Rewriting Sainthood: Al-Dabbāgh, the Nizāmiyya Project, and the Making of the Institutional Shaykh
Sufi tarbiya, in its classical formulation, did not arise organically from the early ascetics of Basra or the loose circles of Khorasan. It was forged in Baghdad as part of a deliberate political-intellectual project under Niẓām al-Mulk (485/1092), during the height of the ʿAbbāsid–Fāṭimid rivalry. The conflict was not merely dynastic; it was a struggle between two theologies of authority. The Ismāʿīlī Imām claimed ʿiṣma, cosmic taṣarruf, and a graded esoteric curriculum modeled upon seven degrees of unveiling. The Niẓāmiyya was the Sunnī response: a system designed to tame charisma, centralize loyalty, and regulate spiritual advancement. Its mandate was clear: produce a class of obedient spiritual elites without conceding the metaphysical claims of Shiʿi walāya.
Within this crucible, Shihāb al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī(632/1234) wrote ʿAwārif al-Maʿārif (“The Gifts of Gnosis”), transforming Sufi guidance into a structured pedagogy. The shaykh became a spiritual physician, the murīd a patient whose will must be disciplined, and the lodge a controlled moral environment parallel to the madrasa. From this architecture emerged the first global Sunnī tariqas—the Qādiriyya, the Rifāʿiyya, later the Shādhiliyya—each inheriting the same grammar of obedience, hierarchy, and codified discipline.
Al-Sharīshī’s Rāʾiyya (641/1243), composed by a scholar of Niẓāmī training, became the Maghrib’s portal into this Baghdad ethos. By versifying al-Suhrawardī’s institutional doctrine, he translated the Sunni substitute for Shiʿi initiation into a portable, memorized, emotionally charged ethics: absolute surrender to the shaykh, effacement of personal judgment, unity of will, and exclusive allegiance. Through this poetic form, the Baghdadi theory of tarbiya became script, ritual, and doctrine for the western Islamic world.
But the Maghrib was not an empty canvas awaiting Baghdad’s imprint. Centuries before the Niẓāmiyya, Morocco had already developed its own intellectual and spiritual structures. Foremost among them was the Qarawiyyīn—an Idrissid foundation that functioned as the first university of the Islamic world. Under the Almoravids it became the heart of Mālikī orthodoxy, and through Morocco’s vast imperial and commercial networks—from Fez to Timbuktu—it disseminated scholarly and spiritual traditions across Africa. When Niẓāmī doctrines later travelled into the Maghrib, they did so largely through Qarawiyyīn-trained scholars, pilgrims, merchants, and jurists. The Moroccan axis globalized what Baghdad systematized.
Yet the deeper Moroccan landscape was shaped not by the madrasa alone but by a still older institution: the ribāṭ. For centuries, ribāṭs and murābiṭūn had provided Qurʾānic literacy, tribal mediation, protection of trade routes, anti-corruption ethics, and an indigenous form of charismatic sanctity rooted in Idrissid memory. From these ribāṭ networks emerged the great maraboutic families whose baraka became both heritable and communal. It was this world—local, tribal, charismatic, negotiated—that formed the substratum of Moroccan spirituality. Only against this backdrop can the reception of the Baghdad model be understood.
When the institutional tarbiya of the Niẓāmiyya entered Morocco, it encountered a religious landscape shaped not by scholastic bureaucracy but by ribāṭs, murābiṭūn, tribal charisma, and Idrissid baraka. Local sanctity was experiential and inherited, not administratively conferred. The Sharīšiyya style offered Morocco a new language of discipline, but not a new metaphysics; the country already possessed its own. The result was neither imitation nor rejection, but a hybridization that produced the distinctive Moroccan synthesis: a world where institutional tarbiya and indigenous maraboutism coexisted uneasily, each shaping the other, and neither fully replacing the other.
It is within this complex interplay of Baghdad’s institutional discipline and Morocco’s charismatic inheritance that the figure of al-Dabbāgh must be placed. His teaching, and the two Dabbāghs—one living, one textual—emerge not as isolated marvels, but as outcomes of this double genealogy: the Niẓāmiyya’s attempt to discipline sainthood and Morocco’s refusal to surrender the autonomy of charisma.
1. The Baghdadi Prototype: al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-Maʿārif, and the Niẓāmiyya Lodge
To understand how Sunni tarbiya became a disciplined institution, one must begin with the political imagination of Niẓām al-Mulk and the curriculum wars of the fifth/eleventh century. The Niẓāmiyya system was not merely a pedagogical innovation; it was the Abbasid state’s strategic response to the Fatimid–Ismāʿīlī challenge—a challenge that was intellectual, metaphysical, missionary, and cosmological at once. At stake were rival theories of authority: the Imām of the Ismāʿīlīs, whose legitimacy rested on lineage, esoteric knowledge, and the power of tasarruf, and the caliphal–juristic order of Baghdad, which lacked an equally compelling spiritual framework. In this context, the Niẓāmiyya curriculum was designed as a counter-Imamate: a rational, legal, supervisory system meant to neutralize Ismāʿīlī metaphysics by replacing it with Sunni uṣūl, Ashʿarī theology, and a tightly structured pedagogy hostile to Shiʿi cosmology and equally hostile to philosophical autonomy.
One must recall that the Ismāʿīlī daʿwa had already produced a universal encyclopaedia of sciences—Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ—that integrated mathematics, music, astronomy, logic, and esoteric psychology into a seven-fold spiritual ascent. For Baghdad, this was a disaster in slow motion: a rival intellectual world capable of swallowing Sunni elites. The Niẓāmiyya responded by purging philosophy, redefining rationalism through jurisprudence, and making qiyās and ijmāʿ the boundaries of acceptable reasoning. Al-Ghazālī consolidated this shift by attacking the philosophical sciences while preserving a safe, juridically framed Sufism. What al-Ghazālī had performed doctrinally, al-Suhrawardī executed institutionally: he transformed the charismatic, unpredictable saint into the head of a lodge that functioned like a Sunni answer to the Shiʿi Imamate. The result was a Sunni intellectual architecture designed not to explore metaphysical possibility but to contain it.
Al-Suhrawardī—the author of ʿAwārif al-Maʿārif—stood at the intersection of Niẓāmiyya scholarship and ʿAbbāsid statecraft. Formed within the Niẓāmiyya curriculum, trained in its juristic ethos, and initiated by ʿ’Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 561/1166), he embodied the moment when Sufism was reshaped into a supervised, politically compatible discipline. His rise under the patronage of the caliph al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh (r. 575/1180 -622/1225), who elevated him to the position of trusted spiritual advisor, reflects how deeply Sufi leadership had become woven into imperial strategy. In this context, ʿAwārif al-Maʿārif is not a mystical encyclopaedia but a blueprint for regulated sainthood: it abandons the philosophical architecture of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ yet preserves the emotional and ethical grammar of their system. The sevenfold ascent becomes a graded pedagogy of adab; cosmic hierarchy becomes the training of the nafs; and the infallible Imām is replaced by a morally disciplined Shaykh whose legitimacy rests not on lineage but on silsila, fiqh, and institutional oversight. Al-Suhrawardī’s achievement lies in stripping the Ismāʿīlī model of its revolutionary metaphysics while retaining its psychological force—devotion, surrender, hierarchy, and the conviction that guidance flows from a single illuminated source.
For this reason, ʿAwārif functions as a counter-Imamate text. It constructs an authority parallel to Shiʿi walāya yet stripped of its revolutionary implications. The Shaykh is to be obeyed, trusted, and approached as the locus of divine favour, but he is neither cosmically infallible nor politically sovereign. His authority is exalted but fragile; luminous but supervised; charismatic but made safe for the Sunni world. Through this manoeuvre, al-Suhrawardī creates a new spiritual archetype: a figure who gathers the affective atmosphere of the Imām while remaining embedded in the legal and political structure of Sunnism.
