The Muhammadan Axis: Al-Ibrīz and the Moroccan Metaphysics of Inheritance
Among the vast literature of Moroccan Sufism, Al-Ibrīz occupies a singular position. It is not a doctrinal summa nor a philosophical construction in the manner of Ibn ʿArabī or Ibn al-Fāriḍ. It is, instead, the distilled testimony of a Moroccan school that matured over centuries—beginning with the Jazūlī revolution of devotion to the Prophet ﷺ, refined through the Ghawzawni lineage, and reaching one of its crystalline expressions in the unveilings of Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh.
In this tradition, al-Dabbāgh is neither origin nor destination. He is a station—a luminous intersection where inherited Moroccan intuitions about sainthood, prophecy, and cosmic hierarchy find a particularly transparent articulation. The value of Al-Ibrīz lies not in innovation but in clarification: it renders visible an already-existing metaphysical structure that dominated Moroccan spirituality from the fifteenth century onward.
Central to this structure is the conviction that the Muhammadan Reality is the axis of all spiritual motion. Every saint is a derivative luminosity, every unveiling is a borrowed ray, and every spiritual hierarchy ultimately unfolds from the primordial radiance of the Prophet ﷺ. The Moroccan path, unlike the Andalusian metaphysics of unity or the Persian poetics of annihilation, is characterized by a doctrine of inheritance (al-wirātha): proximity to the Prophet ﷺ as measure of rank, capacity, and legitimacy.
Al-Ibrīz preserves this doctrine in its most explicit form. Across its pages, we encounter:
The debate between the Ṣiddīqī and Ḥusaynī parties, each claiming a metaphysical proximity to the Prophet ﷺ.
The incapacity of the Ghawth to inherit the full spectrum of Muhammadan attributes.
The cosmological singularity of the Prophet ﷺ, from whom angels, heavens, and spirits draw their subsistence.
The ethical demand that even devotional acts—such as invoking blessings upon him—are only accepted when issuing from purified hearts.
The existential limit of the saint: every illumination he carries is a robe borrowed from the Prophet ﷺ, never his own.
Through these themes, Al-Ibrīz articulates a distinctively Moroccan vision: sainthood is not an ascent toward God through metaphysical speculation but an inheritance of the Prophet’s light through purity, service, and witnessing (mushāhada). The saint rises only to the degree that he carries a portion of the Muhammadan secret; he falls when his witnessing drifts from that axis.
This chapter gathers the core ideas of Al-Ibrīz—idea by idea—and situates them within this broader Moroccan tradition. It reads the Dabbāghī teachings not as isolated insights but as part of a continuum stretching from al-Jazūlī’s Dalā’il, through the Maghrebi refinements of al-Ghazwānī, to the crystallizations of al-Dabbāgh.
The goal is not to recreate Andalusian metaphysics nor to collapse al-Dabbāgh into Ibn ʿArabī’s system. Rather, it is to let the Moroccan path speak in its own tonalities—rooted, hierarchical, Muhammadan, and grounded in lived experience rather than speculative architecture.
By approaching the Dabbāghī revelations through this lens, the chapter becomes not merely a commentary on a text but a re-mapping of an entire intellectual and spiritual geography: the Moroccan Muhammadan Path.
1. The Ṣiddīqī-Ḥusaynī Debate: Companionship or Constitution?
When Al-Ibrīz turns to the question of how the Prophet's perfection reaches the community of saints, it does not begin with theology but with testimony: al-Dabbāgh reports that the friends of God themselves are divided over this matter. Two interpretive camps emerge, each offering a different metaphysics of closeness. The first group, which al-Dabbāgh identifies as the Ṣiddīqī party, believes that spiritual inheritance flows through the channel of companionship. Those who walked with the Prophet ﷺ, who heard him speak and witnessed his conduct, received from him a transmission that cannot be replicated. The Companions hold the highest rank because they were present at the source, drinking directly from the well of prophecy in its historical moment. For this party, the measure of sainthood is determined by one's distance from that original circle of presence.
Against them stands a second group, the Ḥusaynī party, whose vision rests on a different principle entirely. They hold that the Prophet's light can only settle fully in natures that were fashioned to receive it—and such natures exist primarily among his descendants. This is not a claim about genealogy as social privilege but about genealogy as ontological resonance. The children of the Prophet ﷺ inherit not because of their name but because their created constitution was formed from the same primordial substance as his. They carry an imprint, a structural affinity, that allows them to receive what others can only approach from the outside. Where the Ṣiddīqīs speak of proximity in time, the Ḥusaynīs speak of proximity in essence.
