanny timing. After Muḥammad ibn Ḥanīnī donated all his butter to the shaykh, keeping only enough for a fixed period, the supply ended exactly when predicted—and at that moment a stranger appeared at his door with fresh butter “for God’s sake.”

The grain market became another site of baraka-guided calculation. At al-Dabbāgh’s instruction, one disciple held his wheat until a specific day, then sold at the height of prices; heavy rains two days later ruined the harvest and crashed the market. When ʿAlī al-Ṣabbāghī traveled without provisions, the shaykh led him at night to a hidden pile of unthreshed grain beside a spring, precisely when hunger pressed hardest. They compensated the owner generously; he in turn joined their circle, his livelihood and loyalty both reoriented by the encounter.

These episodes do not present the saint as a magician who conjures food from nothing, but as the focal point through which divine provision is timed, multiplied, and redistributed in a precarious economy.

• Elements, Beasts, and the Unseen Realms

Some karāmāt dramatize mastery over the elements themselves. On a visit to the shrine of ʿAbd al-Salām ibn Mashīsh, al-Dabbāgh insisted on an immediate descent from the mountain despite the late hour. They reached Tétouan at dawn just as torrential rain began. Later, standing on a rooftop, he revealed that he had seen the storm approaching when they were still at Ibn Mashīsh’s sanctuary: had it caught them in the exposed passes with no food or shelter, the outcome would have been disastrous. On their departure, rain still lashed the town, but after a short distance the clouds opened and the sun emerged, as if the weather itself obeyed a spiritual timetable.

The Atlas lion that guarded ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s party from bandits likewise appears as a conscious actor enlisted in the saint’s service—a non-human agent in the moral economy of protection.

Other beings belong more explicitly to the unseen. On one occasion, al-Dabbāgh’s wife, pregnant and exhausted by housework, wished aloud not to bear another child. He had warned her never to uncover her face while sleeping for fear she might see something unbearable. One night she disobeyed and awoke to find three luminous figures in the room. The shock was so severe that she miscarried. Later, al-Dabbāgh explained the incident without drama: those “men of the unseen” were part of the spiritual environment around him; her vision, fear, and miscarriage unfolded within that charged field.

The most theologically daring account concerns a soul under punishment in barzakh. After Friday prayer, al-Dabbāgh told Ibn al-Mubārak that they had just passed the place where someone was being tortured. Later he described the scene: a gigantic bodily form stretching toward Mount Zalagh, bound in chains, surrounded by angels inflicting torment. The shaykh then mimed a gesture as if extinguishing something and said that the punishment had ceased. The soul, he later explained, was a corrupt scribe. When asked when this occurred, he replied: “At the very moment I told you,” adding that he had initially concealed the timing because their relationship was still young and he feared being disbelieved.

Even the threshold between life and death could be bent. While traveling, al-Dabbāgh told ʿAlī al-Ṣabbāghī that his wife had died. Seeing ʿAlī’s grief, he asked, “How much will you give me if I tell you she is alive?” When ʿAlī offered his horse, the shaykh replied, “I give you good news—she lives.” Upon returning home, ʿAlī learned that she had indeed stopped breathing and been declared dead—but then, inexplicably, revived. The horse was duly given. Here the miracle lies precisely at the edge: not raising a long-dead body, but pulling a departing soul back across the threshold.

• Unbearable Light and the Edge of Perception

For some witnesses, the greatest karāma was not deliverance but exposure to an intensity of presence that nearly broke them.

When Khalīfa ibn Abī Zayyān first came to the shaykh’s house, he did not find a seated man but a column of pure light—an upright radiance without visible limbs or features—speaking to him for nearly an hour before condensing into the familiar human form of al-Dabbāgh. The lesson was unmistakable: true recognition begins in the unseen and only later stabilizes as a face.

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sharqī, longing to see the Prophet ﷺ, was told by al-Dabbāgh, “You cannot bear such a vision.” When he insisted he preferred death to being denied, his wish was granted. That night, a blinding light flooded his room, not as comfort but as annihilating terror. He fled toward the shaykh, who appeared within the radiance as a point of refuge. The next day, al-Dabbāgh’s remark—“I told you that you could not bear it. God was gentle with you”—reframed the experience: even mercy requires mediation, or it overwhelms.

ʿAlī’s experience in the rooftop room, where his brother’s form grew until it filled every corner, belongs to the same family of events. So too does the shock of the pregnant wife at the sight of the three luminous figures. In each case, the problem is not lack of proof but excess of reality—the human nervous system simply cannot absorb what it has been given to see.

• Pedagogy Through Miracle

Finally, al-Dabbāgh’s karāmāt must be read as a curriculum. Miracles are not decorative; they are the medium of formation.

Ibn al-Mubārak’s attachments to his first two wives, both from the same family, were broken through a sequence of deaths that he retrospectively understood as part of his training. After the second died, al-Dabbāgh said to him: “How long will you go on loving them? God has moved them from this world to His mercy, from the grave to barzakh—to what further place must He move them before they leave your heart?” The sentence “washed their love” from his heart, and the third wife from the same household never occupied him in the same way.

When a jurist complained of obsessive doubt, the shaykh reframed the issue: doubt, he said, comes from not knowing the path. One who wanders toward a city without a map is tormented by conflicting suggestions; one who knows the road walks calmly. “The path to this world and the next is God Himself,” he said. Ibn al-Mubārak reports that from that day, whenever his mind strayed toward worldly concerns, a force pulled it back toward God. The miracle was not in the phrase but in the new mental reflex implanted by it.

With Muḥammad ibn Ḥanīnī, the shaykh used memory itself as a training ground. He teasingly asked if Muḥammad had committed a particular minor sin. After three denials, he asked a fourth time; suddenly Muḥammad remembered doing the act fifteen years earlier in a distant city. Ashamed, he confessed. Al-Dabbāgh then enumerated other long-forgotten misdeeds. “From where do you think I have this?” he asked. “Does anything hide from God—or from those to whom He discloses His secrets?” The point was not humiliation but permanent installation of murāqaba: once the disciple knows nothing can be hidden, his own gaze upon himself changes.

The miscarriage of his wife, precipitated by her vision of the men of the unseen after she had wished not to bear another child, works similarly at the edge of ethics and metaphysics. It is not presented as punishment, nor as random tragedy, but as an event in which desire, warning, disobedience, and exposure to the unseen intersect. Those living near the saint had to accept that their lives were drawn into a more volatile field.

• Dar al-Sirr: Where the Unseen Takes Form

Taken together, these karāmāt do not appear as scattered marvels but as a coherent world of meaning—a landscape where divine reality becomes visible through the life of a single man. For his disciples, al-Dabbāgh’s existence was not accompanied by miracles; it was structured by them, beginning with his prophetically signaled naming before birth and extending through his fluid presence in their daily lives and even after death.

What these accounts describe is a cosmos where boundaries soften: the seen opens onto the unseen, perception exceeds the body, matter responds to sanctified intention, death becomes transition rather than end, and knowledge arrives through unveiling, not study. His followers did not debate these possibilities—they lived inside them, shaped their choices by them, and entrusted their salvation to them.

The karāmāt answered every human need. They affirmed knowledge beyond books, provided sustenance in scarcity, diffused political threats, knit communities in trust, gave suffering a horizon of purpose, and transformed death into an encounter held by mercy.

What distinguishes Al-Ibrīz is the boldness of its claim. Al-Dabbāgh is not merely a worker of wonders; he becomes a statement about knowledge itself—that truth may descend through an unlettered craftsman, that light can outrun lineage, that certainty does not require institutional scaffolding.

Such claims inevitably press against theological boundaries. By approaching prophetic functions—unveiling the unseen, intervening in barzakh, multiplying provisions, commanding nature—the saint stretches categories meant to contain him. But this is precisely the Sufi wager: the walī is the threshold where limits thin, where what is normally impossible becomes simply how mercy behaves.

Seen in this way, “the house of al-Dabbāgh”—both his modest dwelling in Fez and the textual house of Al-Ibrīz—becomes a Dar al-Sirr, a House of Secret where the unseen takes form in gesture, dream, protection, provision, and presence. For the modern reader, these narratives call for two dispositions: critical distance, to understand how such stories establish spiritual authority; and imaginative sympathy, to sense why his disciples believed that in a violent and uncertain world, divine care had chosen to flow—quietly, unforced, unmistakably—through this luminous man.

10. Everyday Sanctity

To speak of al-Dabbāgh’s karāmāt is to speak also of the civilization that produced him. His miracles unfolded not in the abstract space of metaphysics, but in the embodied world of Moroccan life. This civilization, with all its refinement, humility, beauty, and discipline, was not the setting of his sanctity—it was one of its sources.

His charisma was not an abstract force detached from daily life; it was embosdied in a cultural landscape defined by art, craft, clothing, civility, and the sensory language of Fez. The saint emerges in the sources not as an ethereal figure suspended above society, but as a man anchored in the textures of Moroccan lifestyle.

His dress—burnous, jellaba, and shashiya—was not incidental. These garments expressed a refined urban ethos that balanced modesty with ancestral dignity. They signalled a spirituality embedded in the lived world, not withdrawn from it. Across Fez, a man marked by such garments was recognized instantly as someone who belonged to the old moral aristocracy: the world of the zāwiyas, the craft guilds, and the scholarly families. Al-Dabbāgh fit this world instinctively, embodying a style in which the outward comportment of the body served as an ethical extension of the inner state.

The wider setting of Fez is inseparable from the saint’s identity. This city, with its zellige-lined walls, narrow alleys, and complex social hierarchies, served as the spiritual ecology in which his charisma took recognizable form. Fez was a place where crafts were moral disciplines, where scholarly authority and saintly charisma often overlapped, and where lineage, comportment, and knowledge shaped public reputation. Al-Dabbāgh was a craftsman by trade, and this background gave his spirituality a grounded, artisanal texture: a respect for detail, a discipline of the hand, and an instinct for humility.