This is why the institutional Shaykh is so different from the early ecstatic saint. He does not walk the dangerous line of al-Ḥallāj nor inherit the speculative metaphysics of the Ikhwān. Instead, he stands as the product of a curriculum designed to neutralize both—philosophy as a threat to creed, and charisma as a threat to the state. Tarbiya, within this architecture, becomes a disciplined craft: a method for reshaping the disciple’s will, refining his moral impulses, and bringing his inner world into alignment with a regulated, supervised, morally contained spiritual authority.
Yet the Niẓāmiyya victory was never total. Philosophy survived underground; Shiʿi metaphysics survived in poetry, dreams, and cosmology; and when the Niẓāmiyya model travelled westward, to Fez and beyond, it encountered a landscape where tribal ribāṭs, Idrissid lineage, and maraboutic charisma had already produced their own form of spiritual authority. The Qayrawiyyīn, as an Idrissid foundation and the earliest university of the Islamic world, had already spread Mālikī fiqh and Qurʾānic sciences across North and West Africa before the Niẓāmiyya experiment, giving Morocco its own intellectual sovereignty. In this landscape, sainthood was charismatic, inherited, and locally negotiated; knowledge travelled through ribāṭs, taʾifas, and zawāyā as much as through books and courts.
It is against this dense, pre-existing ecology that the Sharīšiyya poem—and later Al-Ibrīz—attempts to translate the institutional model of tarbiya into Maghribi soil. The Abbasid prototype had provided the architecture; Morocco would now test its limits.
2. The Sharīšiyya Poem as the Maghribi Translation of Niẓāmiyya Discipline
The story of al-Sharīshī’s Rāʾiyya cannot be told as if Morocco passively absorbed a Baghdadi doctrine. Al-Sharīshī himself was a bridge figure: a Moroccan scholar first shaped in the intellectual climates of Marrakesh and Fez, trained by Qarawiyyīn masters, and then completed in Baghdad under al-Suhrawardī, the architect of Niẓāmiyya-style tarbiya. His poem is therefore not a distant echo of the ʿAwārif; it is a Maghribi re-articulation of a discipline he learned directly from its source. What he absorbed in Baghdad—graded authority, ethical surrender, vigilant self-surveillance, and the Shaykh as moral regulator—returned with him to the western Islamic world in the form of a tightly structured ethical ode.
Yet the poem entered a landscape already saturated with its own spiritual grammar. Fez was no empty terrain awaiting the imprint of Baghdad. Anchored by the Qarawiyyīn—an Idrissid institution whose scholarly networks long preceded the Niẓāmiyya and whose intellectual influence extended from Marrakesh to Timbuktu—the city possessed a deep, independent pedigree of Mālikī scholarship, Qurʾānic sciences, and saintly devotion. Around this institutional core thrived a dense world of ribāṭs, maraboutic families, and tribal taʾifas whose authority rested not on curricular discipline but on baraka, lineage, and charisma. Sanctity in Morocco was relational, inherited, local, and negotiated; it was not produced through the bureaucratic logic of apprenticeship that the Niẓāmiyya sought to institutionalize.
For this reason, the arrival of Suhrawardian tarbiya in Morocco predates al-Sharīshī’s poem itself. Decades before he travelled east, Fez had already absorbed a living strand of Suhrawardian ethics through the taʾifa of ʿAlī ibn Ḥarāzim—the very saint whom al-Ibrīz later portrays as the hidden pole of his age. Ibn Ḥarāzim’s own paternal uncle, Abū Ṣāliḥ, had journeyed to Baghdad, studied under Abū al-Najīb al-Suhrawardī, and returned with the early Suhrawardian method. Thus, the first implantation of Niẓāmiyya-style tarbiya in Morocco occurred not through books or institutions, but through kinship, household transmission, and ribāṭ practice. The ethic entered Fez as comportment before it appeared as doctrine—an embodied discipline circulating quietly within saintly circles.
This makes al-Sharīshī’s contribution legible. He did not introduce Suhrawardian pedagogy to Morocco; he textualized it. He gave the Maghrib what it had lacked: a portable, memorizable, emotionally charged script capable of converting an existing ethic into a coherent program. The Rāʾiyya supplied form to what had previously existed as dispersed moods of reverence, surrender, and deference toward the shaykh.
The core ethic—"be like a corpse before your washer"—maintains clear continuity with Niẓāmiyya logic: the disciple's will must be so thoroughly surrendered that the Shaykh becomes the sole agent of spiritual transformation, manipulating an inert body with complete freedom. This image, borrowed from funerary ritual, encodes the Suhrawardian principle that tarbiya requires the total suspension of the murīd's autonomous judgment. Yet the poem's form as memorized, recited poetry marks its Maghribi adaptation.
Unlike the prose treatises of Baghdad—the ʿAwārif al-maʿārif or Ādāb al-murīdīn—which circulated among scholarly elites, the Rāʾiyya becomes portable, oral, and liturgical. Tarbiya is no longer confined to the studious reading of disciplinary manuals; it is absorbed into Fez's ritual cycles, chanted in gatherings, internalized through repetition, and carried in the memory of disciples who may never have encountered the Baghdadi prose tradition at all.
The poem functions as an emotional script, not merely a doctrinal guide. It trains disciples to embody a precise affective repertoire: perfect surrender (the extinguishing of personal preference), exclusive loyalty (the rejection of plural allegiances), suspension of judgment (the refusal to evaluate the Shaykh's commands), and fear of divergence (the internalization of surveillance, where even hesitation becomes betrayal). This is pedagogy through rhythm, metaphor, and affect—a performative discipline that writes the Niẓāmiyya ethic directly onto the nervous system of the disciple.
Like al-Suhrawardī, the poem performs a cultural translation: it takes motifs historically associated with the Shiʿi Imām—absolute trust (the Imām's infallibility), unshared authority (the rejection of rival claimants), cosmic rank (the Imām as pole of the age)—and grafts them onto the figure of the Sunni Sufi master. This was already the Niẓāmiyya strategy: to counter Fatimid charisma by creating a Sunni pedagogy capable of generating comparable devotion without claiming prophetic succession. But the Maghribi difference is decisive: the model becomes stricter, not looser.
In Baghdad, the Suhrawardian Shaykh operated as one authority among several. A disciple might study fiqh with a Shāfiʿī jurist, hadith with a traditionist, kalām with an Ashʿarī mutakallim, and taṣawwuf with a Sufi master—all without violating the logic of the system. The Shaykh's authority was supreme within his domain, but that domain was carefully bounded. Spiritual formation complemented legal training; it did not displace it. The scholar-Shaykh of Baghdad remained embedded in a broader institutional ecology where multiple voices competed for legitimacy, and where the disciple's intellectual and spiritual growth was expected to integrate diverse sources.
In Fez, however, the poem confronts not only jurists but a dense ecosystem of saints—living and dead, near and far. The cityscape itself is a spiritual palimpsest: Mawlāy Idrīs II lies buried at its heart, his shrine a pilgrimage site drawing visitors from across the Maghrib. Local qutbs like Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Tāwudī ibn Sūdah (580/1184), command living taʾifas. Rural marabouts, like Abī Shuʿaib al-Sāriya (d. 561/1165), anchor tribal devotion. The tombs of earlier awliyāʾ serve as nodes of intercession. Disciples move fluidly between these figures, seeking baraka from one, counsel from another, initiation from a third. Spiritual authority in Morocco is relational, plural, and geographically diffuse—sustained not by institutional appointment but by inherited charisma, miraculous intervention, and communal recognition.