Al-Dabbāgh himself was trained within the Ṣiddīqī lineage, yet when the question presses upon him—when he must choose between these two readings—he does something unexpected. He declares his allegiance to the Ḥusaynī interpretation, adding only that the truth deserves to be spoken regardless of one's affiliation. What compelled this shift was not doctrine but kashf: his own unveilings showed him that the Prophet's station is so singular that only those whose nature mirrors his can fully inherit from him. This becomes the governing logic of Al-Ibrīz. Inheritance is not about effort, rank, or even virtue—it is about whether the vessel was made to hold the light.
The book then pushes this principle to its furthest consequence by examining the case of the Ghawth, the greatest of all saints. Al-Dabbāgh reveals that the Prophet ﷺ possesses not hundreds but tens of thousands of spiritual essences—124,000 in total—a treasury so vast that it exceeds all attempts at comprehension. The Ghawth, for all his cosmic responsibility, can receive only 366 of these. This is not a limitation of his spiritual rank but a fact of his created structure. He can hold no more because to receive more would unmake him. Al-Dabbāgh describes what would happen if the full weight of the Prophet's light were placed on the Throne: it would dissolve. If placed on the seventy veils above the Throne, they would shatter. If placed on all of creation at once, everything would collapse into nothing. The Muhammadan light is not greater than other lights by degree—it belongs to another category of existence altogether.
This disproportion reveals something essential about the nature of sainthood in Al-Ibrīz. If the Ghawth, who sustains the cosmos and hears every voice in creation simultaneously, can inherit only a fraction of the Prophet's treasury, then every other saint must be drinking from an even smaller portion. And yet saints speak, act, and sometimes even claim stations that seem to rival or exceed the prophets. How is this possible? Al-Dabbāgh's answer introduces one of the most elegant images in the text: the borrowed robe. When a saint performs an act beyond his capacity, he does so not from his own station but while wearing a garment temporarily given to him by the Prophet ﷺ. The light is not his own; the power is not his own; the knowledge is not his own. He has been clothed for a moment in a Muhammadan perfection, and when the moment passes, the robe is returned and he descends to his natural measure.
This principle allows al-Dabbāgh to interpret one of the most controversial statements in Sufi literature: Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī's claim that "we plunged into oceans whose shores the prophets only reached." Taken literally, this would suggest that a saint surpassed a prophet, which is impossible. But al-Dabbāgh reads it differently. Abū Yazīd did not plunge into an ocean of his own making; he entered the Prophet's ocean while wearing the Prophet's robe. For that instant, he tasted what the Prophet ﷺ tastes continuously. But the ocean was never his, and once the robe was withdrawn, he returned to the shore where all saints must stand. The statement is not false—it simply requires a more careful reading. Every saint who claims an extraordinary station is speaking from within a moment of borrowed light, and the highest spiritual wisdom is not to claim such moments as one's own but to recognize them as gifts from the Muhammadan source.
Perhaps the most vivid expression of this disproportion appears in al-Dabbāgh's account of a saint who had reached the rank of the Ghawth. This figure sustained all creation, distributed provision to every being, and witnessed the entirety of existence in a single glance. Yet when he turned his inner eye toward the source of his own power—when he saw that everything he carried flowed to him from the Prophet ﷺ—he said something startling: "When I see that the support comes from another, I find myself like a frog, and all creatures stronger than me." The image is precise. The Ghawth, who seemed to hold the universe together, realizes that he is nothing more than a conduit. His strength is not intrinsic but channeled. He is not the light but a passageway for the light. And in the presence of the Muhammadan reality, even the greatest saint becomes infinitesimal.
This hierarchy—God as the source, the Prophet ﷺ as the direct receiver, the Ghawth as the administrator, and the rest of the saints in descending degrees—is not a ladder to be climbed but a structure to be understood. The Prophet's station does not sit above the Ghawth in the way one step sits above another. It is the ground from which the Ghawth's existence arises. Without the Muhammadan channel, there would be no Ghawth, no saints, no spiritual hierarchy at all. Inheritance, in this vision, is not the transfer of a property from one owner to another. It is participation in a light that remains forever beyond possession, a drinking from a well that cannot be drained, and a proximity measured not by closeness in space or time but by the capacity of one's nature to resonate with the Muhammadan frequency.
2. The Cosmology of Muhammadan Light
In Al-Ibrīz, the Muhammadan light is not a metaphor but the primal architecture of existence. Al-Dabbāgh states repeatedly that the Prophet ﷺ is the first of created essences, the moment where divine knowledge, divine power, and divine mercy were poured without veil. Everything that comes after—angelic, celestial, terrestrial—is a diluted residue of that first radiance. His spirit was nourished directly “when the Beloved was with His Beloved, and there was no third between them,” and from that moment his soul became the source for every seeker and the material for every borrower. The Shaykh explains that when this spirit entered the Prophet’s own blessed body, the body itself rose through ascending degrees of knowledge and unveiling until the age of forty, when the veil between his spirit and his essence dissolved completely. Only then did the unbearable witnessing begin: the Prophet ﷺ saw God’s acts in creation with the clarity of direct vision and perceived creatures as empty vessels moved solely by divine will.