His path between Fez, Jabal al-ʿĀlam, and Taza traced a uniquely Moroccan sacred geography, binding the medina to the highland sanctuaries and the far-eastern edge of the realm. Across this terrain, his baraka left a visible trace: whether feeding dozens in the small rooms of his Fez home or, as in Taza, multiplying a simple morning meal until waves of townspeople and tribesmen ate their fill while the food miraculously remained.

Beyond the visual and spatial elements, al-Dabbāgh’s style of interaction marked him as a product of deeply rooted Moroccan civility.

His humility before makhzen officials reflects a cultural intelligence rather than submission. When he addressed commanders or administrators, he did so with the language of a man who understood the unwritten codes of his society. Moroccan sainthood has long lived at the creative intersection of the spiritual and the political—never confronting authority directly, yet subtly shaping its moral horizon. Al-Dabbāgh represents this tradition at its most refined: a saint who moved quietly within the structures of power, yet whose hidden influence was later remembered as decisive.

His daily habits further reveal a human portrait drawn from the details of Moroccan life. He read books through spectacles—a detail that immediately cuts through the stereotype of the “illiterate saint,” and instead situates him in the learned urban culture of Fez where books circulated, were read aloud, and were discussed across social classes. He treated workers generously, fed them from his own meals, and gave them more than their agreed wage. He wept with his family during moments of emotional strain.

His tarbiya operated through an intimacy so disarming that his disciples felt sheltered inside his very presence. He carried their worries before they named them, shouldered their fears in both religion and worldly life, and promised to answer for their missteps on the Day of Judgment. Nothing, he insisted, should be hidden—not sins, not doubts—because true companionship cannot survive secrecy. In return, he unveiled his own inner states with radical honesty, convinced that concealing them would be a betrayal of trust.

His style dissolved hierarchy. He joked with his disciples, removed the stiffness of reverence, and urged them to treat him as a brother rather than a distant master. Yet his protection was fierce: he intercepted temptations, redirected dangers, and sometimes manifested in moments of crisis with the suddenness of a guardian spirit. Even his playful tests—like confronting a disciple with a visiting saint in the form of a lion—became lessons in courage and reliance.

Among the most telling of his shamāʾil was his practiced simplicity. His subḥa hung in the entry of his home; he sat on the threshold of his house conversing with companions; he walked austere markets arm-in-arm with scholars, and he pruned the trees of his small orchard while responding to questions about cosmology, prophecy, and the Last Day. These details reveal the full humanity of the saint: grounded, accessible, and unmistakably Moroccan.

11. The Three Economies of Inheritance

The transmission of saintly authority does not follow a single logic. It articulates itself across multiple registers—biological, initiatic, institutional—each governed by distinct mechanisms of legitimation, temporality, and spatial organization. In the case of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh, these registers operated simultaneously but not identically, producing what might be termed a tripartite economy of inheritance: (1) the genealogical mode, in which prophetic descent and material relics constitute the infrastructure of transmitted baraka; (2) the initiatic mode, in which direct encounter with the master's presence generates a localized elite of ʿārifūn bound by mutual unveiling rather than institutional form; and (3) the institutional mode, in which formalized ṭuruq standardize transmission through ritual, text, and chains of authorization (silsila) capable of reproducing themselves across vast geographic and temporal distances. Each mode operates according to its own internal coherence, yet the three remain structurally interdependent: the household provides legitimacy through prophetic lineage; the initiatic circle provides spiritual depth through direct kashf; the institutional network provides scale through organizational replication. To map al-Dabbāgh's legacy is thus to trace not one trajectory but three overlapping and occasionally competing systems of spiritual capital accumulation.

• The Genealogical Mode

The immediate custodians of al-Dabbāgh's sanctity were not his disciples but his descendants—those who inherited not gnosis but nasab, and with it the material substrate through which baraka could be accessed across generations. This inheritance was irreducibly physical. It comprised, first, the sacred objects that had catalyzed al-Dabbāgh's own spiritual awakening: the red tarbūsh and balgha of Aḥmad al-Fashtālī, the artifacts whose placement upon the fourteen-year-old ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz's head had triggered his inaugural fatḥ. These were not relics in the passive sense—remnants of a departed sanctity—but active concentrations of transformative power. To inherit al-Fashtālī's tarbūsh was to inherit the capacity to reproduce in others what it had produced in al-Dabbāgh himself. The family's guardianship of these items thus constituted a form of sacramental stewardship: they maintained physical access to the originary moment of unveiling, preserving in material form the possibility of transmission across time.

Alongside these objects, the household inherited al-Dabbāgh's textual estate: manuscripts containing his awrād, theological responses, and—most critically—the materials shaped by Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak into al-Ibrīz. The relationship between manuscript and baraka here is not incidental. In the Islamic sciences, the autograph manuscript carries a dignity and authority distinct from later copies; it is understood as bearing a trace of the author's presence, a material connection to the hand that wrote and the mind that conceived. To possess al-Dabbāgh's writings in their original form was thus to possess a dimension of his ḥaḍra. The family's archival function was therefore also priestly: they guarded the textual vehicles through which al-Dabbāgh's cosmology could be accessed by those outside the circle of direct discipleship.

Yet the genealogical mode of inheritance extends beyond objects and texts to encompass the biological reproduction of sanctity itself. The progeny of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh stood at the intersection of bloodline and baraka, navigating the complex terrain where prophetic descent meets individual charisma. Although only two of his sons survived to maturity—ʿUmar and Idrīs—the extended Dabbāgh kinship network was substantial: brothers, cousins, collateral branches whose Andalusian ancestors had settled in Fez generations prior. Their descendants dispersed throughout the city's quarters, establishing a comprehensive web of familial connections that preserved the saint's memory and transmitted his spiritual legacy well beyond the immediate post-mortem period.

This dispersal, however, was not random but strategic, following the structural logic of Fāsī urban society, where families of sharīfian descent positioned themselves within the city's neighborhoods, mosques, and scholarly circles to maintain both social visibility and spiritual influence. The Dabbāgh family's distribution across Fez's quarters created a decentralized network of baraka that functioned without formal institutional architecture, relying instead on kinship ties, shared memory, and the ongoing charisma of the family name. This pattern reveals a crucial dimension of how sanctity operates in urban Islamic contexts: it is not confined to shrines or zāwāyā but radiates through kinship networks that occupy strategic nodes within the social fabric.

The direct patrilineal line, however, maintained a distinctive spiritual density that set it apart from collateral branches. Idrīs carried forward the principal genealogical sequence, from which emerged ʿUmar ibn Muḥammad—the prominent khaṭīb of Masjid al-Dīwān and a companion (ṣāḥib) of Aḥmad al-Tijānī (d. 1230/1815). This connection positioned the Dabbāgh lineage within one of the most rapidly expanding Sufi orders of the nineteenth century, creating a spiritual alliance that extended the family's influence far beyond Fez into the Saharan and West African networks that the Tijāniyya was consolidating. ʿUmar ibn Muḥammad's marriage to the daughter of the poet Ḥamdūn ibn al-Ḥājj al-Sulamī (d. 1232/1816) further embedded him within Fez's literary and scholarly elite, demonstrating how the Dabbāgh lineage maintained its position through calculated matrimonial alliances that linked spiritual capital to cultural and intellectual prestige. The pattern suggests deliberate strategy: the family leveraged its ancestral sanctity to secure positions within established institutions while simultaneously preserving the memory of their ancestor's radical independence from those same structures.

The most significant figure in this genealogical sequence was Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar (d. 1285/1868), who achieved renown as a malāmatī practitioner in Fez—a spiritual orientation that deliberately cultivated hiddenness, austerity, and the concealment of extraordinary states beneath ordinary appearance. His spiritual profile reveals a deliberate cultivation of the paradoxes that had defined his great-grandfather's sanctity: he was simultaneously visible and hidden, socially integrated yet spiritually withdrawn, genealogically privileged yet ascetically rigorous. Contemporary accounts describe him as possessing extraordinary spiritual states and commanding deep popular devotion, suggesting that his charisma operated independently of institutional validation.

His intensive devotional practice—abundant awrād and adhkār—mirrored the discipline of his great-grandfather, while his generosity and willingness to endure personal deprivation recalled early accounts of Dabbāgh's humble circumstances. Students attributed to him the transmission of esoteric divine names (al-asmāʾ al-bāṭiniyya) and spiritual secrets (asrār) allegedly derived from direct encounters with al-Khiḍr, positioning him not merely as biological heir but as spiritual replicant of his great-grandfather's Khiḍrian initiation. This claim is structurally crucial: it suggests that the founding charisma could be reproduced across generations not through institutional mechanisms but through the convergence of proper genealogical and spiritual conditions—that wirātha Muḥammadiyya flowed through blood and comportment simultaneously.

Yet Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar's authority remained deeply contested, as evidenced by the most dramatic public episode associated with him: his announcement of the death of Shamharūsh al-Jinnī, a legendary jinn believed to be a companion of the Prophet ﷺ, and his organization of a funeral procession to a site outside Bāb al-Sharīʿa. The incident divided Fez's population into two camps: those who possessed faith in him (man lahu iʿtiqād fīhi) attended and reportedly heard the trembling (rajja) of the assembled jinn; those who lacked such faith dismissed the entire affair as superstition (khurāfāt).

This episode reveals the structural instability of charismatic authority in nineteenth-century Fez. Even a figure descended from one of the city's most celebrated saints, transmitting his ancestor's wird and claiming Khiḍrian knowledge, could not command universal recognition. His authority depended entirely on the subjective faith of his audience—a faith that the scholarly establishment, represented by the cautious phrasing of Sukayrij ("God knows best the truth of the matter"), was unwilling to either fully endorse or categorically reject. The incident demonstrates that Dabbāgh baraka, despite its textual consecration in al-Ibrīz and its genealogical perpetuation, remained vulnerable to skepticism precisely because it claimed access to domains (the world of jinn, direct Khiḍrian instruction) that exceeded the epistemological boundaries of conventional Mālikī scholarship.