The Sharīšiyya responds to this crowded landscape by pushing exclusivity further than its Baghdadi precedent. Where al-Suhrawardī insisted on a single Shaykh for spiritual training, the Rāʾiyya forbids even adjacency to other sources of authority. The poem explicitly prohibits:
Visiting other saints: Even respectful attendance at the shrine of a recognized walī becomes suspect, a potential dilution of the bond with one's own master.
Seeking advice elsewhere: The disciple must not turn to other scholars, even on matters of fiqh or theology, without the Shaykh's permission—a restriction that exceeds even the Niẓāmiyya model.
The "two-master" problem: The poem treats divided loyalty not as confusion but as corruption, a spiritual adultery that voids the disciple's progress entirely.
Inner hesitation: Most strikingly, the poem condemns not only outward disobedience but internal doubt. To question the Shaykh's judgment—even silently, even momentarily—is framed as spiritual betrayal, a fracture in the unity of devotion.
This is not simply a restatement of Suhrawardian discipline; it is an amplification designed to counter a specifically Maghribi threat. In a city where every corner holds a potential intercessor, where baraka flows through multiple channels, and where saintly authority is inherited rather than earned through curricular mastery, the poem must work harder to secure the disciple's exclusive attention. It disciplines mobility—the very fabric of Maghribi spiritual life. It seeks to arrest the disciple's drift between multiple baraka sources, to interrupt the habit of cumulative shrine-visiting, and to convert a crowded, horizontal saintly landscape into a single, vertical hierarchy with one living master at its apex.
This exclusivist devotion is not culturally neutral. It directly responds to a Maghribi environment where discipleship was fluid, loyalties overlapping, and shrine-visiting a shared social practice binding families, tribes, and neighborhoods. A merchant might seek the blessing of Mawlāy Idrīs before a journey, consult a local faqīh on a legal matter, and maintain regular attendance at the ribāṭ of a Sufi master—all without perceiving contradiction. The Sharīšiyya seeks to discipline this mobility, to transform the disciple's spiritual geography from a network of nodes into a single point of orientation.
The poem thus becomes a mechanism of social consolidation. It attempts to domesticate the pluralism of Fez, to prevent the fragmentation of spiritual authority, and to gather diffuse Maghribi charisma into a manageable structure. Its Maghribi form intensifies what was already implicit in Suhrawardī: a reorientation of devotion away from the city's many shrines and toward one living Shaykh who absorbs the totality of the disciple's ethical, emotional, and cognitive life. The master is no longer one authority among others; he becomes the lens through which all other authorities must be refracted, the gateway through which all baraka must pass.
Yet the poem did not spread widely in its own generation—and more than this, it failed its first historical test. The very charismatic crisis the Niẓāmiyya pedagogy was designed to prevent erupted in the Maghrib with devastating force. The rise of Ibn Tūmart and the Almohad revolution represented precisely the scenario Baghdad had feared: the return of the Mahdist claimant, the collapse of institutional authority, and the triumph of a charismatic figure whose legitimacy rested not on disciplined apprenticeship but on direct divine election.
The Almoravid collapse and the rise of the Almohads created a theological climate in which Niẓāmiyya tarbiya could not take root—because it had already been outflanked. Ibn Tūmart's Mahdist claim was not a marginal heterodoxy; it was a frontal assault on the entire logic of graded spiritual formation. Where the Niẓāmiyya model offered a Shaykh whose authority was earned through years of training, vetted by lineage, and bounded by scholarly consensus, Ibn Tūmart presented an Imām whose authority was absolute, unmediated, and apocalyptic. He did not need a silsila; he claimed direct prophetic descent and eschatological mission. He did not submit to the judgment of the ʿulamāʾ; he judged them, declaring the Almoravid scholars ignorant of the very foundations of theology.
The Almohad project, built on this Mahdist claim and on a sharply rationalizing, quasi-Shiʿi theology, suspended the Ghazālian middle path and reconfigured the entire Maghribi religious sphere. Almoravid scholars had never been trained in Ashʿarī kalām; Ibn Tūmart, claiming to have studied with al-Ghazālī himself in Baghdad, confronted them with categories they did not possess and declared their ignorance proof of his superiority. The new regime centralized authority around a charismatic Imām whose role echoed, in transformed guise, both the Fatimid model they opposed and the prophetic infallibility they invoked. Where the Niẓāmiyya sought to domesticate charisma through institutional discipline, the Almohads reinstated it at the center of political theology.
For Baghdad, this was a disaster. The Niẓāmiyya apparatus—the madrasas, the Ashʿarī synthesis, the graded pedagogical chains, the carefully bounded authority of the Shaykh—had been constructed precisely to prevent the rise of figures like Ibn Tūmart. The entire Suhrawardian project rested on the premise that Sunni Islam could generate devotion and authority comparable to the Shiʿi Imām without collapsing into millenarian chaos. Yet here, in the Maghrib, a figure emerged who claimed not merely saintly rank but Mahdist election, who wielded not merely moral authority but political and military power, and who succeeded in toppling an entire dynasty and reshaping the religious landscape of North Africa and Iberia.
The Sharīšiyya poem, with its insistence on exclusive devotion to a single master, could do nothing against this. Ibn Tūmart's charisma was of a different order entirely—not the regulated, pedagogical authority of the institutional Shaykh, but the volcanic, self-authenticating authority of the Mahdi. In such an atmosphere, the Niẓāmiyya grammar—designed as a Sunni counter-Imamate—had no institutional soil. The poem's pedagogy of surrender was rendered moot by a figure who demanded not spiritual apprenticeship but theological submission and political allegiance.
Even towering Maghribi figures such as Abū Bakr ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 543/1148), al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (d. 544/1149), and Ibn al-ʿArīf (d. 536/1141), were folded into the Almohad project, exiled to Marrakesh, or pressed into a theological vision that left little room for the Suhrawardian model of disciplined companionship. The institutional Shaykh, the carefully vetted guide of the Niẓāmiyya system, could not compete with the Mahdi. The poem's exclusivist devotion, designed to prevent the fragmentation of spiritual authority, was powerless before a figure who unified authority by declaring himself its eschatological terminus.
This is why the Sharīšiyya remained a latent text: admired, transmitted, occasionally studied, but not yet a social program. The ribāṭ system was too deeply rooted, its charismatic authority too embedded, its tribal networks too resilient for a Baghdad-style pedagogy to impose itself in a single generation. Even Abū Madyan—one of the most influential Moroccan shaykhs of his age—embodied this indigenous mode. A former Almoravid soldier, trained by ʿAlī ibn Ḥarāzim and Abū Yaʿzā Yalnūr (d. 572/1177), he operated within maraboutic, not Niẓāmī, structures. His encounter with al-Jīlānī during the pilgrimage was spiritually significant but did not transplant Baghdad's institutional model into the Maghrib. He remained, fundamentally, a saint of the ribāṭ horizon.
Only after the Almohad period—during the transitional decades leading to the Marinid rise—did the Maghrib acquire the conditions for the poem to circulate widely. The theological rigidity of the Almohads softened; the ribāṭs remained powerful but now interacted more fluidly with urban scholarship; and the Qarawiyyīn began incorporating elements of institutional ethics into their own pedagogical repertoire. Fez scholars such as Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Hazmīrī al-Dukkālī (d. 678/1279) adopted the Sharīšiyya not as a replacement for indigenous sainthood, but as a grammar capable of disciplining it. By the time of Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān al-Jazūlī (d. 870/1465), the poem finally became an integral tool for articulating a specifically Maghribi form of regulated companionship.