Such witnessing is not merely epistemic; it is transformative. The Prophet’s ﷺ essence became a magnet pulling the saints toward God, a force unique to him among all created beings. Whoever reaches his station in their spiritual ascent becomes safe from falling, because the attractive power embedded in his nature draws the seeker through the final thresholds. This is why al-Dabbāgh insists that the Prophet’s station cannot be shared: no creature can bear what his nature bears. The metaphysical scale is absolute. If the full power of the Prophet’s intellect, spirit, essence, soul, and protective forces were placed upon all prophets and saints combined, they would “melt and collapse.”
This incomparable capacity explains why only the Prophet’s household can approach the deeper layers of his inheritance. Al-Dabbāgh’s broader cosmology is built on capacity: every soul contains 366 arteries, each holding a disposition—envy, pride, deception, desire. Only when the seeker purifies these arteries does the divine grant vision: first of the earths, then the heavens, then the barzakh, then the angels, then the decrees written into light. But when the seeker reaches the Muhammadan station, a different process begins: he must drink from the hundreds of thousands of lights housed in the Prophet’s essence. Al-Dabbāgh gives a precise mechanism: the seeker is flooded repeatedly by rays corresponding to the Prophet’s attributes—patience, mercy, forbearance, generosity, truthfulness—each ray “piercing the self like a cold light,” dissolving its darkness. Only when all darkness has been expelled may the seeker behold the Prophet ﷺ directly. Yet even then, he receives these lights “only to the measure of his original nature.” The Prophet’s household, whose natures were cast from clay nearest to his, are the only ones able to drink deeply across this spectrum. The Ghawth, for all his exaltation, can drink only to the limit of his 366-fold vessel; the household drink from horizons beyond that vessel’s design.
This Muhammadan light is also the substance of creation. Al-Dabbāgh states that the eight heavens, the eight angels who bear the Throne, and the eight gates of Paradise were all created from eight portions of the Prophet’s light—each portion containing a specific secret. Hence, each gate of Paradise is paired with an angel fashioned from the same portion of the same primordial radiance. Even more striking is the assertion that no created structure—neither the Throne, nor the seventy veils above it, nor the dome of the Barzakh—can carry the weight of the Prophet’s spirit. His spirit resides in the Barzakh but does not remain fixed in any locus, for “nothing can bear the intensity of its secrets,” except his own blessed body.
This cosmic architecture shapes devotional practice as well. Blessings upon the Prophet ﷺ expand Paradise itself because Paradise “yearns for him as a child yearns for its parent,” having been created from his light. When angels at the edges of Paradise mention his name, the Garden stretches outward in yearning until God manifests to its people, at which point it settles again. But not every ṣalāt is accepted. A prayer issued from an unpurified self—tainted by vanity or habit—does not ascend into this Muhammadan architecture. Only the heart cleansed by light receives the acceptance that corresponds not to the human offering but to the rank of the Prophet and the generosity of God.
What emerges from all these strands is a single cosmological law: all spiritual motion, capacity, and inheritance is graded by nearness to the Muhammadan light. The saints see only as much of creation as they have been re-formed by that light; the Ghawth sustains creation only through borrowed rays; Paradise expands only when that light is invoked; and the household inherits because their nature alone can bear the deeper intensities of that light. In Al-Ibrīz, the Muhammadan horizon is not merely superior—it is the ontological axis around which all existence, knowledge, sanctity, and salvation are ordered.
3. Form, Presence, and the Mediation of Vision
Among the most distinctive features of Al-Ibrīz is its uncompromising affirmation that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is not merely a historical figure but an active, perceivable presence within the unseen world. Here, prophetic presence is not metaphorical, not visionary in the poetic sense, not a pious imagination—but an ontological event: the Prophet ﷺ appears, speaks, directs, and governs the highest assemblies of sainthood. Al-Dabbāgh treats this presence as an objective reality on the same plane as angels and spiritual hierarchies; it is neither hallucination nor inner symbolism. The Prophet’s arrival in the Dīwān—the cosmic council of saints—causes the entire hierarchy to reconfigure: the Ghawth vacates his seat, the deputy moves behind him, and the saints enter a state of trembling annihilation under the “unbearable, killing, majestic light” that floods the assembly. No created being—neither angel nor pole—can bear this radiance except by divine support. This single scene reveals the psychological and metaphysical structure of Al-Dabbāgh’s thought: prophetic presence is a force so intense that the cosmos bends around it.