The consolidation of this contested spiritual inheritance reached its apex in al-Ḥabīb ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar (d. 1326/1908), whose life and transmission activities reveal the mechanics of baraka preservation in late nineteenth-century Fez. What distinguished al-Ḥabīb was not merely genealogical proximity to the founding saint but his function as a dār al-silsila—a living repository of multiple chains of transmission that converged in his person. He transmitted the original Dabbāghid wird, Khiḍrian remembrances, esoteric divine names, and formal licenses (ijāzāt) in widely circulated devotional texts like Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, effectively consolidating diverse streams of spiritual authority into a single biographical node.

The transmission pattern he represented was deliberately multi-layered: the family wird and esoteric knowledge followed the direct patrilineal chain (al-Ḥabīb from his father Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar, from ʿUmar, from Idrīs, from Abū Fāris ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz), while formal scholarly texts like Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt required separate chains connecting him to recognized scholarly authorities. This dual structure allowed the family to maintain its charismatic distinctiveness while simultaneously participating in broader networks of scholarly transmission that conferred institutional legitimacy. His disciple ʿAbd al-Ḥafīẓ ibn al-Ṭāhir al-Fāsī al-Fihrī's description emphasizes his embodiment of Fāsī spiritual aristocracy: he was venerated yet withdrawn, served yet generous, socially elevated yet deliberately distant from ordinary social interaction. This malāmatī comportment replicated the structural position of his great-grandfather, who had likewise operated outside institutional frameworks while commanding institutional respect.

Yet the patrilineal chain, however spiritually dense, represents only one vector of Dabbāgh baraka's transmission. Parallel to these male-line descendants operated an equally significant channel through Dabbāgh's daughter Lalla Fāṭima, whose grandson—al-Sharīf Ḥamīd—played a pivotal role in redirecting the course of Moroccan Sufism. Ḥamīd's significance lies not in his own spiritual attainments but in his function as a hinge figure who connected Dabbāgh's legacy to the most transformative Sufi movement of the late eighteenth century. When the young ʿArabī al-Darqāwī (d. 1239/1823) sought spiritual guidance, it was Ḥamīd who directed him toward ʿAlī al-Jamāl (d. 1192/1778), the master who would initiate him into the Shādhilī-Jazūlī path and set in motion the emergence of the Darqāwiyya ṭarīqa.

This seemingly minor act of guidance had profound structural consequences. The Darqāwiyya would become one of the most influential Sufi orders in nineteenth-century Morocco, spawning numerous branches and reshaping the religious landscape from the Atlas Mountains to the Sahara. Through Ḥamīd, Dabbāgh's baraka entered the Darqāwiyya network not as institutional affiliation but as genealogical substrate—an invisible current of sharīfian sanctity flowing beneath the formal silsila of the order. This matrilineal transmission pattern reveals a crucial dimension of how baraka circulated in Moroccan society: women, while excluded from most formal chains of spiritual authority, functioned as essential conduits through which sanctity passed between male lineages, creating alliances and transmissions that the patrilineal system alone could not achieve. Lalla Fāṭima's son thus became a bridge between two models of spiritual authority: the deterritorialized, Khiḍrian, and textually consecrated charisma of al-Dabbāgh, and the highly organized, disciple-dense, reform-oriented structure of the Darqāwiyya.

• The Initiatic Mode

Beyond the household lay a second circle of inheritance—neither genealogical nor institutional, but initiatic: a community of intimates bound not by blood or organizational charter but by direct encounter with al-Dabbāgh's living presence and the radical transformation it enacted. This circle constitutes what might be termed the first-generation charismatic community: those who absorbed not lineage but sirr, and whose relationship to the master was governed not by kinship structures or bureaucratic hierarchies but by the paradoxical dynamics of spiritual companionship (ṣuḥba).

The sociological character of this community is remarkable. Al-Dabbāgh maintained no formal zāwiya; his companions gathered intermittently—sometimes in his home, sometimes at its threshold, sometimes on its roof, sometimes at his rural property in the village of Sīdī Ḥarāzim. As Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Murābiṭī notes in Taysīr al-Mawāhib, "Most of his companions were students and fuqahāʾ, some of whom became renowned among elite and commoners alike for goodness and righteousness (ṣalāḥ al-ḥāl). Their opposition to those who merely claimed affiliation with the people of the Path (ahl al-ṭarīq), and their intense scrutiny (shiddat baḥthihim) in pursuit of authentic truth (al-ḥaqq al-ḥaqīq), are well known."

The community was marked, in other words, by three structural features: (1) refusal of institutional formalization, (2) composition from the scholarly class rather than from marginalized or illiterate populations, and (3) a polemical stance toward what it perceived as false or diluted Sufism. This last feature is particularly significant. Al-Dabbāgh's circle did not position itself as one ṭarīqa among others but as a critique of the very category of ṭarīqa—a community organized around the principle that authentic kashf requires no organizational apparatus, no inherited liturgy, no genealogical chain beyond direct access to prophetic presence. The polemic was not against Sufism per se but against its institutionalization, its routinization, its reduction to transmitted forms.

Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak occupies a unique position within this constellation. His function was neither that of successor (khalīfa) in the administrative sense nor that of spiritual pole, but rather that of witness (shāhid) and scribe (kātib). Ibn al-Mubārak's al-Ibrīz is not hagiography in the conventional sense—it does not narrate the saint's life chronologically, does not enumerate miracles to prove sanctity, does not situate him within dynastic or institutional genealogies. Instead, it is an extended act of shahāda (testimony), in which the author positions himself as the guarantee of al-Dabbāgh's speech. The text's authority derives not from Ibn al-Mubārak's own sanctity but from the precision and honesty of his witnessing.

Yet this witnessing is not neutral reportage. Ibn al-Mubārak records not only al-Dabbāgh's cosmological teachings but the phenomenology of the master-disciple relationship itself—its affective structure, its ethical demands, its moments of crisis and disclosure. The relational architecture he describes is one of radical transparency and mutual vulnerability. Al-Dabbāgh instructs his companions:

“Do not conceal from me anything—not your worldly affairs, nor your religious concerns. Inform me even of your sins (maʿāṣī)! If you do not tell me, I will tell you. There is no good in a ṣuḥba in which things are hidden between the companions.”

This demand for disclosure is reciprocal. The shaykh declares: "As for me, I conceal nothing from you." He then proceeds to narrate his entire spiritual autobiography, including transgressions and struggles, concluding:

“If I do not inform you and disclose my states to you, then God will punish me and hold me accountable, because you think well of me. So be patient until I mention the internal matters you have not witnessed. Then whoever wishes to remain with me may remain—and it will be lawful (ḥalāl) for me to eat his food and accept his gift. And whoever wishes to depart may depart. My silence about these matters would be a betrayal (ghashsh) of you.”

The structure being articulated here transcends conventional pedagogy. It is a covenant of mutual exposure in which the master's authority derives not from distance but from proximity, not from concealment but from radical disclosure. The traditional asymmetry of the master-disciple relationship is preserved (the master still possesses knowledge the disciple lacks) but it is traversed by an ethical demand for transparency that operates in both directions. The master must disclose his flaws so that the disciple's devotion is based on full knowledge rather than idealization; the disciple must disclose his sins so that the master can assume responsibility for them.

This last point is crucial. Al-Dabbāgh's most extraordinary claim concerns his willingness to bear his disciples' spiritual liabilities. When Ibn al-Mubārak complains of a matter threatening both his worldly standing and his religious state, al-Dabbāgh responds: "As for this world, fear nothing—no harm will come to you from this. As for the afterlife, I take responsibility for you before God (atakaffal laka ʿalā Allāh) that you will not be questioned about this matter, nor held accountable for it."

The verb takaffala here is juridical—it denotes the assumption of a debt, the acceptance of surety. Al-Dabbāgh is claiming the capacity to assume his disciple's eschatological burden, to intercede not merely through prayer but through ontological substitution. This is neither metaphor nor hyperbole; it is a theological claim about the saint's function as mediator between the individual soul and divine judgment. The master's statement, "A man who does not share in his companion's sayyiʾāt is no companion at all," articulates a theology of companionship that inverts conventional hierarchies. The relationship is not purely asymmetrical (master/disciple) but covenantal (companion/companion), even as the master retains the capacity to absolve and intercede.

Al-Dabbāgh's insistence on this point is structural rather than sentimental. He declares:

“Do not place me in the position of shaykh! I am like a brother to you! The protocols of the shaykh-disciple relationship (ādāb maqām al-shaykh) are burdens you cannot bear, so I release you from them (usammīḥukum). Treat me as a brother, and our ṣuḥba will endure!”

The paradox is deliberate: he who possesses supreme spiritual authority renounces its formal markers in order to maximize intimacy and durability of relationship. The result is a form of spiritual community that operates beneath or beyond institautional structure—bound not by rule or hierarchy but by shared experience of unveiling and the mutual assumption of risk that such exposure entails.

Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Ḥanīnī al-Zurārī (d. 1149/1736) was designated by al-Dabbāgh himself as the khalīfa (successor) through whom the function of ghawthiyya would continue after the master's death. The designation was explicit and ontologically absolute: “When I die, whoever is able to see you—then you are me (idhā anā mittu, fa-man amkanahu an yarāka; fa-anta anā).”

The formulation is not metaphorical substitution but identificatory collapse: the successor does not merely represent the master but is the master in a mode of extended presence. This is the logic of khilāfa at its most radical—not delegation of authority but continuation of identity.