From this angle, the Sharīšiyya is not simply mystical composition but a mechanism of social consolidation—an attempt to domesticate Fez's pluralism and prevent fragmentation of spiritual authority. Its Maghribi form intensifies what was implicit in Suhrawardī: reorienting devotion away from the city's many shrines toward one living Shaykh who absorbs the totality of the disciple's ethical, emotional, and cognitive life. In Fez—a city of competing qutbs, merchants, artisans, ascetics, and storytellers—such a poem would be most necessary and most contested. And it is within this hybrid world (part Baghdad, part Fez, part ribāṭ, part madrasa) that al-Dabbāgh emerges: a Moroccan saint whose lived charisma would ultimately surpass the very institutional models that sought to contain it.
3. The Twenty Pillars of the Sharīšiyya Tarbiya: A Maghribi Manual of Discipleship
The Sharīšiyya system does not merely prescribe etiquette; it constructs an entire anthropology of spiritual discipline shaped by the institutional imagination of Baghdad and adapted to the complex spiritual topography of Morocco. Its twenty pillars form a continuous chain, each one tightening the architecture of obedience, surrender, and psychic reorientation that transforms a novice into a murīd. What appears, at first glance, as scattered advice is in fact a deliberate program designed to produce a specific kind of human being capable of submitting wholly to a single authority and advancing through a carefully supervised path of spiritual labour.
The early pillars establish the ontology of the shaykh. In this model, the shaykh is not merely a teacher of law or a transmitter of blessings; he is the axis around which the disciple's moral universe turns.
Pillar 1: The Dual Knowledge Requirement
"If he lacks knowledge of ẓāhir
and bāṭin, throw him into the depths of the sea."The authentic shaykh must master both exoteric sciences (fiqh, ḥadīth, kalām) and esoteric realities (maʿrifa, spiritual states, the science of hearts). This dual requirement distinguishes the Suhrawardian model from earlier, more charismatic forms of Sufism. The shaykh is not a wild ecstatic or an untrained visionary; he is a scholar-saint, a figure who has completed the institutional curriculum before being granted authority over souls.
The metaphor is medical:
"If he does not unite both descriptions
in perfect combination,
then the patient's condition is closest to destruction
when the physician has no knowledge of his illness."
A shaykh ignorant of bāṭin cannot diagnose the murīd's spiritual diseases; one ignorant of ẓāhir cannot prevent him from falling into legal and theological error. The system thus requires a figure who can navigate both the juristic ecology of urban scholarship and the subtle inner terrain of the nafs. This pillar reflects the core anxiety of the institutional model: preventing spiritual authority from detaching itself from legal-theological oversight. The Baghdad model sought to create shaykhs who would never become rivals to the ʿulamāʾ, but rather their spiritual extensions.
Pillar 2: Divine Appointment, Not Self-Proclamation
"Only the one whom Existence has established
and whose banners of victory He has unfurled."
The shaykh's authority must be God-given, not self-declared. This principle attempts to solve the problem of false claimants—those who use spiritual rhetoric to gather followers without genuine realization. The Sharīšiyya insists that authentic shaykhhood reveals itself through divine signs:
"The people of spiritual resolve approach him
with sincerity that makes softness appear in the hardness of rock."
When disciples flock to an authentic shaykh, their sincerity (ṣidq) itself becomes miraculous—capable of softening stone. Yet this creates an epistemological problem the manual cannot fully resolve: how does one distinguish divine appointment from successful charisma? The text offers no mechanism beyond the subjective recognition of "people of resolve" (arbāb al-irāda). This will become significant when al-Dabbāgh appears—an unlettered dyer whose divine appointment is undeniable to those with baṣīra, yet completely invisible by the manual's institutional criteria
Pillar 3: Outward Signs of Inner Purity
"His signs: if he does not incline toward desire,
his dunyā is folded and his ākhira unfurled."
The authentic shaykh displays visible detachment from worldly appetite. His dunyā is "folded" (fī ṭayy) while his ākhira is "unfurled" (fī nashr)—a powerful spatial metaphor suggesting that what occupies most people's attention (worldly concerns) is compressed and hidden in him, while what they neglect (the hereafter) is expanded and manifest.
The poem continues:
"If murīds gather to eat his food,
do not accompany him for a moment of time."
This verse addresses a specific Moroccan context: shaykhs who used hospitality and communal meals to build followings. The Sharīšiyya warns that such gatherings, when they become the center of the relationship, signal a master more interested in social prestige than spiritual guidance.
These outward markers serve a social function: they allow potential disciples to vet the shaykh before committing. Yet the emphasis on visible signs creates a tension:
"If the mirror of his understanding's gaze is rusted,
it shows him the moon's blemishes on the sun's face."
The manual simultaneously warns that outward judgment can deceive. One whose perception is clouded might mistake genuine sanctity for hypocrisy, or charismatic performance for authentic realization. This tension between observable criteria and inner recognition runs throughout the Sharīšiyya and will be exploited by al-Dabbāgh, who violates every outward expectation while embodying every inward reality.
Once the shaykh's stature is secured, the manual turns to the formation of the murīd himself. Here the tone sharpens; the text begins to dissolve the autonomy of the disciple and to reconfigure his interior life.
Pillar 4: The Precondition of Absolute Belief
"Do not approach before you believe he is the murabbī,
none better than him in the age."
Entry into discipleship requires a prior act of iʿtiqād—a binding conviction that this specific shaykh is the best available guide. This is not provisional trust that can be revised upon encountering someone superior; it is a fixed metaphysical commitment. The disciple must believe, before the relationship begins, that no contemporary equals this master.
This pillar reveals the Sharīšiyya's competitive anxiety. In Baghdad, a murīd might study with multiple shaykhs serially or even simultaneously. But in Morocco, where shrines and saints proliferate, the system must secure the murīd's commitment in advance to prevent his gaze from wandering. The murīd must enter already convinced of his shaykh's supremacy, effectively closing the door to comparison before it opens.
Pillar 5: The Corpse Principle—Total Passivity
"Place your nafs in the shaykh's lap like an infant,
so it emerges without ever being weaned from his care and discipline."
The disciple must become like a corpse before the washer—inert, unresisting, without preference. But the poem introduces a more intimate metaphor: the nafs is not merely subdued but nursed. It is handed over to the shaykh as an infant is given to a wet nurse, to be raised entirely within his care. The word ḥijr carries a double resonance: it means both "lap" (the site of intimate care) and "restraint" (the act of prohibition). The murīd's nafs grows up in the shaykh's lap—held, fed, protected—and simultaneously under his ḥijr, his disciplining prohibition.
This is more profound than mere obedience. The system does not ask the murīd to suppress a fully-formed self; it asks him to never let that self form in the first place. The nafs must be raised from infancy within the shaykh's care so that it knows no other reality, no other source of nourishment. When it "emerges" (khurūj), it does so still unweaned (bi-lā faṭm)—meaning its formation is complete, yet its dependence remains absolute. The murīd's will is not broken; it is never allowed to crystallize as separate from the shaykh's will.
This is the Suhrawardian model at its most extreme. It borrows the Shiʿi logic of absolute submission to the Imām but redirects it toward a Sunni master. The psychological effect is similar: the murīd experiences the shaykh as the locus of moral certainty in a cosmos of doubt.
Pillar 6: The Prohibition of Opposition
"Do not oppose him even for a day, for it will scatter you in abandonment."
Any act of resistance—even a momentary hesitation—threatens the entire structure. Opposition is not a minor fault to be corrected; it is a catastrophic rupture that "scatters" (tashtīt) the murīd into spiritual exile (hajr). The relationship is so total that disagreement itself becomes existentially dangerous.