Yet Al-Dabbāgh insists that prophetic presence is not limited to the Dīwān. It is accessible to the seeker in waking vision, a possibility he treats with utmost seriousness. The Prophet ﷺ may speak to the saint exactly as he spoke to the Companions; but unlike the Companions, the saints receive this vision through the filter of their own interiors. The Shaykh explains that God safeguards the veracity of these encounters: the Prophet’s form cannot be imitated by Satan, either in sleep or in wakefulness. But he adds a decisive nuance: the mode of the vision depends entirely on the seeker’s inner capacity. The Companion sees the outward form because he knew it; the scholar who has studied the descriptions sees a likeness; the ordinary believer sees the “form of a human perfected in beauty,” which may or may not correspond to the outward Muhammadan form. The important point is that the presence is real even if the form is mediated by the seeker’s imagination. The mind can only picture what it knows, but the presence behind the picture is the Prophet ﷺ himself.
Al-Dabbāgh’s analysis of mental picturing is one of the most psychologically sophisticated passages in the entire Sufi tradition. He distinguishes between three layers of the experience: the seeker’s imaginative image, the Prophet’s actual presence, and the quality of the exchange. The imaginative image arises from the seeker’s own knowledge, memory, and symbolic vocabulary. But what occurs within that image—conversation, instruction, unveiling—belongs not to the imagination but to the reality of Muhammadan presence. Thus, even if the form differs from the historical description, the event remains an encounter with the Prophet ﷺ, provided the seeker’s inner state is purified. This distinction allows Al-Dabbāgh to maintain doctrinal orthodoxy (no claim of incarnation, no confusion between essence and form) while affirming the immediacy of spiritual contact.
Because the inner faculties can deceive, Al-Dabbāgh identifies the decisive sign of true prophetic witnessing. It is not emotional rapture, nor visions, nor dreams, nor supernatural openings. It is the transformation of consciousness into a state of perpetual remembrance: the seeker’s thought becomes so saturated with the Prophet ﷺ that he cannot eat, drink, sleep, quarrel, or converse without an unbroken interior orientation toward him. This is not obsessive imagination but the fruit of proximity. The mind acquires a new “center of gravity,” and every cognitive act rotates around the Muhammadan presence, the way celestial spheres rotate around a luminous axis. When this state stabilizes, prophetic vision in waking becomes not an interruption but an extension of the seeker’s habitual awareness. Al-Dabbāgh considers this the authentic measure of companionship (ṣuḥba), and only from this state does vision progress further toward divine witnessing.
Ultimately, prophetic presence in Al-Ibrīz is a psychology of light and a metaphysics of nearness. The Prophet ﷺ is the locus where divine generosity manifests in a form accessible to creation, and the seeker’s heart is the chamber in which that form can appear. Mental picturing is the language of the soul; true presence is the descent of light within that language; and the sign of authenticity is the transformation of the entire inner life. In this horizon, the Prophet ﷺ becomes not a memory but a living axis: the doorway through which all guidance flows, all hierarchies are arranged, and all visions are measured. Through this framework, Al-Dabbāgh gives Moroccan Sufism its most detailed psychology of seeing Muhammad ﷺ, establishing prophetic presence as the beating center of spiritual experience.
4. Light and Its Limits: Prophet, Saint, Angel, Philosopher
In Al-Ibrīz, hierarchy is not a ladder—it is a cosmological architecture of light. Between Prophet, angel, saint, and philosopher there exists not a spectrum of degrees but a fundamental metaphysical divide: the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ is the primordial arch-source, the axis where nūr first descends into the universe. All other luminosities—Gabriel, the Ghawth, the awliyāʾ—are emanations, radiant but derivative, receiving only according to their limited capacities. Al-Dabbāgh’s statements are not devotional ornamentation; they form a coherent ontology. Gabriel himself, though majestic, is crafted from the Muhammadan Light. An emanation cannot outrun its origin. Thus, Gabriel knows through association and service, while the Prophet ﷺ knows from the station beyond all mediation—the Beloved with the Beloved, without witness, veil, or intermediary.
This metaphysics is what shapes al-Dabbāgh’s critique of all forms of false expansion—whether mystical inflation among saints or cosmological speculation among philosophers. When someone claims to “fill the cosmos,” al-Dabbāgh reads it as a category error. The cosmos has one gate, and that gate is Muḥammad ﷺ. The luminosity at the gate is unbearable; even the Ghawth cannot withstand its intensity. If a being cannot endure the threshold, how could it claim the totality? Any expansion that bypasses Muḥammad ﷺ is not luminous (nūrānī) but dark (zulmānī), an opening without axis, without source, without center.