Ibn Ḥanīnī's custodianship of al-Dabbāgh's death rituals confirms this status. He washed, shrouded, prayed over, and buried the shaykh, having been informed beforehand of the exact location of the grave. This knowledge—of where the body would lie before the body arrived—marks him as inheritor not only of spiritual authority but of prophetic foreknowledge. The delegation of these ritual functions is not incidental. In Islamic eschatology, the one who washes the dead inherits a portion of their sanctity; the ritual contact with the corpse effects a transfer of baraka. Ibn Ḥanīnī's performance of these rites thus enacts, in liturgical form, the transmission of spiritual authority from master to successor.

The poetry composed in his honor by Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Tāzī articulates the theological stakes of this succession with precision:

O seeker of love and passion,
O companion of inquiry pursued with diligence—
The men of God, their radiance has not ceased;
they are like stars illuminating darkness.
If you wish to tread their sanctuary
and seize them with the grasp of the resolute,
Then journey at night while darkness covers you,
and aim for the light—the light of the one who advances.
Turn to Muḥammad ibn Ḥanīnī and you will find
our shaykh, who gathered the powers of the Imam (qiwā al-imām).
You will find all the prey in the belly
of the lion of beasts, O seeker of game.
An imam, a gnostic of God, pure (barrā),
a high-minded one, inheritor of the Imam's secret (wārith sirr al-imām).

The central claim—"Turn to Muḥammad ibn Ḥanīnī and you will find our shaykh"—is not comparative (Ibn Ḥanīnī resembles al-Dabbāgh) but identificatory (in Ibn Ḥanīnī, one encounters al-Dabbāgh himself). The poet warns those who deny this:

You have disputed your Lord over His decree (qaḍāʾ)
and fought Him, though God is vengeful (dhū intiqām).

To reject Ibn Ḥanīnī's succession is thus to reject divine predestination itself. The succession is not merely a human appointment but a cosmic necessity, a dimension of God's eternal will.

Al-Murābiṭī reinforces this in his own panegyric:

The quarters have been perfumed by Muḥammad,
son of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanīnī—most fragrant of perfumes (adhkā tārij).
His spiritual stations ascended to the heights of the foremost ones,
like the sun following a radiant dawn (ka-l-shams taʿqib ḍawʾ ṣubḥ ablaj).

The solar metaphor is structurally significant: Ibn Ḥanīnī is not a replacement for al-Dabbāgh (as night replaces day) but a continuation (as the sun follows dawn). The light is uninterrupted; only its vessel changes.

Ibn Ḥanīnī's own preserved teachings, transmitted through al-Murābiṭī, demonstrate the depth of gnosis he inherited. In one remarkable passage, he explicates al-Dabbāgh's doctrine of the invisible forces (jund) attached to every human being from conception—luminous beings (dhawāt munīra) from the ranks of paradise and dark beings (dhawāt muẓlima) from the fire, each striving to draw the soul toward its respective abode. These forces, Ibn Ḥanīnī explains, are not merely metaphorical inclinations but actual ontological entities whose strengthening or weakening determines salvation or damnation.

When the luminous forces prevail entirely and the dark forces die, the person's earthly life ends, for there is no further spiritual work to accomplish. Conversely, when dark forces predominate, they actively assist the individual in sinful endeavors precisely to accelerate his descent into perdition. This is why, Ibn Ḥanīnī notes, the acts of the damned often "succeed" (yanjuḥ amruhu) in worldly terms—the dark jund facilitate their apparent victories to ensure their ultimate ruin.

The teaching is paradigmatically Dabbāghī: it renders soteriology as cosmological warfare, transforms moral choice into ontological struggle, and recasts death as the terminus of a spiritual labor that began before birth. That Ibn Ḥanīnī transmits this with the authority of one who sees these realities directly (mushāhada) confirms his status as inheritor of al-Dabbāgh's gnoses.

Khalīfa ibn Abī Zayyān represents a different modality of elite discipleship. Al-Dabbāgh prayed that he would inherit the quṭbāniyya in the manner of Yaḥyā al-Jarīdī—the saint who, in al-Dabbāgh's cosmology, oversees all visitations to the graves of the righteous (tawallī al-taṣarruf fī jamīʿ man yazūr al-ṣāliḥīn al-mawtā). Ibn Abī Zayyān's initiatic encounter with al-Dabbāgh was itself a visionary rupture. He recounts:

“When news of the shaykh reached me, my heart flew to him. I sought guidance from God regarding him (istaʿmartu Allāh fī amrihi), and only grew in longing. My heart had been sealed with love for him since my youth. I came to him and knocked on his door. He emerged, and I swear by God, I saw none of his physical features by which to recognize him. He was simply a pillar of pure light (ʿamūd min nūr). He spoke to me for a while, and I perceived no form—only heard his voice (aṣmaʿ al-ṣawt faqaṭ). Then the radiance subsided, and I beheld his body, recognized his person and attributes. He began unveiling matters to me. This was among the strangest things I witnessed in this world.”

The phenomenology is precise: Ibn Abī Zayyān does not see al-Dabbāgh as if he were light, but sees only light where the shaykh's body should be. The ordinary perceptual apparatus fails; form dissolves into luminosity. When the light finally condenses back into corporeal visibility, the body that appears is no longer ordinary flesh but flesh recognized as the substrate of radiance. This is the structure of mushāhada: not the negation of the physical but its transfiguration in the gaze of the seer.

Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak later testified: "I have continued to love Sīdī Khalīfa ever since I heard the shaykh's words about him." The love here is not affective preference but ontological recognition: to love Ibn Abī Zayyān is to love the maqām al-Dabbāgh confirmed in him.

Other figures orbit this inner circle with varying degrees of visibility. Muḥammad al-Bannāʾ al-Ṭarābulsī, a Libyan who spent fourteen years searching across Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Constantinople, and India for a true guide, was repeatedly directed by saints he encountered to return to his homeland, where his need would be fulfilled. Upon arriving in Fez and meeting al-Dabbāgh, he stayed six months and achieved fatḥ. He then returned to Tripoli, where he became a recognized walī, "famous for sanctity (mashhūr bi-l-wilāya) and sought for guidance (maqṣūd li-l-hidāya)," both during al-Dabbāgh's lifetime and after his death.

Al-Dabbāgh's comment on him is revealing: “A man from the region of Marrakesh who was among the ʿārifūn died, and his sirr remained with me. When this man came to Fez, I clothed him in a shirt I was wearing (albastuhu qamīṣan kāna ʿalayya) and gave him that sirr.” [Al-Ibrīz, ch. 9].

The transmission is both material (the shirt) and immaterial (the secret), and it occurs not through pedagogical instruction but through the transfer of what a deceased saint had bequeathed to al-Dabbāgh. Sanctity thus operates as a circulating reserve, passed from walī to walī according to divine economy. The shirt functions as vehicle: it has absorbed al-Dabbāgh's baraka through contact with his body, and its transfer to al-Bannāʾ effects a material inscription of spiritual authority.

What united this Maghribi circle was not institutional affiliation—al-Dabbāgh had no zāwiya, no formalized ṭarīqa, no inherited liturgy—but direct encounter with a presence that dissolved ordinary social hierarchies and conventional master-disciple protocols. The community operated beneath or beyond institutional structure, bound not by rule or organizational chart but by shared experience of unveiling and the mutual assumption of ontological risk that such exposure entails. It was a community of muḥibbūn (lovers) and muṣaddiqūn (those who testify to truth), organized around the principle that authentic maʿrifa requires no intermediary apparatus beyond the living master's presence and the disciple's readiness to be reconstituted by it.

• The Institutional Mode

The third mode of inheritance represents a qualitative transformation: the conversion of al-Dabbāgh's legacy from a localized, charismatic phenomenon into a transregional ṭarīqa capable of reproducing itself across multiple contexts through standardized ritual, textual authority, and formal chains of initiation (silsila). This transformation was mediated by a single pivotal figure: ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Tāzī (d. 1206/1792), whose relationship to al-Dabbāgh was simultaneously genealogical (as milk-father) and initiatic (as disciple), positioning him as a hinge between the household and the initiatic elite, uniquely suited to carry al-Dabbāgh's baraka into institutional form.

The significance of the milk-kinship (riḍāʿ) bond cannot be overstated. In Mālikī jurisprudence, suckling from the same wet-nurse creates quasi-consanguineous ties (ḥurmat al-raḍāʿ) that prohibit marriage and establish certain mutual obligations. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb had nursed from al-Dabbāgh's wife during infancy, creating a legal relationship that Islamic law treats with the gravity of blood kinship. This bond was thus doubly inscribed: in the juridical structure of kinship and in the charismatic structure of wilāya. The dual inscription allowed ʿAbd al-Wahhāb to claim both genealogical proximity to the household and initiatic intimacy with the master—a combination that would prove essential for his later function as transmitter.

Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar al-Kattānī in Salwat al-Anfās preserves the moment of ʿAbd al-Wahhāb's spiritual investiture with narrative precision. While still a youth (yāfiʿ), he encountered al-Dabbāgh at the Blue Steps (al-ʿAqaba al-Zarqāʾ) in Fez's Qarawiyyīn quarter. He kissed the shaykh's hand and averted his gaze in modesty (aṭraqa ilā al-arḍ ḥayāʾan). Al-Dabbāgh asked: "My son ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, do you want to see the Prophet ﷺ?" (turīd tarā al-nabī?). When the boy assented, the shaykh commanded: "Lift your head and look" (irfaʿ raʾsaka wa-nẓur). There, standing before him, were the Messenger of God ﷺ and Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq (fa-idhā bi-l-nabī wa-Abī Bakr).

ʿAbd al-Wahhāb would be hailed by later generations as the “ghawth of his age, without dispute” (raʾs al-ʿārifīn bi-lā nizāʿ), "pole of those who have arrived, with none to contest" (quṭb al-wāṣilīn bi-lā difāʿ). But his historical significance lies less in his personal sanctity than in his structural function as the transmitter through whom al-Dabbāgh's legacy entered the institutional field of the ṭuruq, transforming from local charisma into transregional organization.