This reflects the institutional model's understanding of tarbiya as a zero-sum bond: either complete submission or total loss. There is no middle ground where the murīd might question a command while maintaining the relationship. The system cannot tolerate negotiation because negotiation implies retained autonomy, and autonomy is precisely what must be destroyed.
Pillar 7: Agreement in Belief, Not Just Action
"Whoever does not agree with his shaykh in belief
remains in the flames of burning coals."
Obedience extends beyond behavior into thought. The murīd must not merely act as if the shaykh is right; he must believe the shaykh is right. Even when the shaykh's action appears "as far from truth as night from dawn," the murīd must hold fast to the conviction that a hidden wisdom justifies it.
This pillar addresses the problem of inner reservation. A disciple might outwardly comply while inwardly doubting, and this concealed disagreement would corrupt the entire process. The Sharīšiyya demands cognitive conformity—a reworking of the murīd's epistemic framework so that the shaykh's judgment becomes the standard of truth.
The system assumes that if the murīd maintains ḥusn al-ẓann (good opinion) despite apparent contradictions, God will eventually unveil the secret wisdom. But this functions as a self-sealing mechanism: doubt is always interpreted as the murīd's deficiency, never as evidence that the shaykh might err.
Pillar 8: The Rational Choice Is Exclusive Loyalty
"The person of sound intellect accepts none but his shaykh,
even if he seems to distance himself from truth."
Here the manual attempts to frame total submission as the rational choice. The "sound intellect" (dhū al-ʿaql) recognizes that appearances deceive and that the shaykh's outward distance from conventional righteousness conceals a "straight hidden face" (wajh mustaqīm).
This is a sophisticated rhetorical move. Rather than asking the murīd to abandon reason, the Sharīšiyya redefines reason as trust in the shaykh's superior knowledge. The truly rational person, it suggests, knows the limits of his own perception and defers to one whose sight is clearer. The seemingly irrational act of following a shaykh who appears to violate norms becomes, paradoxically, the height of rationality.
With both poles of the relationship defined, the text then elaborates the architecture of companionship itself. The relationship between shaykh and murīd becomes a totalizing system of exclusive allegiance.
Pillar 9: Presence Without Distraction
"Do not recognize anyone else in the shaykh's presence,
and do not fill your eyes with sidelong glances."
In the physical space of the shaykh's gathering, no other figure may occupy the murīd's attention. Lateral vision—looking at other attendees, glancing around the room—is forbidden. The murīd's gaze must remain fixed on the shaykh alone.
This seemingly minor rule of etiquette encodes a larger principle: the shaykh is not one voice among many but the singular source of meaning in the murīd's perceptual field. By controlling where the disciple looks, the manual begins to restructure how he sees. The shaykh becomes the interpretive center through which all other reality is filtered.
Pillar 10: Minimal Speech, Maximal Listening
"Do not speak before him unless he calls you to it;
then do not exceed minimal words."
The murīd's default posture is silence. Speech is permitted only when invited, and even then must be brief. This rule has multiple functions: it trains humility, prevents the murīd from imposing his concerns onto the shaykh's agenda, and maintains the hierarchical asymmetry of the relationship.
More subtly, it disciplines the murīd's thought. One who cannot speak freely cannot easily sustain an independent inner narrative. Silence becomes a tool for emptying the mind of its habitual self-talk, creating space for the shaykh's words to penetrate without resistance.
Pillar 11: Vocal and Postural Submission
"Do not raise your voice above his,
and do not laugh loudly in his presence."
Even the volume and tone of the murīd's voice must be regulated. Laughter—especially loud, unrestrained laughter—is particularly dangerous because it signals a moment of forgetting, a lapse into the natural self. The disciplined murīd maintains continuous awareness of the shaykh's presence, never allowing himself the spontaneity that would suggest independence.
This pillar also addresses the symbolic dimension of sound. In a hierarchical order, the loudest voice belongs to the highest rank. By requiring the murīd to speak more softly than the shaykh, the manual inscribes authority into the acoustic space of the gathering.
Pillar 12: Bodily Postures of Subordination
"Do not sit cross-legged before him, nor with your back turned,
nor spread your prayer mat in his presence."
The body itself becomes a text of submission. Certain postures (sitting cross-legged, reclining) signal comfort and equality; others (kneeling, standing at attention) signal deference. The prohibition against spreading one's own prayer mat in the shaykh's presence is particularly telling—it prevents the murīd from creating his own sacred space within the shaykh's domain. The murīd may not establish an autonomous zone of devotion; all worship occurs within the field of the shaykh's authority.
These rules train the body to hold itself in a permanent state of readiness and submission. Over time, the physical postures internalize as psychological dispositions. The murīd who cannot relax physically cannot relax spiritually; his body itself becomes a constant reminder of his subordinate position.
Pillar 13: Radical Humility Before All Creation
"Do not see any believer or unbeliever beneath you until you enter the grave,
for the end is hidden and one who is not at loss fears deception."
This pillar shifts from the shaykh to the broader community. The murīd must cultivate universal humility, recognizing that his own spiritual status is uncertain until death. Even the manifest sinner might be forgiven, and even the outwardly pious might be deceived. The murīd who judges others reveals that he still trusts his own perception—a trust the system seeks to destroy.
This teaching serves multiple purposes. It prevents the murīd from developing spiritual pride, keeps him focused on his own faults rather than others', and reinforces his dependence on the shaykh as the only reliable judge of spiritual rank. If the murīd cannot trust his assessment of others, he certainly cannot trust his assessment of himself; thus the shaykh's evaluation becomes the sole measure.
Pillar 14: Total Detachment from Human Opinion
"Do not look toward creation, for it releases
the pure soul into muddy captivity."
The murīd must achieve complete indifference to human approval or disapproval. To "look toward creation" means to shape one's actions according to how others will perceive them—the essence of riyāʾ (ostentation). The Sharīšiyya warns that such dependence on external validation imprisons the soul in "muddy captivity" (kadar al-asr), contaminating the purity (ṣafāʾ) that tarbiya seeks to cultivate.
This pillar establishes an impossible standard: the murīd must live in society without being affected by it, must interact with people without caring what they think, must perform worship publicly without any trace of self-consciousness. The only way to approach this ideal is through total absorption in the shaykh, whose gaze replaces the gaze of creation.
Al-Dabbāgh will radicalize this principle, teaching that the greatest sin is not conventional wrongdoing but allowing an hour to pass without the shaykh in one's heart. The Sharīšiyya makes the shaykh the antidote to riyāʾ; al-Dabbāgh makes the shaykh the very content of consciousness.
Pillar 15: The Prohibition of Spiritual Mobility
"Do not know anyone else in the shaykh's presence" extends to: do
not visit other saints, do not seek counsel elsewhere, do not allow divided loyalty.
The poem makes literal what was previously implied: the murīd's attention must never drift to other sources of authority. But how does the system enforce this? Not primarily through external prohibition—no shaykh can police every shrine visit or casual consultation—but through the internalization of watchfulness. The phrase "raqīb al-iltifāt li-ghayrihi" (the watchfulness against turning to another) suggests an interior guardian, a psychological mechanism that triggers guilt or anxiety at the mere thought of seeking elsewhere.
This creates a form of spiritual monogamy that operates through emotional conditioning rather than explicit rules. The murīd learns to experience even innocent adjacency to other saints as potential betrayal. A visit to another shaykh's tomb, even for general blessings, begins to feel like infidelity. Seeking counsel from another scholar on a point of fiqh—something entirely normal in Baghdad's differentiated system—now carries the weight of disloyalty. The system installs what could be called a "devotional reflex": the murīd's heart cools automatically when approached by other sources of spiritual authority, not because he has been commanded to feel this way, but because the bond with his own shaykh has become so totalizing that it crowds out all other attachments. The architecture of exclusive companionship is complete when the murīd no longer needs to be told whom to avoid—his entire affective economy has been restructured around a single center.