Into this same zulmānī horizon, al-Dabbāgh places the classical philosophers—not as rationalists who lack revelation, but as half-opened seers who mistook the lower lights for the Origin. Their lineage, as al-Dabbāgh narrates, begins with a man who lived in the era of Prophet Ibrāhīm, who tasted a partial unveiling of the created heavens. Instead of moving from the created to the Creator, from sign to meaning, he became transfixed by the splendor of the cosmic order. It was a vision confined to the eons of creation, the layered heavens, the rotations and harmonies of the spheres. He seized this glimpse as totality and built from it a structure—astral correspondences, cosmological judgments, luminous patterns mistaken for ultimate causality.
This kind of opening is what later traditions would call an encounter with the Demiurge—the architect of form, order, and heavenly law, but not the source of Being. In Plotinian terms, it is an ascent that stops at the Nous and never reaches the One. In Hermetic language, it is the vision of Hermes Trismegistus who saw the splendor of the heavens but mistook the “Mind of the All” for God Himself. Al-Dabbāgh calls this precisely what it is: a zulmānī unveiling, not because it is evil, but because it is incomplete—light trapped inside creation, luminosity without transcendence.
Thus the genealogical descent: the first half-opened seer passes his cosmology to those who inherit the darkness of the upper realm—Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Galen—each brilliant, each capable of extraordinary intellectual leaps, but all imprisoned within a sublime ceiling. They rise to the threshold of the cosmos but never cross into the Muhammadan domain. They grasp the architecture of creation but miss the Creator. Their cosmology becomes a mirror hall of eons, spheres, intermediaries, harmonies—magnificent, intricate, radiant, but sealed from the source of nūr.
Within this architecture, prophethood reveals its pure function: to shatter the ceilings of created light and guide creation back to God. If one imagines a prophet calling to himself rather than to God—an ontological impossibility—his identity would invert. Prophethood is not defined by miracles but by the total effacement that allows the Divine to be seen without distortion. The Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ is the apex because he perfected this effacement beyond measure. He receives without mediation; everyone else receives in proportion to their vessel.
This is why al-Dabbāgh defends hierarchy with luminous precision. Gabriel remains majestic but derivative; the Ghawth remains vast but bounded; the saints remain exalted but clothed in borrowed robes; the philosophers remain brilliant but veiled by the splendours of created heavens. Only Muḥammad ﷺ is unborrowed Light. Only he sustains the double-vision in which witnessing creation does not veil God and witnessing God does not veil creation. Every other being oscillates—when they enter nūr, creation fades; when they return to creation, the Divine veils. Only Muḥammad ﷺ holds both without conflict because his capacity is beyond measure.
What emerges is a rigorous cosmology. Knowledge descends from the Muhammadan source; rank is measured by proximity to that source; false openings arise when one stops at the created lights; the philosophers are prisoners of the Demiurge; prophets shatter all intermediaries; and the entire metaphysical hierarchy—nūrānī and zulmānī—is calibrated by what each being can bear of the primordial Light. In this horizon, sainthood is inherited luminosity, not autonomous ascent; philosophy is a half-opening trapped in cosmic beauty; and the Muhammadan Reality is not simply the pinnacle of the system—it is its genesis, its axis, its engine, and its return.
5. From Vision to Presence: The Soul's Progressive Reconstitution
In al-Dabbāgh’s universe, the Muhammadan Reality is not only the first light but the ongoing medium of every spiritual transformation. What distinguishes his vision from Andalusian monism or Persian annihilationism is the insistence that proximity to the Prophet ﷺ is not symbolic but ontological: every motion of the spirit, every increase in perception, every refinement of character is carried by a trace of the Muhammadan nūr entering the seeker’s being. Just as the body is animated by breath, the inner life is animated by effusion from the Prophetic presence. This effusion does not merely illuminate; it alters the very composition of the human soul.
For al-Dabbāgh, witnessing Muḥammad ﷺ—whether in vision, presence, or sustained recollection—is an event that restructures the seeker from within. The soul does not simply “see”; it is recast. Luminous attributes descend one by one, expelling the dark residues that prevent perception. Every attribute of the Prophet has an opposite within the human being, and each opposite must be dissolved before a new degree of witnessing becomes possible. What the mystic receives is not imitation but infusion: a subtle pouring of nūr that replaces the impulses of the ego with configurations drawn from the Prophetic essence. This is why al-Dabbāgh refers to the process as sukhyān, a kind of inner “saturation,” where the being becomes steeped in attributes not its own.