From ʿAbd al-Wahhāb's circle emerged Aḥmad ibn Idrīs al-Wazzānī (d. 1253/1837), the Moroccan Idrisid sharīf whose destiny would be to carry the Dabbāghī silsila beyond the Maghrib into the Ḥijāz, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and East Africa, creating in the process one of the most extensive and politically consequential Sufi networks of the nineteenth century. Ibn Idrīs was born in Maysūr, a village in the High Atlas, and pursued his scholarly formation in Fez under luminaries such as al-Tāwudī ibn Sūda (d. 1209/1795). He sampled widely from the ṭuruq available in late eighteenth-century Morocco—receiving initiation from al-Tijānī; from al-Darqāwī, from Abū al-Qāsim al-Wazīr; and from ʿAbd al-Majīd al-Mijdūrī, the Shinqīṭī scholar who served as intermediary to ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Tāzī.

Yet among these multiple shuyūkh, Ibn Idrīs identified ʿAbd al-Wahhāb as his ʿumda (principal master, pillar). It was ʿAbd al-Wahhāb who brought him to al-Dabbāgh's tomb in Fez and stood before the grave reciting verses that collapsed temporal distance into a single declaration of fidelity:

A love for you has grown in my heart (laqad nabatt fī al-qalb minkā maḥabba)
as fingers grow from the palms (ka-mā nabatt fī al-rāḥatayn al-aṣābiʿ).
Forbidden to my heart is the love of any but you (ḥarām ʿalā qalbī maḥabbat ghayraka)
as the wet-nurses were forbidden to Moses (ka-mā ḥurimat yawman li-Mūsā al-marāḍiʿ).

The imagery is exegetically precise. The Qurʾān recounts that the infant Moses refused all wet-nurses until his own mother was brought to him (Q 28:12). ʿAbd al-Wahhāb would sometimes recite another verse in remembrance of al-Dabbāgh:

I fell in love with you as a child, not knowing what passion was,
and my temples have grayed, yet my passion for you remains young.

The temporal structure of the verse is significant: love precedes consciousness of love; devotion precedes understanding of devotion. The relationship is not chosen but discovered as always already operative, a bond that predates reflection and outlasts the aging of the body.

In his own letters to disciples, Ibn Idrīs made the silsila explicit. Writing to one of his successors, he states:

“I took the Path (al-ṭarīq) from the possessor of the spiritual influx of his age and imam of his era, the renewing shaykh (al-shaykh al-mujaddid), our master and patron ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Tāzī. He took it from the possessor of the influx of his age, the Ḥasanī sharīf our master ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz known as al-Dabbāgh. He took it from the shaykh of shaykhs, the comprehensive singularity (al-fard al-jāmiʿ), Sīdī Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad al-Khiḍr, peace be upon him.”

This is the silsila as cosmic infrastructure: al-Dabbāgh becomes the hinge between the eternal guide (al-Khiḍr) and the networks of the modern age. The chain is deliberately short—only three human intermediaries separate Ibn Idrīs from al-Khiḍr, and al-Khiḍr's direct connection to the Prophet ﷺ is assumed. This brevity is not incidental; in the logic of silsila-comparison, shorter chains are considered superior (aʿlā) because they minimize the potential for distortion or dilution across generations of transmission.

Ibn Idrīs relocated to Mecca around 1213/1798-99 and spent thirty years there, teaching and initiating disciples in what he called the "Muḥammadan-Khiḍrian Path" (al-ṭarīqa al-Muḥammadiyya al-Khiḍriyya). The liturgies he transmitted—the Dhikr al-Makhṣūṣ (The Specific Remembrance), the Ṣalāt al-ʿAẓīmiyya (The Magnificent Prayer upon the Prophet ﷺ), and the Istighfār al-Kabīr (The Great Formula of Seeking Forgiveness)—were not his own compositions but gifts received in a vision of the Prophet ﷺ in the company of al-Khiḍr. In this vision, the Prophet ﷺ himself instructed al-Khiḍr to teach these formulas to Ibn Idrīs, who then recited them in their presence. The Prophet ﷺ concluded by declaring: "O Aḥmad, I have given you the keys to the heavens and the earth (mafātīḥ al-samawāt wa-l-arḍ), and they are: the Specific Dhikr, the Magnificent Prayer, and the Great Istighfār."

The structure recapitulates and extends al-Dabbāgh's own initiatic architecture: direct prophetic investiture, mediated through al-Khiḍr, bypassing the accumulated layers of human transmission that characterize most ṭuruq. What Ibn Idrīs received was not merely permission to teach existing formulas but new revelation—liturgical forms disclosed directly by the Prophet ﷺ for the needs of the age.

From Ibn Idrīs in Mecca, the baraka bifurcates into two major institutional branches, each of which would reshape the religious and political landscape of North and East Africa in the colonial and post-colonial periods:

1. The Sanūsiyya, founded by Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Sanūsī (b. 1202/1787, d. 1276/1859), an Idrīsī scholar from Mostaganem who studied under Ibn Idrīs in Mecca from approximately 1238/1823 to 1253/1837. Al-Sanūsī's treatise al-Manhil al-Rawī al-Rāʾiq fī Asānīd al-ʿUlūm wa-Uṣūl al-Ṭarāʾiq ("The Pure and Delightful Spring Regarding the Chains of the Sciences and the Principles of the Paths") explicitly traces his initiatic lineage:

I transmit the Muḥammadan Path through several chains, the loftiest of which is what I took from our shaykh, the pole of the gnostics and imam of the realized ones, our master Aḥmad ibn Idrīs, may God sanctify his secret, from his shaykh the gnostic of God, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Tāzī, may God be pleased with him, from his shaykh the gnostic of God, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Masʿūd al-Dabbāgh al-Fāsī, may God be pleased with him, from our master and patron Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Khiḍr, peace be upon him, from the Prophet ﷺ. This is among the loftiest chains, rarely found (min aʿālī al-asānīd qalīlat al-wujūd).”

Al-Sanūsī returned from the Ḥijāz to Ifrīqiya and established the first Sanūsī zāwiya in Cyrenaica (present-day eastern Libya) in 1843. Over the following decades, the order established a network of zawāyā stretching across the Sahara from Cyrenaica to Chad, creating what has been described as a "theocratic federation"—a de facto state organized around Sufi lodges that provided education, dispute resolution, trade facilitation, and military coordination in regions where Ottoman authority was nominal or absent. The Sanūsiyya's organizational structure was hierarchical and disciplined: each zāwiya was headed by a disciple appointed by the central leadership, and economic surplus generated by the zawāyā's agricultural activities was redistributed through the network.

When Italian forces invaded Libya in 1329/1911, the Sanūsiyya organized armed resistance that would continue intermittently until 1349/1931, when the Italian military—under the command of General Rodolfo Graziani—finally suppressed the order through systematic campaigns of mass executions, concentration camps, and the execution of the resistance leader ʿUmar al-Mukhtār. The Sanūsī leadership went into exile, but the order's social infrastructure remained intact enough that when Libya achieved independence in 1370/1951, the head of the Sanūsiyya—Muḥammad Idrīs—became King Idrīs I, ruling until his overthrow by Muammar al-Gaddafi in 1389/1969.

Here, al-Dabbāgh's baraka—mediated through three generations—enters the domain of state-formation, anti-colonial resistance, and the reconfiguration of sovereignty in the wake of empire. The Sanūsiyya's trajectory demonstrates how a ṭarīqa founded on claims of direct prophetic instruction and Khiḍrian initiation could transform into a political-military organization capable of challenging European imperialism and ultimately establishing a kingdom. The spiritual and the political are not separate spheres but overlapping fields: the baraka that legitimizes the shaykh also legitimizes the king, and the organizational discipline cultivated through Sufi practice translates directly into military and administrative capacity.

2. The Mīrghāniyya, founded by ʿUthmān ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿUthmān al-Mīrghānī (d. 1268/1852), known as al-Khatm ("the Seal"), a Ḥusaynī sharīf from Mecca who studied under Ibn Idrīs and received from him the ijāza to transmit the Idrīsī silsila and liturgies. Al-Mīrghānī's epithet—"the Seal"—is theologically charged: it suggests that he represents the culmination or completion of a spiritual cycle, positioning him as the final perfection of what Ibn Idrīs had initiated.

The Khatmiyya spread rapidly through Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, becoming one of the most influential Sufi orders in the Nile Valley and the Horn of Africa. Unlike the Sanūsiyya, which often stood in opposition to Ottoman and later European power, the Khatmiyya navigated colonial politics through strategic alignment. In Sudan, the order initially supported Egyptian rule, then aligned with British forces against the Mahdist state (1298/1881-1316/1898), and later became a pillar of the pro-independence movement in the twentieth century. Members of the Mīrghānī family held high political office in independent Sudan, and the order's zawāyā became centers of education and social services that functioned in parallel to state institutions.

The Mīrghāniyya's organizational structure differed from the Sanūsiyya's in significant ways. Where the Sanūsiyya emphasized agricultural self-sufficiency and territorial consolidation, the Mīrghāniyya operated through urban-based zawāyā that attracted merchant and artisan classes, creating economic networks through trade rather than land. The order also developed a more elaborate hierarchy of successors, allowing for decentralized growth while maintaining ritual and doctrinal coherence through the circulation of standardized awrād and pilgrimage to the order's central shrines.

Once again, al-Dabbāgh's spiritual genealogy intersects with the hard realities of colonialism, nationalism, and state power. The baraka that began in al-ʿAqaba al-Zarqāʾ in Fez now flows through institutions managing hospitals, schools, publishing houses, and political parties. The transformation is not betrayal but actualization: the claim to direct access to prophetic presence always carried within it the potential for political mobilization, for the reorganization of society according to divinely sanctioned principles.