Al-Dabbāgh's circle will demonstrate this principle in practice: disciples' hearts "cool" toward other saints upon meeting him. Some feel active prohibition from visiting other shrines—not through explicit command but through somatic resistance (stomach pains at tombs, inability to approach). The Sharīšiyya prescribes this as discipline; al-Dabbāgh embodies it as metaphysical reality.
Having secured the shaykh, reconfigured the murīd, and structured the relationship between them, the manual addresses what happens when spiritual experiences begin to emerge.
Pillar 16: Concealment of Karāmāt
"If God arranges karāmāt in lines,
do not reveal a single letter to anyone except the shaykh."
When extraordinary experiences occur—visions, unveilings, intuitions, miraculous occurrences—the murīd must conceal them from everyone except the shaykh. Public disclosure of karāmāt serves no spiritual purpose and carries multiple dangers: it feeds the ego, invites false interpretation from the ignorant, and exposes the murīd to envy and slander.
The shaykh alone can discern whether an experience is authentic or delusional, whether it marks progress or distraction. He is described as "running upon the ocean of unveiling" (yajrī ʿalā baḥr kashf al-sirr), suggesting that he navigates the dangerous waters of spiritual experience with expertise the murīd lacks.
This pillar reinforces the shaykh's monopoly on interpretation. The murīd may experience the divine, but only the shaykh can tell him what his experience means. By requiring total disclosure to the shaykh while forbidding disclosure to anyone else, the system ensures that the shaykh remains the sole gatekeeper of spiritual knowledge.
Pillar 17: Total Transparency—No Event Unshared
"Do not act independently on any event that occurs,
for your eyes are in darkness and your hearing is deaf."
The murīd must report everything to the shaykh: not only karāmāt but also temptations, doubts, dreams, slips, inner movements. Nothing may remain private. The relationship demands total transparency, a complete exposure of the murīd's inner world to the shaykh's diagnostic gaze.
The metaphor is striking: the murīd is described as blind and deaf, incapable of perceiving reality accurately. Only the shaykh's vision is clear. Thus the murīd must "flee to him in all crises" (firr ilayhi fī al-muhimmāt kullihā), treating the shaykh not merely as a consultant but as a refuge, a shelter from the chaos of his own misperceptions.
This pillar creates a condition of total dependence. The murīd cannot trust his own judgment about anything, from major life decisions to passing spiritual states. Self-reliance becomes a form of arrogance; dependence becomes the mark of wisdom.
Al-Dabbāgh will transform this into a reciprocal covenant. In his circle, not only does the murīd disclose everything to the shaykh, but the shaykh discloses everything to the murīd—even his sins, his struggles, his moments of weakness. The Sharīšiyya's one-way transparency becomes, in the Dabbāghian model, a mutual unveiling that creates intimacy rather than hierarchy.
Pillar 18: Consultation Before Independent Action
"Do not improve a good deed in his absence without returning to consult him,
lest you flee toward the attack."
Even when the murīd believes he is acting virtuously, he must not trust his own judgment. What appears to him as an improvement (ḥusn al-fiʿl) might, from the shaykh's perspective, be a step backward. The phrase "flee toward the attack" (tafrr ilā al-karr) suggests that unguided action, even when well-intentioned, often leads the murīd into spiritual danger rather than away from it.
This pillar addresses the subtle danger of spiritual ambition—the murīd who adds extra fasts, lengthens his vigils, or intensifies his worship without permission. Such efforts, though outwardly praiseworthy, might spring from ego rather than genuine devotion. The shaykh's role is to distinguish between the two and to calibrate the murīd's efforts according to his actual capacity and spiritual state.
The system thus forbids both sin and unauthorized virtue. The murīd's entire spiritual economy must be regulated by the shaykh, who alone knows the appropriate measure of effort for each stage.
The final pillars describe the horizon of the path, setting out the purpose of tarbiya: purification, illumination, and gradual ascension through supervised stages.
Pillar 19: The Station of Repentance
"When you enter the station of tawba,
its preservation requires mujāhada through nothing but patience."
Repentance is not a single act but an ongoing maqām that must be guarded through continuous struggle. This struggle takes the form of four types of patience: Patience in performing obligatory acts at their proper times, Patience in restraining from the forbidden across all times, Patience in performing recommended acts in every state, and Patience in bearing the disliked without compulsion.
Tawba also requires muḥāsaba (self-accounting)—a daily reckoning of one's actions, thoughts, and spiritual state. The murīd must "watch his breaths in every moment" and "describe the five senses with precision and constraint," maintaining vigilant awareness of how each faculty is employed.
Within this station dwell the states of khawf (fear), ṣabr (patience), and riḍā (contentment), as well as rajāʾ (hope). The murīd oscillates between fear of his own inadequacy and hope in divine mercy, between the struggle of self-discipline and the peace of accepting God's decree.
The Sharīšiyya presents tawba not as the entry point to the path but as a profound station that can occupy the murīd for years. This reflects the institutional model's emphasis on gradual transformation: spiritual states are not gifts suddenly bestowed but achievements slowly won through disciplined labour.
Pillar 20: The Station of Zuhd (Renunciation)
"The station of zuhd is reached only by one free from planning, autonomous power,
and personal strength, who sees God's promise with certain vision."
Zuhd represents a higher stage than tawba. Where tawba focuses on correcting wrong action, zuhd focuses on emptying attachment. The true zāhid has "folded his dunyā" entirely—not merely abstaining from the forbidden but becoming indifferent to both gain and loss, comfort and hardship.
The defining characteristic is internal freedom: the zāhid sees prosperity and adversity as equal (sawāʾ) because he perceives them both as issuing from God's will. He has achieved such certainty in divine providence that he experiences "no safety in abundance and no fear in scarcity."
This station also involves radical scrupulousness (waraʿ) about ‘halal sources. The Sharīšiyya insists that true waraʿ extends to everything: not only obvious foodstuffs like bread and rice but also vegetables, salt, spices, water from cisterns. The murīd who reaches this station "neither buys nor sells," suggesting complete withdrawal from economic participation.
The manual presents zuhd as preparatory to the higher stations of love (maḥabba) and extinction (fanāʾ), but insists that these cannot be approached through personal effort. Zuhd marks the end of what the murīd can accomplish through discipline; beyond this point, all progress depends on divine gift.
Taken together, the twenty pillars form nothing less than a charter for the Suhrawardian model's Maghribi afterlife. They translate Baghdad's political and spiritual anxieties into the social fabric of Fez. They attempt to create a disciple immune to the seductive pluralism of Moroccan saintly culture, a disciple who no longer drifts between shrines or participates in the fluid devotional economy of the ribāṭs. They aspire to produce a vertical, hierarchical bond in a land accustomed to horizontal, charismatic networks. And they provide a framework for a model of sainthood that is stable, supervised, and insulated from the volatility that once gave rise to figures like al-Ḥallāj or, closer to the Maghribi experience, Ibn Tūmart.
Yet the manual cannot escape its own tensions. It demands outward signs of authentic shaykhhood while warning that such signs can deceive. It requires absolute conviction in the shaykh's supremacy while acknowledging that many false claimants exist. It prescribes a graduated path while insisting that the highest stations arrive only as divine gifts. It constructs an architecture of control while pointing toward a goal—fanāʾ—that by definition exceeds all control.