In this view, the inner journey is not ascent but exchange. The seeker does not climb; he is progressively emptied of what belongs to him and filled with what belongs to Muḥammad ﷺ. Hence the Dabbāghī emphasis on permanence of recollection: the one who truly walks does not let the Prophet slip from thought for an instant, for the flow of nūr is proportional to the constancy of inward turning. To eat while remembering him, to argue while remembering him, to sleep while remembering him — this is not piety but the mechanics of transformation. Continuous remembrance keeps the inner aperture open, allowing the Muhammadan current to continue reshaping the soul’s interior architecture.
Al-Dabbāgh also makes a subtle distinction between vision of the Prophet and presence with him. Vision is a disclosure; presence is a station. Vision may occur to the beginner through grace; presence belongs only to the one whose inner composition has been sufficiently reshaped. The transformation required for presence is described through physiognomy of the soul: three hundred and sixty-six traits, each an organ of perception, each bearing its own luminous and dark potential. Only when these organs have been purified can the seeker endure the proximity of the Muhammadan radiance without collapsing into bewilderment or self-deception.
At the heart of this transformation lies a paradox distinctive to al-Dabbāgh: witnessing the Prophet does not terminate in the Prophet. Rather, it opens toward witnessing God. The Prophet ﷺ is both veil and unveiling — veil insofar as his luminosity shelters the seeker from overwhelming divine confrontation, unveiling insofar as his light is the medium through which the divine is made visible. Al-Dabbāgh insists that one cannot reach God except through the Prophet, nor remain with God except through the Prophet. The more one witnesses Muḥammad ﷺ, the more one is prepared to witness the Real.
From this perspective, the Muhammadan horizon is not an object of devotion but a living field of transformation. The seeker moves not by personal exertion but by increasing his resonance with the Prophetic presence. Each new influx of nūr rearranges his interior world; each remembrance draws him deeper into the field; each moment of presence sharpens the soul’s capacity for witnessing. The path, then, is neither philosophical speculation nor ecstatic self-loss but a progressive reconstitution of the being in the image of Muḥammad ﷺ — not as metaphor, but as metaphysical fact.
6. Why Not Every Blessing Reaches the Prophet
In Al-Ibrīz, intercession (shafāʿa) is not a juridical privilege nor a symbolic gesture. It is a structural feature of the cosmos. Al-Dabbāgh treats the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ as the central field around which all metaphysical processes are calibrated—the point where divine effusion condenses into form. In contemporary language, one could say: the Muhammadan Reality functions as the universe’s luminous constant, a kind of spiritual Planck-scale—an indivisible quantum of nūr from which all higher-order phenomena derive. Intercession is simply the movement of creation back toward that constant.
Al-Dabbāgh does not imagine intercession as a courtroom plea. Rather, he presents it as the natural behaviour of created nūr when exposed to its source. Every being carries within it a faint Muhammadan imprint; when the Prophet ﷺ is invoked, that imprint resonates, intensifies, and reorients the soul toward God. In quantum terms, we may liken this to coherence: particles of light fall into phase when placed in the presence of a stronger, purer wave.
Thus intercession is not an act performed by the Prophet ﷺ; it is a condition of the cosmos that happens because of him. Those who draw nearer to him align the inner structure of their souls with the primordial field. Those who turn away collapse back into disordered states. The entire architecture of mercy is patterned on the proximity to that central nūr.
Among the boldest teachings of Al-Ibrīz is that Paradise expands whenever the angels recite blessings upon the Prophet ﷺ. In al-Dabbāgh’s metaphysics, this is not metaphor but ontology. Paradise is fashioned from the Muhammadan Light; it is therefore drawn to its origin in the way a quantum particle “jumps” to a higher state when struck by a photon of matching frequency. The ṣalāt functions as this activating photon.
The Garden responds by expansion—a spatial dilation akin to a field that stretches when infused with additional energy. Just as physical spacetime curves in response to mass-energy, the paradisal domain curves, widens, and elaborates itself when touched by the nūrānī pulse of ṣalāt. Thus the invocation of the Prophet is not devotional ornamentation; it is the mechanism by which the Garden completes its architecture. Paradise grows because its very substance yearns toward the sound of Muḥammad’s name.
Contrary to popular belief, al-Dabbāgh denies that every ṣalāt upon the Prophet reaches its destination. The reason is not moral but existential. Speech, like light, possesses a spectrum. Some utterances carry nūrānī coherence; others are thickened by zulmānī noise. Only the former can penetrate the luminous barrier that separates the earthly from the paradisal realm. Only real (ḥaqq-rooted) remembrance attains the Prophet ﷺ. What is formed from illusion (khayāl) or egoic self-regard (nafsāniyya) remains trapped in its own density.