Beyond these two institutional giants, Ibn Idrīs's circle included figures whose influence spread across an even wider geographic range:

1. Ibrāhīm ibn Ṣāliḥ al-Rashīd al-Makkī (d. 1300/1884), described by Ibn Idrīs as "the center of Aḥmadian sciences and the locus of Idrīsī influxes (mahabbiṭ al-imdādāt al-Idrīsiyya), the ocean of divine gnoses (qāmūs al-maʿārif al-ilāhiyya), the guide of disciples to their eternal life (murshid al-murīdīn ilā ḥayātihim al-abadiyya), shaykh of the Path and imam of Reality (shaykh al-ṭarīqa wa-imām al-ḥaqīqa)." Al-Rashīd's network extended across India, Pakistan, the Levant, Turkey, and Sudan, creating a trans-Asian branch of the Idrīsī tradition that operated independently of both the Sanūsiyya and Mīrghāniyya but maintained spiritual fidelity to the same Dabbāghī-Khiḍrian silsila.

2. Ṣāliḥ al-Jaʿfarī al-Ḥusaynī, who served as imam of al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, embedded the Idrīsī lineage within the institutional heart of Sunni Islamic learning. His presence at al-Azhar ensured that the Dabbāghī cosmology—its emphasis on direct prophetic encounter, its Khiḍrian initiation, its claims of saintly hierarchy—circulated within the scholarly elite rather than remaining confined to devotional circles.

3. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Sulaymān al-Ahdal (d. 1250/1835), mufti of Zabīd in Yemen, brought the Idrīsī silsila into one of the most prestigious centers of Shāfiʿī jurisprudence in the Arabian Peninsula, demonstrating that the Dabbāghī legacy could be integrated into madhhab-based scholarly establishments despite its origins in a context quite distant from Yemeni Shāfiʿism.

4. Muḥammad ibn Ḥasan Ẓāfir al-Madanī (d. 1263/1847), whose influence extended through the Ḥijāz, further consolidated the Idrīsī presence in the sacred precincts of Mecca and Medina, ensuring that pilgrims from across the Islamic world encountered the Dabbāghī-Idrīsī teaching during their ḥajj, creating opportunities for transmission to regions as distant as Southeast Asia and West Africa.

What had begun as an ecstatic unveiling in the garden of a Fāsī weaver was now, within a century, a hemispheric network of learning, devotion, political mobilization, and institutional power. The name "al-Dabbāgh" appeared in ijāzāt granted in Delhi and Harar, in Khartoum and Benghazi, in Istanbul and Jakarta. His cosmology—the doctrine of the aqṭāb, the metaphysics of saintly hierarchy, the possibility of direct prophetic encounter—became the common inheritance of ṭuruq whose members had never seen Morocco and whose founders had never read al-Ibrīz.

12. The Hidden Death

The death of al-Dabbāgh is one of the paradoxes of his legacy. In al-Ibrīz—the work that made him famous across the Islamic world, the text that preserved his teachings on divine secrets, saintly hierarchies, and cosmic governance—his death receives barely a mention. Ibn al-Mubārak, who spent years transcribing the saint's words, who documented his visions and karāmāt in exhaustive detail, falls nearly silent when it comes to the moment of his shaykh's departure. This is the "hidden death"—hidden not because it was obscure, but because al-Ibrīz, structured as a record of spiritual dialogue and divine knowledge, had no room for mourning.

It is Taysīr al-Mawāhib, the biographical supplement compiled by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Murābiṭī generations later, that reveals what al-Ibrīz concealed. Where al-Ibrīz is a handbook of Sufi metaphysics, Taysīr al-Mawāhib is a proper biography—concerned with dates, places, relationships, and the human texture of grief. And so the death that al-Ibrīz hid becomes visible in Taysīr: not as a theological event but as a rupture in the lives of those who loved him.

Al-Dabbāgh died on the morning of Thursday, 20 Dhū al-Qaʿda 1132 / 7 December 1720, at the age of thirty-six lunar years (thirty-five solar years and eleven months). The jurist ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Qāḍī al-Shanṭījī captured the date in an elegy whose opening lines function as both chronogram and lament:

فَقَدَ النَّاسُ نُورَهُمْ وَسَنَاهُمْ
فِي الدَّيَاجِي بِحَادِثٍ هَزْهِيزِ
عَامَ إِحْدَى بَعْدَ الثَّلاَثِينَ فِي عِـ
ـشْرِينَ مِنْ قِعْدَةِ لِشَقٍّ حَزِيزِ
People lost their light and splendor,
Darkness shook under a shattering blow,
In the year one past thirty, on the twentieth of Dhū al-Qaʿda,
A wound cut into the ledger of time.

The poet's language is raw. The Arabic hādith hazhīz (a shattering event) and shaqq ḥazīz (a deep wound) evoke violence—not the peaceful passing of an old saint but the sudden severing of something vital. The "light and splendor" (nūr and sanā) are not metaphorical courtesies; they name what the community felt it had lost: illumination, guidance, the presence that organized their spiritual world.

Eight days before his death, al-Dabbāgh informed his closest disciple, Muḥammad ibn Ḥanīnī al-Zurārī, of both the place and imminence of his burial. The precision of the instruction—delivered without drama, as Taysīr emphasizes—suggests a man who had already begun to detach from the visible world. Ibn Ḥanīnī later recalled that the shaykh's tone held no fear, only completion.

When the moment arrived, Ibn Ḥanīnī was present, fulfilling the saint's prophecy. Al-Murābiṭī emphasizes Ibn Ḥanīnī's unique distinction: he was the one who washed, shrouded, prayed over, and lowered the shaykh into his grave—a rare privilege in Moroccan Sufi tradition, signaling not merely intimacy but the transfer of baraka and authority. Even Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak, the master jurist and author of al-Ibrīz, prayed behind Ibn Ḥanīnī. "God placed him forward," al-Murābiṭī writes, "even though courtesy might have kept him back."

Such an act marked the intimacy of their bond; yet it also underscores the loneliness surrounding the saint's final hours. A figure whose days had been filled with visitors died effectively within a small domestic circle, his physical weakness known only to a few. His wife faced widowhood with several small children—ʿUmar, Idrīs, and Fāṭima—"still clinging to his garments when he entered the house," as one source notes. A young family awakened on a winter morning to find its center gone, and a modest home in Ḥūmat al-ʿUyūn suddenly emptied of the man whose presence had made even its narrow rooms feel expansive.

The ancestral burial place of the Dabbāgh family was the shrine of ʿAlī ibn Ḥarazim, where Mawlāy Rashīd himself had been interred. Yet al-Dabbāgh desired a site reserved for himself, his companions, and his descendants. He disclosed the exact location to Ibn Ḥanīnī: adjacent to the Rawḍat al-Anwār, associated with the saint ʿAlī ibn Ṣāliḥ (d. 903/1498), outside Bāb al-Futūḥ. Ibn Ḥanīnī purchased the plot eight days before the shaykh's death, following his master's instruction.

After burial, the disciples erected a domed mausoleum—modest compared to the great shrines of Fez, yet destined to become one of the city's spiritual coordinates. The poet Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Tāzī celebrated it in a qaṣīda that compares the dome to celestial phenomena:

أَبَرْقٌ لاَحَ مِنْ غَرَبِ الغَمَامْ
أَمِ الْبَدْرُ الْمُجَلِّي لِلظَّلاَمْ
أَمِ الشَّمْسُ الْمُنِيرَةُ حَانَ مِنْهَا
طُلُوعٌ مِنْ غُرُوبٍ لِلْقِيَامْ
بَلِ الْقُبَّةُ الْمَنِيفَةُ قَدْ تَجَلَّتْ
فَأَزْرَتْ بِالْكَوَاكِبِ الْجِسَامْ
Is it lightning flashing from the western clouds?
Or the full moon dispelling darkness?
Or the radiant sun rising
from its setting toward the Day of Resurrection?
No—it is the lofty dome that has appeared,
eclipsing even the greatest stars.

The imagery is deliberate: the dome is compared to lightning (sudden illumination), the full moon (complete light), and the sun rising from its setting—an eschatological image suggesting that al-Dabbāgh's death was not an ending but a transition, a rising toward the Day of Judgment. The dome "eclipses the stars" (azarat bi-l-kawākib al-jisām), asserting that this modest structure, housing an illiterate weaver, outshines the shrines of established scholars and rulers.

A dream reported in Taysīr al-Mawāhib adds collective consolation. On the day of his burial, a vision declared that all believers buried in the cemetery had been forgiven. Whether taken literally or symbolically, the narrative reveals the psychological need of the community to see significance in his death—a need intensified by the abruptness of his passing and the youth he never outgrew. The saint who had claimed to carry the Dīwān al-Ṣāliḥīn in his chest was now imagined as interceding for an entire necropolis.

The companions of al-Dabbāgh—and the scholars of Fez, Taza, and Meknes who loved him—answered his passing with a body of elegies (marāthī) that reveal how deeply his presence had marked their spiritual world. These were not poems of protocol or courtly obligation; they were cries from men who felt that a light guiding their path had suddenly been withdrawn.

Foremost among the poets was ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Qāḍī al-Shanṭījī, a jurist and scholar whose long marthiya became the touchstone in the memory of al-Dabbāgh's circle. He begins with raw grief that refuses consolation:

فَكَأَنَّ الأَنَامَ جِسْمٌ بِلاَ رُوحٍ
لِفَقْدِ الإِمَامِ عَبْدِ الْعَزِيزْ
It was as though all humanity became a body without a soul
when the Imām ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was lost.

This is not hyperbole—it is theological diagnosis. In Sufi anthropology, the saint is the rūḥ (spirit) of the community, the invisible animating force that gives coherence to the visible body. Without him, humanity (al-anām) remains physically intact but spiritually lifeless. The image evokes the Qurʾānic description of death as the departure of the soul, leaving behind a corpse that resembles the living but no longer is. Al-Shanṭījī is saying: Fez still stands, but it is dead.