Yet for all their systematicity, the pillars cannot escape their own internal contradictions. The manual demands that the shaykh possess visible outward signs—detachment from wealth, freedom from enemies, dignified comportment—while simultaneously warning that "one whose mirror of understanding is rusted will see the moon's blemishes on the sun's face." It requires the murīd to form absolute conviction about the shaykh's supremacy before entering discipleship, yet offers no reliable mechanism for discerning true from false claimants beyond the circular logic of subjective recognition. It prescribes a graduated, methodical path through tawba and zuhd toward maḥabba and fanāʾ, yet insists that the highest stations arrive only as unearned divine gifts. It constructs an elaborate architecture of human effort while pointing toward a goal that by definition transcends all human construction.
Most tellingly, the manual attempts to simulate the psychological effects of Shiʿi ʿiṣma without making the metaphysical claim. The shaykh is to be obeyed as if infallible, trusted as if incapable of error, followed even when he appears "as far from truth as night from dawn"—yet the system must simultaneously maintain that he remains a fallible human being subject to oversight by the broader scholarly community. This tension is never resolved; it is managed through rhetorical devices that shift responsibility onto the murīd's perception rather than the shaykh's action. If the shaykh's behavior seems wrong, the fault lies in the murīd's limited vision, not in the shaykh's judgment. The system thus creates what it needs—a figure whose authority approaches the absolute—while maintaining plausible deniability about the claim.
It is precisely here that the drama of al-Dabbāgh will unfold. For if the Sharīšiyya represents the most articulate expression of institutional tarbiya ever produced in the Maghrib, al-Dabbāgh represents not its rejection but its metabolization and transcendence. The manual constructs a world where discipline produces illumination; al-Dabbāgh embodies illumination that then expresses itself through (and beyond) discipline. The manual assumes progress through method; al-Dabbāgh receives openings without method, yet writes commentary on the method itself in the chapter "Shaykh al-Tarbiya." The manual binds the disciple to a human shaykh in physical co-presence; al-Dabbāgh affirms this necessity while revealing that he met his own shuyūkh "from long distance" (ʿan buʿd), never in the flesh, across the barzakh—a metaphysical silsila that preserves the principle of tarbiya while shattering its institutional form.
The twenty pillars thus become, retrospectively, not the doctrine al-Dabbāgh rejects but the vocabulary he inherits and elevates. They describe the architecture that al-Dabbāgh's existence does not collapse but relocates—from the physical plane to the metaphysical, from the institutional to the interior, from the externally supervised to the internally spontaneous. They are the pedagogical system his charisma does not oppose but surpasses, demonstrating that the system's deepest truths operate at a level the system itself could not articulate. When al-Dabbāgh tells his disciples, "my ḥaḍra is the entire cosmos; wherever you seek me, you find me," he is not abandoning the Sharīšiyya's demand for continuous presence before the shaykh—he is revealing what that presence truly means when freed from the accidents of location and embodiment.
This is why al-Dabbāgh can write commentary on the Sharīšiyya despite being semi-illiterate, can name his shuyūkh despite never meeting them, can embody perfect tarbiya despite violating every institutional prerequisite. He is not pre-institutional, operating in ignorance of Baghdad's model; he is post-institutional, having absorbed the model so completely that he can see through its surface forms to the metaphysical realities they were always attempting to encode. He does not reject the necessity of the shaykh; he demonstrates that true shuyūkh can operate through dimensions—the barzakh, the realm of spiritual vision, the interior presence in the heart—that the institutional model has no language to theorize.
The manual's twenty pillars therefore stand as both achievement and limitation. They represent the furthest extent to which the Suhrawardian imagination could travel in codifying the relationship between master and disciple, in translating the Shiʿi Imām's charisma into Sunni institutional forms, in disciplining the fluid, horizontal networks of Moroccan sanctity into vertical hierarchies of supervised ascent. They are a monument to the institutional mind's ambition to capture, regulate, and reproduce spiritual transformation.
But they are also, inevitably, the measure of what such codification cannot achieve. For in attempting to regulate charisma, they reveal how charisma always exceeds regulation. In attempting to prescribe the conditions for recognizing authentic shaykhs, they expose how recognition finally depends on baṣīra that no checklist can guarantee. In attempting to create a graduated path to the highest stations, they must finally admit that the highest stations arrive not through method but through divine election (iṣṭifāʾ) that no human effort can compel. The manual constructs its elaborate edifice only to point, in its final verses, toward a reality beyond its own categories—"stations above these, which have not passed through thought."
This manual therefore is not only a historical document; it is the mirror that allows us to see the distinctiveness of Moroccan spirituality and the genius of its response to Baghdad's inheritance. It preserves the institutional dream of disciplined ascent with extraordinary clarity and sophistication. Yet the lived landscape of Fez—with its ribāṭs, its saints, its shrines, its markets, and its unlettered masters who receive universes of knowledge without opening a book—reveals what happens when that dream encounters a culture whose spiritual grammar is older, deeper, and more fluid than any manual could contain.
The twenty pillars stand as the most articulate expression of that dream, meticulously constructed, internally coherent, and pedagogically sophisticated. They represent centuries of accumulated wisdom about how to guide souls, discipline egos, and protect disciples from the dangers of unguided spiritual ambition. They are, in their own terms, a remarkable achievement of Islamic institutional thought.
And they are, simultaneously, the architecture that Morocco will digest, transform, and transcend—not through rejection but through a process of metabolization that preserves their deepest principles while relocating them to a plane the architects themselves could not envision. When al-Dabbāgh emerges in seventeenth-century Fez, he will prove that the pillars were never the foundation—they were the scaffolding. And the building they were meant to support had already been standing, in Moroccan soil, long before Baghdad sent its blueprints westward.
4. The Al-Ibrīz Manual of Tarbiya: A Dabbāghī Critique of Institutional Sainthood
Tarbiya, in the world of al-Dabbāgh, is neither a curriculum nor an institution. It is a physics of the soul, a technology of stripping the self from its falsifications until it becomes capable of bearing the secret. The shaykh is not a professor, not a moral policeman, not a Sufi shareholder in the Nizāmiyya university system. He is a presence. His task is not to “teach” but to cut darkness from the disciple’s essence until the heart becomes a vessel for light. Tarbiya is therefore the art of returning the human being to its original clarity, not through intellectual training but through re-orientation of the inner axis.
When al-Dabbāgh is asked whether tarbiya has ended—as Zarrūq al-Fāsī (d. 899/1493) supposedly claimed—his answer is not a legal rebuttal but an ontological one. Tarbiya, he says, is as old as the human soul. It appears in different climates across history: in the first generations of Islam, purification happened naturally because hearts were born leaning toward God; later, as desires thickened and thought scattered, the shaykh became necessary as a surgeon of the inner night. His role is not pedagogical superiority; it is the ability to see the attachments woven around the disciple’s self, and to burn them through presence, himma (aspiration), and companionship. This is the Al-Ibriz spirit: the shaykh as a gravitational field, not a schoolmaster.
Tarbiya as Transformation, Not Instruction
In al-Dabbāgh’s exposition, tarbiya is not a “program.” It is the alignment of two essences: the murīd’s terrestrial self (al-dhāt al-turābiyya) and the shaykh’s own terrestrial self. Only when the disciple loves the shaykh’s self—not his secrets, not his miracles, not the metaphysical glamour—does the transmission occur. The Al-Ibriz style insists: the secret does not travel through ideas. It travels through attachment, through a bond strong enough that the disciple’s movements synchronize with the shaykh’s inner states.
This is why al-Dabbāgh treats the obsessive modern question: “Who is authorized to do tarbiya?” as fundamentally flawed. For him, tarbiya is not authorized by institutions; it is authorized by light, and light cannot be certified. It can only be recognized.