Al-Dabbāgh’s criterion anticipates the logic of quantum filtering: only waves that match the frequency of an opening can pass through it. The gate of the Prophet accepts only speech whose inner architecture has been purified of distortion. A blessing propelled by love, humility, and reverence reaches him with the speed of light; a blessing mixed with vanity or self-display collapses back into its low-energy state. In this sense, ṣalāt is not merely recitation—it is a diagnostic of the soul’s inner luminosity.
Intercession, therefore, is not external “help” granted from on high. It is the soul’s alignment with the primordial nūr that makes elevation possible. When al-Dabbāgh says that the Prophet’s prayer for his umma was delayed to the Day of Resurrection, he means that the Marvelous One ﷺ holds in reserve an unimaginable torrent of luminous coherence—a wave that, once released, will draw every receptive soul into God’s mercy with irresistible force.
In this architecture, shafāʿa becomes the culmination of a cosmic process: Muḥammad’s nūr sets the universe in motion, sustains its harmonies, expands its paradisal domains, and finally gathers creation back into divine nearness.
7. The Primordial Wine: Intoxication Before Creation
Intoxication in Al-Ibrīz unfolds as a migration of nūr, a luminous journey that began before breath, before clay, before history. Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s cry—“We drank upon remembering the Beloved a vintage…”—echoes for al-Dabbāgh as the first cosmic meter, a secret al-kāmil beating in the heart of pre-existence. In that ancient horizon, the rūḥ tasted a radiance drawn from the Muhammadan field, and the taste awakened its inner scales (mawāzīn) the way a poem awakens when its meter is struck: half longing, half remembrance, fully alive.
That primordial drink flowed like voltage through a new circuit. It altered the rūḥ’s habits, widened its capacities, tilted its equilibrium between awe and yearning. This was the first emigration of light, when the spirit crossed from the silence of non-being into the tremor of awareness. Love appeared as resonance, knowledge as frequency, courage as a pulse. Every soul began circling a sun it did not yet name, yet could never forget.
Then the descent came—the exile into clay. The rūḥ entered the body the way a migrating bird enters a narrow nest: wings folded, horizon compressed. The luminous intoxication dimmed, not from absence, but from density—infinite nūr confined within finite matter. The body remembered earth; the spirit remembered heaven. Between them stretched the entire Sufi path.
For this reason, each practice becomes a form of return migration. Dhikr is a crossing. Salāt is a checkpoint. Invocation is smuggling a drop of that first wine back into the bloodstream of dust. When the seeker remembers the Prophet ﷺ, the rūḥ sends back its ancient signals—tremors, lights, sweetness—until the body begins to vibrate in the meter of its homeland. The primordial wine left three signatures in the soul: transition, severance, boldness—each one a meter in the soul’s hidden poem.
Transition is the light step of al-mutadārik, carrying the seeker from state to state.
Severance is the sharpness of al-munsariḥ, cutting the threads of habit. Boldness is the overflowing fullness of al-wāfir, restoring the courage of the first encounter with the Muhammadan Sun.
Within this vision, al-Dabbāgh also situates the philosophers. Hermes, Plotinus, Socrates, Plato—each reached the outer atmosphere of the celestial world, tasting its twilight but never its dawn. Their unveilings remained zulmānī, not due to malice but because they halted at the surface of the upper ocean. They charted the waves but never entered the Source. They measured the eons but missed the Origin. They touched the dome but did not reach the Door. Sukr, in contrast, is the science of the Door. The physics of nearness. The chemistry of light. The music of the Supreme Name.
For al-Dabbāgh, pre-existent intoxication predates every metaphysics, every revelation, every philosophy. It was the first rhymed prose whispered into the rūḥ, the first meter etched into its being, the first light that taught it how to yearn.
Thus the chapter closes not with argument, but with melody: intoxication as the soul’s earliest homeland, the resonance it still seeks, the rhythm it still remembers, and the wine that began its eternal circling around Muḥammad ﷺ— in migration, in harmony, in yearning, and in light.
7. Where Letters Become Light and Revelation Takes Form
At the heart of the Dabbāghī horizon lies a simple but ruthless thesis: the seven aḥruf of the Qurʾān are seven modes of nūr, and all seven unfold from the Muḥammadan essence. The text does not treat the aḥruf as philological convenience, nor as historical concession to early Arabs; it treats them as a metaphysical syntax. Each ḥarf condenses one radiance of the Prophetic reality: a nūr of prophethood, a nūr of messengership, a nūr of human clay, a nūr of pure spirit, a nūr of knowledge, a nūr al-qabḍ that contracts awareness, and a nūr al-basṭ that dilates it. The Qurʾān, in this register, is a web of these seven lights woven into articulate sound. Every elongation, pause, assimilation, and emphatic consonant becomes a tiny act of tajallī: a disclosure of which mode of Muḥammadan nūr is passing through the reader’s chest at that instant.