He continues with a meditation on al-Dabbāgh's sharīfian lineage:

الشَّرِيفُ الْمُشَرَّفُ وَمَنْ لَيْسَ يُدْلِي
بِيَدٍ مِنْهُ فِي مَدَى التَّحْوِيزْ
The noble one, ennobled—and whoever cannot claim
a connection to him falls beyond the boundary of worth.

The phrase sharīf musharraf (the noble one, ennobled) plays on the dual meaning of sharīf: noble by descent (from the Prophet ﷺ) and noble by spiritual station. Al-Dabbāgh is both—his Idrīsī Ḥasanī lineage validated by his spiritual achievements. But more striking is the second line: those who cannot claim connection to him (man laysa yudlī bi-yadin minhu) fall "beyond the boundary" (madā al-taḥwīz). The poet is not merely praising al-Dabbāgh—he is asserting that proximity to the saint defines one's spiritual worth. To be outside his circle is to be outside salvation.

Al-Shanṭījī then addresses the paradox that defined al-Dabbāgh's life:

عَجَبٌ أُمِّيٌّ إِذَا أَمَّ أَبَدًا
كُلَّ عِلْمٍ مَعْنًى بِلَفْظٍ وَجِيزْ
بِلِسَانٍ عَلَيْهِ مَنَّ قَلْبُ صِدْقٍ
كِسْوَةٌ طُرِزَتْ بِلاَ تَطْرِيزْ
A marvel—illiterate, yet he led
every science, meaning compressed in concise expression,
with a tongue upon which a truthful heart bestowed
a garment embroidered without embroidery.

The verb amma (to lead, as an imām leads prayer) is used metaphorically: al-Dabbāgh "led" the sciences despite never studying them. His speech was "embroidered without embroidery" (kiswat turizat bi-lā taṭrīz)—an oxymoron suggesting that his eloquence was natural, unlearned, divinely bestowed. The "truthful heart" (qalb ṣidq) is the source: not books, not teachers, but a heart aligned with divine truth, which then "dressed" his tongue in knowledge.

Al-Shanṭījī's most poignant lines address the practical loss—not just metaphysical abstraction but the concrete absence of a man who did things for people:

وَمَنْ لِقُلُوبِ الْغَافِلِينَ إِذَا صَدَّتْ
جَلاَهَا بِأَنْوَارِ الْمَعَارِفِ وَالذِّكْرِ
Who will mend the hearts of the heedless when they harden?
He polished them with the lights of knowledge and remembrance.

The verb jallā (to polish, to clarify) evokes the image of a craftsman—appropriate for al-Dabbāgh the tanner, who worked with leather. But here he is polishing hearts (qulūb), removing the rust of heedlessness (ghafla) with "the lights of knowledge and remembrance" (anwār al-maʿārif wa-l-dhikr). This was not abstract teaching—it was tarbiya, spiritual formation through presence. And now that presence is gone. The rhetorical question man li-qulūb ("who for the hearts?") hangs unanswered, because the poet knows: no one.

Another voice rises from Meknes, that of Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd Adūsh, whose tone is more intimate, almost familial:

أَقُولُ وَدَمْعُ الْعَيْنِ فِي الْخَدِّ سَائِلٌ
وَهَذَا الَّذِي يُرْوَى يُذِيبُ فُؤَادِي
I speak while tears run down my cheek,
and the news that is told melts my heart.

The simplicity is devastating. No metaphysical claims, no theological arguments—just a man crying (damʿ al-ʿayn fī al-khadd sāʾil) because the news of death (hādhā alladhī yurwā) has "melted" (yudhību) his heart. The verb dhāba suggests dissolution, liquefaction—the heart losing its form, becoming fluid grief.

Adūsh continues with the essential marvel:

أُمِّيٌّ وَلَكِنْ فِي كَلاَمِهِ بَحْرٌ
جَوَاهِرُهُ تَعْلُو كَالْكَوْكَبِ الدُّرِّيْ
Unlettered—yet in his speech flowed an ocean
whose jewels shone like the brightest star.

The image of the "ocean" (baḥr) whose "jewels" (jawāhir) rise like stars (al-kawkab al-durrī—the bright planet, Venus or Jupiter) combines aquatic and celestial metaphors. Al-Dabbāgh's knowledge is an ocean containing pearls, but those pearls shine like stars—as if the deep and the heights had merged in him. The ummī (illiterate one) becomes the source of light that guides navigation, both at sea and under the night sky.

Adūsh also captures the social dimension of the loss:

فَمَنْ لِلْيَتَامَى وَالأَرَامِلِ بَعْدَهُ
وَمَنْ لِلرِّجَالِ الْمُعْدَمِينَ ذَوِي الْفَقْرِ
Who for the orphans and widows after him?
Who for the destitute men, those in poverty?

This is not metaphorical. Al-Dabbāgh, despite being poor himself, redistributed whatever came to him. The sources record that he gave away food, clothing, money—not as institutional charity but as personal care. The "orphans and widows" (yatāmā wa-arāmil) and "destitute men" (rijāl muʿdamīn) are not abstractions; they are people who showed up at his door and left with something. And now? Man lahum—who for them? The question is unanswered because the answer is: no one like him.

Other poets—anonymous in name yet unmistakable in feeling—capture the theological core of Sufi mourning:

تَوَارَى عَنِ الأَعْيَانِ شَخْصُهُ فِي الْقَبْرِ
وَبَقِيَتْ نُورُهُ يَهْدِي السَّالِكِينَ
His form vanished from sight into the grave,
but his light remained, guiding the seekers.

This is the essential Sufi doctrine of the saint's posthumous presence. The shakhṣ (physical form) is hidden (tawārā—literally "concealed himself") in the grave, but the nūr (light, spiritual presence) remains (baqiyat) to guide the sālikīn (wayfarers, seekers). Death is not annihilation but occlusion of the visible while the invisible endures. The saint's body is buried, but his baraka, his spiritual authority, his function as guide—these continue.

Another anonymous voice emphasizes the Prophetic connection:

سَلِيلُ التُّقَى مِنْ خَيْرِ ضِئْضِئِ هَاشِمٍ
وَسِبْطُ رَسُولِ اللهِ حَقًّا بِلاَ نُكْرِ
A descendant of piety from the finest branch of Hāshim,
and a grandson of the Messenger of God, truly, without dispute.

Salīl (descendant) and sibṭ (grandson, specifically of the Prophet ﷺ through Fāṭima) locate al-Dabbāgh in the genealogical chain that matters most. But note the emphasis: ḥaqqan bi-lā nukr ("truly, without dispute"). The poet is not merely stating fact—he is defending al-Dabbāgh's sharīfian status against potential skeptics. The illiterate weaver might have been questioned by those who doubted such a man could be a true sayyid. The elegy insists: he was, indisputably.

Across these elegies, several spiritual and social themes emerge, shaping how al-Dabbāgh's followers understood both his life and his absence:

1. The Saint as Communal Soul: Al-Shanṭījī's image of humanity as "a body without a soul" is echoed in other poems. The saint is not an individual who dies but the animating principle of the community. His death is experienced not as personal loss (though it is that too) but as collective disintegration—the community still functions outwardly but is spiritually dead.

2. The Marvel of Illiteracy: Every single elegy returns to this paradox: ummī (unlettered), yet speaking with the authority of the greatest scholars. This is not incidental praise—it is the central karāma, the proof that what al-Dabbāgh possessed could not have come from human learning. The poets are arguing: his knowledge vindicates the claim that God teaches directly.

3. The Prophetic Lineage as Validation: References to sharīf, sibṭ, Hāshim, ʿitra appear constantly. The elegies are not merely mourning a holy man—they are mourning a descendant of the Prophet ﷺ. This genealogical emphasis serves two purposes: it locates al-Dabbāgh within the chain of baraka transmitted through blood, and it elevates his death to the level of a dynastic loss, as if a member of the Prophet's ﷺ family had passed.

4. The Social Function: Who Will Care for the Vulnerable? Adūsh's question—"Who for the orphans and widows?"—is repeated in variant forms. The elegies reveal that al-Dabbāgh was not merely a teacher of esoteric doctrine but a provider, mediator, and protector for the poor. His baraka was not abstract—it fed people, clothed them, settled their disputes. The mourning is not just for lost wisdom but for lost practical care.

5. The Posthumous Presence The insistence that "his light remained" (baqiyat nūruhu) reflects Sufi eschatology: the awliyāʾ do not die in the way others die. Their barzakh (intermediate state between death and resurrection) is different—they remain active, aware, and capable of intercession. The dome over al-Dabbāgh's grave is not a memorial but a locus of ongoing spiritual presence.

Though the poets do not name his wife, his small children (ʿUmar, Idrīs, Fāṭima), or his brothers (ʿAlī and al-ʿArabī), their presence hangs in the background of every lament. The elegies carry the quiet pain of a home that suddenly lost its center: a father barely thirty-six, taken at the height of his tenderness.

His wife had already endured the jealousy and turbulence of living beside a man whose states often exceeded ordinary comprehension. Now she faced widowhood with young children. His brother ʿAlī, who had once seen the saint's form expand until it filled the rooftop room, experienced a different kind of sorrow. For a man whose own spiritual reassurance had come from hearing the words "It is only your brother," the moment of death meant the disappearance of that steadying voice. The sources do not record his reaction, but the silence itself is eloquent: grief often leaves no vocabulary.

The children—"still clinging to his garments when he entered the house," as one disciple recalled—awakened on a winter morning to find their world contracted abruptly. Not only the absence of a father, but the disappearance of a presence that had shaped the rhythm of every day.

What al-Ibrīz hid, Taysīr al-Mawāhib and the elegies reveal: al-Dabbāgh died as he lived—modestly, among a few, claiming nothing. There was no public spectacle, no throngs of mourners at the moment of passing. Ibn Ḥanīnī washed his body. A small circle buried him. The disciples built a dome not because the sultan commanded it but because they could not bear for the site to remain unmarked.