Presence and Absence — The Inner Continuum
The Sharīshiya imagination of the shaykh assumes a hierarchical relation: the disciple rises by proximity; the shaykh descends by instruction. But al-Dabbāgh redraws the map. The disciple who is elevated by the shaykh’s presence alone—yet collapses the moment he returns home—has not met the shaykh in the realm where tarbiya occurs. He has merely met the man. True tarbiya happens even if the shaykh dies, even if centuries pass. If the disciple’s love for the shaykh stems from faith, not ego, the shaykh’s himma is effective beyond geography and beyond time.
This is a devastating critique of the “Institutional Shaykh”: someone whose authority is tied to physical leadership, administrative presence, disciplinary supervision. Al-Dabbāgh replaces that with a metaphysics of relational love. Proximity is not spatial; it is existential.
Shukr vs. Mujāhada — The Two Engines of the Path
The Nizāmiyya-Ghazzālī model elevates discipline, hunger, watchfulness, moral accountability. Al-Dabbāgh does not dismiss this—he acknowledges its validity—but he insists it is the secondary path, one born after the corruption of hearts. The primordial path, that of prophets and early companions, is the path of shukr: moving not by exhaustion but by intimacy.
This is where Al-Ibriz differs sharply from the institutional madrasa-Sufism that prevailed in post-Ghazzālī centuries. The institutional system built saints by training. The Dabbāghī system reveals saints through gratitude. Shukr is the light that cracks open being from within; mujāhada is the tool used when the door of light has been buried under centuries of desire. Both are valid, but one is original and one is a repair mechanism.
The Murīd’s Capacity: Destiny and Disposition
Al-Dabbāgh rejects any bureaucratic screening of disciples. A person’s eligibility is not decided by the shaykh but discovered by the person themselves through their dominant thoughts. Where the mind wanders, the destiny is written. One who secretly leans toward God—even if drowning in sin—has a nature carved for the path. One who leans toward deceit, ego, or worldly cunning—even if outwardly pious—is not a vessel for the secret.
This is a radical democratization of sainthood. Al-Ibriz does not ask: “Is this man outwardly disciplined? Is he literate? Is he morally polished?” It asks one question only: Where does his inner gravity pull?
The Disaster of Idealizing the Shaykh
Here al-Dabbāgh explodes the entire Sharīshiya-style imaginary of sainthood. Books of manāqib, he says, did more harm than good: they produced a mythology of saints as flawless, invincible, unerring beings. When the ordinary shaykh of a village fails to move a mountain or fails to convert his scandalous nephew, people dismiss him as a fraud.
Al-Dabbāgh calls this spiritual illiteracy. A saint is not a divine subcontractor. He does not command destiny, he does not override the cosmic script, he does not cure all, save all, or predict all. The saint is not a template. The saint is a human touched by excess light. His failures are pedagogical; his limits are theological; his humanity is essential.
This is the cornerstone of Al-Ibriz: Sainthood is not copy-paste.
Variants of sainthood exist like variants of stars—unrepeatable, irregular, unpredictable.
The Sinful Saint — A Necessary Shock
Al-Dabbāgh’s most daring contribution is his theory of the “sinful saint.” He says: sometimes God manifests a saint’s outward sin to save the disciple from worshipping the shaykh. When the murīd’s love begins to drift into divinization, God protects him by letting the shaykh appear in an act that breaks the illusion. The goal is not moral corruption but theological protection: the saint is not God.
Sometimes the saint appears sinful because the seekers arriving are themselves inwardly corrupt; the shaykh becomes a mirror reflecting their darkness. Sometimes he behaves strangely to preserve his terrestrial self from dissolving completely under the intensity of witnessing. Sometimes he retreats into mundane or even scandalous behavior to anchor his soul back into the human plane.
Here tarbiya becomes a dance of shadows and light. Al-Ibriz does not produce well-polished, predictable “holy men.” It produces beings who bend under the weight of divine intensity, whose outward contradictions are not criminality but metaphysical survival mechanisms.
Whenever al-Qarawiyyīn jurists sought to contain al-Dabbāgh’s sainthood, their real target was not the man but the principle he embodied. By the seventeenth century, the Fez madrasa had itself become a ṭarīqa: a structure of initiation, hierarchy, authorised transmitters, regulated apprenticeship, and verifiable chains of knowledge. The boundaries that once separated “legal scholarship” from “spiritual training” had largely dissolved; to the Qarawiyyīn elite, the credentialed scholar was the legitimate spiritual guide, and the disciplined madrasa curriculum constituted the proper path of tarbiya. Sainthood, therefore, was expected to take the shape of the institution that housed it.
Al-Dabbāgh arrived as the anti-model. He represented a form of sainthood that bypassed the madrasa-ṭarīqa altogether: no teacher, no curriculum, no silsila, no recognisable apprenticeship—only the sudden irruption of divine gifting mediated through al-Khiḍr. For institutional scholars, this was not merely irregular; it was destabilising. If sanctity can appear outside the institutional ṭarīqa, then the authority of the institution is no longer guaranteed. Hence their instinctive resistance: to protect the madrasa-ṭarīqa, they had to reject the saint who fulfilled none of its criteria.
It was in this climate that Ibn al-Mubārak intervened with surgical clarity. Al-Ibrīz records debate after debate in which he dismantles the foundational assumption of the institutional model: that grace must submit to form, and that sainthood must resemble its pedagogical container. His challenge was simple yet devastating: How can one legislate divine election? How can the sudden irruption of spiritual presence be confined within categories originally designed to regulate jurisprudence? In defending al-Dabbāgh, he was not opposing learning; he was opposing the illusion that learning can domesticate the sacred.
Thus the controversy surrounding al-Dabbāgh became a paradigmatic moment in Maghribi Sufism: a confrontation between two paths—one institutional, cumulative, and formally transmitted, the other eruptive, unsolicited, and descending without credentials. The debates in al-Ibrīz reveal the decisive insight of the Sharishiya style: no madrasa-ṭarīqa can monopolise a gift that comes only from God.
In this worldview, sainthood is individual, not standardized; existential, not institutional; relational, not scholastic; unpredictable, not programmable; human, not angelic; and always rooted in the interplay between love, destiny, and divine overflow. Al-Dabbāgh's emergence outside every institutional criterion—illiterate, without formal tarbiya, without recognized qutbs, operating from a weaver's workshop in the markets of Fez—proved that wilāya cannot be bureaucratized.
The system assumed that if you followed the method, you would reach the goal. Al-Dabbāgh demonstrated that the goal arrives through iṣṭifāʾ, and when it does, those with sight recognize it regardless of whether the recipient has completed any curriculum. The scholars who validated him were not abandoning their training; they were demonstrating that their training had, at its best, prepared them to recognize the real thing when it appeared in a form their manuals never anticipated. The institutional model's deepest success was not in producing saints but in cultivating the capacity to witness sanctity when it erupted outside institutional control.
The Dabbāghī shaykh is the antidote to the modern demand for expertise, certification, and bureaucratized spirituality. His tarbiya is a wild pedagogy, a pedagogy of unlearning, a pedagogy that collapses the illusion that perfection is outward. He cannot be replicated through tarbiya programs or tariqa franchises. His authority cannot be verified through observable criteria or transferred through hierarchical appointment. He is not a model to be copied. He is a field to be entered. He is not a template. He is a singular event—a convergence of divine choice, sharifian lineage, personal receptivity, and the mysterious operations of grace that no manual can predict and no institution can regulate.
This is why tarbiya, in this model, is not scalable. You cannot systematize encounter. You cannot bureaucratize recognition. You can only witness it when it arrives, and if you have been prepared—through whatever means, institutional or otherwise—your heart will know.