Creation, then, does not begin from neutral being; it begins from a spoken pattern. The universe arises from a kalima whose inner skeleton consists of letters and numbers—ḥurūf that give shape, and aʿdād that assign measure. Letters act as the rhetoric of form, the visible figures through which realities become sayable; numbers act as the rhetoric of proportion, the hidden meter through which each reality receives its limit. To say that God created with a kalima is to say: the first act was a coded discharge of nūr, expressed as a structured sequence of signs. The Qurʾān later descends as a mirror of this first code. When a human tongue recites, it does not add sound to a silent cosmos; it briefly synchronizes a finite throat with the original pattern that called worlds into being.
On this background, the relation between revelation and the Prophet’s inner life becomes logically unavoidable. If the Qurʾān is the supreme configuration of the seven lights, and if those lights reside at their most intense degree in the Prophet ﷺ, then the descent of verses naturally follows the movements of his consciousness. When a thought stirs in his heart, the sevenfold spectrum already burns there in its highest clarity; the descent of speech does not inform a blind soul but clothes an already luminous awareness in audible form. Revelation answers his inner addressing the way lightning answers a charged sky. The usual hierarchy collapses: the Prophet does not stand below a descending voice like a passive scribe. His heart functions as the highest mirror of divine intent, and the Qurʾān appears where that intent and that mirror coincide.
The primordial narratives of Adam, Eve, Fire, Tree, and Serpent become, in this light, an extended allegory of how the seven radiances circulate in early humanity. Adam’s clay receives a breath marked by the full spectrum; Eve shares the same encoded nūr, differentiated only by distribution and orientation. Fire refuses to bow, not to mud, but to the unseen Muḥammadan signature that already dignifies that mud. The Garden inclines toward the lights it once contained in pre-temporal intimacy. The Tree dazzles with a degree of nūr beyond Adam’s measured readiness. The Serpent becomes the figure of misaligned desire: attraction toward nūr without obedience to its scale. Each element in the story acts as synecdoche: a part standing for a whole economy of light, will, and measure.
At the center of this economy stands the Supreme Name. Here, Al-Ibrīz sketches an ontology that behaves like a rhetorical chiasm: what begins as nūr returns as Name; what appears as Name unfolds again as nūr. The Supreme Name is not a magical syllable; it is a configuration where letters and numbers reproduce, in miniature, the sevenfold Muḥammadan spectrum. Whoever aligns the architecture of the heart with that pattern enters a field of attraction we may call quṭbāniyya: the soul begins to behave like a pole, not through self-expansion, but through resonance with the primordial kalima. In this field, the Muḥammadan Reality functions as the hidden subject of every act, and the seeker’s “I” dwindles to a grammatical accident.
Within this field, ʿAlī appears as more than a historical figure. If Muḥammad is the city of the seven lights, ʿAlī is the gate where those lights cross from essence into distribution. He becomes the intimate secret of the Prophetic interior, the root of the Muḥammadan Tree in whose branches the Household, the Ḥusaynī line, and the true poles take their positions. The Grand Khatmiyya unfolds along this axis: the Ghawth does not sit on an abstract throne, but on the invisible seat traced by the ʿAlawī secret. His function depends on how much of the seven radiances his nature can carry without disintegration. The saints who stand beneath him drink from the same tree but at lower branches; the Household stand nearer the trunk, fashioned from clay that was tempered longer in Muḥammadan nūr.
At this point, rhetoric stops being ornament and becomes a weapon against the ego. If the Qurʾān’s seven aḥruf encode seven Muḥammadan lights; if creation itself arises from a kalima whose letters and numbers reproduce that code; if revelation answers the Prophet’s inner movements because his heart is already the clearest locus of these lights; if Adam, Eve, Fire, Tree, and Serpent dramatize degrees of alignment and misalignment with that spectrum; if the Supreme Name compresses the same structure into a single pattern; if ʿAlī and the Household carry the deepest resonances of that structure into history; then one conclusion follows with merciless clarity: every recitation you utter either harmonizes with this architecture or exposes your distance from it. The Qurʾān on your tongue is a verdict on your interior geometry. You do not “read a holy text”; the seven lights briefly read you.
And when that logic finally lands in the heart, it no longer produces pride. It produces a very specific tremor: shame without despair, smallness without paralysis, a softness around the eyes that feels suspiciously like the beginning of tears. Because somewhere beneath the habits, beneath the doctrinal defenses, beneath the rehearsed certainties, the soul recognizes what this structure implies: it was created to vibrate in the Muḥammadan meter, sculpted to carry more nūr than it currently allows, summoned to a horizon where the final meaning of its existence is very simple—to become, in its own infinitesimal way, a clear letter inside that first kalima.