Yet the elegies prove that his death was felt far beyond that small circle. Scholars in Meknes, jurists in Fez, disciples scattered across Morocco—all responded with poetry because words were the only way to process a loss that felt cosmic. If al-Shanṭījī was right—if al-Dabbāgh had been the rūḥ animating the jism of Moroccan Islam—then his death was not a private event. It was the moment when an entire community realized how much it had depended on a man it had barely known.

The dome outside Bāb al-Futūḥ stands not as a monument to a famous scholar but as a testimony to absence: the absence felt by orphans who no longer had a protector, by seekers who no longer had a guide, by a city that—however much it continued—knew it had lost something irreplaceable.

13. Conclusion: The Third Authority and the Architecture of Sanctity

When Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh died in his modest home in Ḥūmat al-ʿUyūn on that winter morning in 1132/1720, barely thirty-six years old, he left behind no zawiya, no endowments, no formal organization, and no institutional apparatus through which his authority might be preserved. What he left instead was something far more durable: a new possibility in the architecture of Islamic sanctity—a demonstration that spiritual sovereignty could operate entirely outside the structures that normally contain it, yet command recognition from those very structures without ever submitting to their logic.

This was the meaning of "the third authority." In the triangulated field of ʿAlawī Morocco—where the sultan in Meknes wielded military force and dynastic charisma, where the scholars of al-Qarawiyyīn controlled juridical discourse and intellectual prestige, and where the Idrīsī sharīfian families of Fez held genealogical proximity to the Prophet ﷺ and custodianship of sacred space—al-Dabbāgh introduced a fourth dimension that cut across all three without belonging to any. He was Idrīsī by blood, which the ʿAlawīs could not ignore. He was Khiḍrian by initiation, which the scholars could not replicate. And he was cosmically sovereign by virtue of claims that neither throne nor university could adjudicate: that the Dīwān al-Ṣāliḥīn convened in his chest, that he bore robes capable of dissolving cities, that he had surpassed the saints of earlier centuries, and that his authority extended over domains—the barzakh, the hierarchy of saints, the invisible governance of creation—that remained permanently beyond the reach of sultans and jurists alike.

What is most remarkable is not that he made these claims, but that they were believed—and not by the credulous or the marginal, but by some of the most formidable legal minds of his generation. When Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak, a mujtahid scholar trained in the full rigor of Ghazālian Sunnī orthodoxy, encountered this illiterate weaver and heard from him "knowledge I had never heard from any human being nor seen in any book," something profound shifted in the epistemological foundations of Moroccan Islam. Ibn al-Mubārak did not merely record al-Dabbāgh's utterances—he validated them, cross-referencing them against 139 works spanning ḥadīth, uṣūl, fiqh, tafsīr, and taṣawwuf, and demonstrated through 266 citations that what appeared to be the spontaneous overflow of an unschooled mystic was in fact entirely consonant with—and often superior to—the conclusions of the transmitted sciences.

The result was al-Ibrīz, a text whose very existence constitutes an epistemological scandal. It is a work of high Islamic scholarship authored by one of Fez's greatest jurists, yet its primary source is not a previous text, not a teacher in a formal chain of transmission, but the direct speech of a man who never studied. It claims to preserve not ʿilm maktasab (acquired knowledge) but ʿilm ladunī (divinely-bestowed knowledge), yet it subjects that knowledge to the same rigorous verification procedures that scholars apply to transmitted texts. It positions itself within the Sunnī scholarly tradition, yet it advances claims—about saintly infallibility, cosmic hierarchy, and the capacity of the awliyāʾ to govern creation—that approach the very boundaries Sunnī orthodoxy was constructed to defend.

That al-Ibrīz was not merely tolerated but celebrated—that it circulated immediately upon completion, that it generated abridgments, commentaries, and institutional recognition, that Sultan Mawlāy Sulaymān himself commissioned a revised edition—reveals something essential about the elasticity of Moroccan Sunnism. The Mālikī-Ghazālian synthesis that dominated al-Qarawiyyīn was rigid in its doctrinal boundaries but flexible in its recognition of charismatic authority. It could absorb al-Dabbāgh precisely because his claims, however extraordinary, were always articulated within the grammar of Prophetic inheritance. He did not claim to legislate (which would have made him a prophet). He did not claim political authority (which would have made him a rebel). He claimed only wilāya—and wilāya, in the Sunnī framework, is theoretically unbounded in its capacity to receive divine disclosure, provided it never transgresses the finality of revelation.

This is the structural genius of Moroccan Sufism's solution to the problem of authority: it created a space where the saint could be cosmically sovereign without being politically threatening. Al-Dabbāgh's authority was deterritorialized—it did not require land, armies, or institutional control. It was phenomenological: it existed in the experience of those who encountered him, in the transformations they underwent, in the certainties they acquired that could not be shaken by argument or force. When Ibn al-Mubārak defied Mawlāy Ismāʿīl's direct command to serve as imam in Meknes, he did so not because he possessed military power or institutional protection, but because al-Dabbāgh had told him, "Remain in your house and fear no misfortune." And nothing happened. The sultan—who had executed his own sons for far less, who had crushed zawiyas and ruined scholars—took no action. Not because he lacked power, but because al-Dabbāgh's authority operated in a register where coercion was beside the point.

This is what makes al-Dabbāgh's legacy so difficult to categorize and so important to understand. He was not a reformer—he founded no movement. He was not a revolutionary—he challenged no dynasty. He was not a institution-builder—he left no organizational structure. Yet his influence has proven more durable than any of these. Through the genealogical mode of inheritance, his descendants preserved his relics, his manuscripts, and his wird, ensuring that Dabbāghī baraka remained materially accessible across generations. Through the initiatic mode, his companions—Ibn Ḥanīnī, Ibn Abī Zayyān, al-Bannāʾ al-Ṭarābulsī—carried his gnoses into their own circles, creating nodes of direct transmission that required no institutional mediation. And through the institutional mode, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Tāzī and Aḥmad ibn Idrīs transformed the Dabbāghī silsila into a hemispheric network that would reshape the religious landscape of North Africa, the Nile Valley, the Arabian Peninsula, and East Africa for the next two centuries.

When the Sanūsiyya organized armed resistance against Italian colonialism in Libya, when the Khatmiyya navigated the complexities of Sudanese independence, when Ibrāhīm al-Rashīd's disciples carried the Idrīsī-Dabbāghī teachings across South Asia, they were operating within a spiritual economy that al-Dabbāgh had not created but had exemplified: the possibility that authority rooted in Prophetic proximity, mediated through Khiḍrian initiation, and validated by direct experience of the unseen, could generate forms of social organization and political mobilization that neither required nor acknowledged state sanction.

This is why al-Dabbāgh matters beyond the history of Sufism, beyond the history of Morocco, and beyond the history of Islam. His life and legacy demonstrate that in contexts where multiple forms of sovereignty compete—dynastic, juridical, genealogical, charismatic—sainthood can constitute not merely a spiritual status but a distinct mode of governance, one whose jurisdiction extends over domains that remain permanently inaccessible to conventional power: the structure of the cosmos, the hierarchy of creation, the mechanics of intercession, and the governance of hearts.

The elegies composed at his death reveal what his community understood and what later historians have sometimes missed: that his passing was not the loss of a pious individual but the departure of an axis. When al-Shanṭījī wrote that "humanity became a body without a soul," he was not engaging in hyperbole—he was articulating a cosmological claim about the saint's function as the invisible principle of social coherence. When Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd Adūsh asked, "Who for the orphans and widows after him?" he was not lamenting the absence of charity but the collapse of a system of care that had operated through the saint's redistributive presence.

Yet the very fact that these elegies were composed, that Taysīr al-Mawāhib was written, that the dome was built, that the wird was preserved, that the ijāzāt were granted, and that pilgrims still visit Bāb al-Futūḥ three centuries later, proves that the poets were wrong. Al-Dabbāgh did not leave Morocco as a body without a soul. He became the soul in a different mode—no longer localized in a single body in Ḥūmat al-ʿUyūn, but distributed across texts, descendants, disciples, and the ongoing practices of those who invoke his name, recite his wird, and claim spiritual descent from his teaching.

This transformation—from living presence to textual monument to transregional silsila to ongoing invocation—is not the decline of charisma but its successful institutionalization. What Max Weber described as the "routinization of charisma" and saw as an inevitable loss of intensity, the Dabbāghī tradition demonstrates can be a multiplication of presence: the saint becomes more accessible in death than in life, his baraka no longer confined to those who could physically reach Fez but available to anyone, anywhere, who receives the ijāza, recites the formula, or stands at the threshold of the shrine.

In the end, al-Dabbāgh's legacy reveals something essential about the nature of Islamic sanctity and the resilience of traditional authority in modernity. He lived in an age of centralizing states, disciplined armies, and rationalizing bureaucracies—Mawlāy Ismāʿīl's Morocco was not a medieval polity but an early modern one, with gunpowder, trained regiments, diplomatic treaties, and administrative reforms. Yet within that modernizing context, a man who owned nothing, commanded no one, and claimed authority over nothing visible, nevertheless shaped the consciousness of his generation and the trajectory of centuries to follow.

This is the paradox and the power of the third authority: it does not compete with the state because it does not operate in the same domain. It does not challenge the scholars because it does not claim their jurisdiction. It does not threaten the sharīfian families because it is one of them. It simply exists, quietly, persistently, irrefutably, as a standing reminder that not all power flows through institutions, that not all knowledge comes from books, and that not all authority requires force.

As long as there are hearts that seek certainty beyond what reason can provide, as long as there are communities that need mediation between the human and the divine, and as long as there are traditions that remember—through relics, texts, descendants, and invocations—that such mediation is possible, the legacy of Mawlāy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh will endure. Not as a relic of a vanished past, but as a living possibility: the possibility that in any age, in any place, an illiterate weaver sitting at the threshold of his home might carry within himself the governance of the cosmos—and that those with eyes to see will recognize it, those with hearts to love will serve it, and those with pens to write will preserve it for generations yet unborn.