DAR.SIRR
MOROCCAN SUFISM BY EL HASSANE DEBBARH
I return today with DAR.SIRR as a writer who has chosen responsibility over immediacy, silence over repetition, and depth over visibility. This space gathers more than ten years of retreat, research, field immersion, and intellectual maturation. It is not the continuation of a project, but the articulation of a position.
I am Mawlay El Hassane Debbarh, born in Fez, descending from the Idrissid House through the ancient al-Dabbagh lineage. Lineage, for me, is not a claim to authority but a burden of continuity: an obligation to think rigorously, to write carefully, and to confront Moroccan history where spirituality, power, and genealogy have always been entangled. DAR.SIRR emerges from this responsibility.
My work approaches Moroccan Islam as a living structure shaped simultaneously by taṣawwuf, makhzan (political authority), territorial organization, and inherited sanctity. I read Moroccan history not as a sequence of dynasties or schools alone, but as a slow intelligence formed through ribāṭs, saints, zawāyā, routes, and lineages that preceded and conditioned later juridical and institutional frameworks. Central to this reading is an unresolved fracture within Islam itself—the Sunni–Shīʿi divide—and its decisive role in shaping authority, madhhab growth, and the politics of sanctity in the Maghrib.
DAR.SIRR is therefore not neutral…
Long before Mawlāy Idrīs crossed the mountains into Walīlī (Volubilis), Morocco was already an ancient and self-conscious civilization. To the Greeks, it was the land of the Mauroi; to the Romans, it was Mauretania Tingitana, a kingdom whose rulers negotiated with emperors and whose cavalry rode in distant provinces from Britannia to Syria. The celebrated Juba II—scholar, geographer, and philosopher—reigned here with his queen Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Egypt’s last pharaoh. Their capital at Volubilis stood as one of the great cities of the Mediterranean world, where Roman administration, local Moorish culture, and Hellenistic learning blended into a uniquely Moroccan synthesis. Across the plains and coastal zones, cities like Sala, Tingis, and Tamuda flourished with commerce, agriculture, stone architecture, and maritime trade. Christianity spread early through these regions; bishops and monastic communities became part of the Moroccan landscape. Even the Canary Islands lay within Morocco’s maritime sphere, confirming that this was not a marginal land but a sovereign world with deep cultural roots.
In the topography of Moroccan Sufism, sainthood often appears in pairs. In the 7th/13th century, we encounter ʿAbd al-Salām Ibn Mashīsh (d. 622/1225) and his disciple Abū ʼl-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī (d. 656/1258); five centuries later, the couple Abū Fāris ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Masʿūd al-Dabbāgh (d. 1132/1720) and Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn al-Mubārak al-Sijilmāsī (d. 1156/1743) occupies a structurally similar place. Both pairs enact the same spiritual drama: a "hidden" Moroccan pole (quṭb)—noble in lineage (sharīf), socially marginal, and portrayed as unlettered—whose authority rests on sainthood (wilāya) and Muhammadan inheritance (wirātha); alongside a highly trained jurist-scholar, often emerging from rural environments, who translates that ineffable experience into disciplined discourse, devotional liturgy, and institutional memory.
Yet the case of al-Dabbāgh exceeds the purely dyadic model. His emergence in early 18th-century Fez must be situated within a triple field of authority that defined ʿAlawī Morocco: the empire centered in Meknes, commanding military force and administrative apparatus; the scholarly establishment of al-Qarawiyyīn, wielding juridical legitimacy and intellectual prestige; and the Idrissid sharifian lineages of Fez, whose claims rested on genealogical proximity to the Prophet ﷺ and the charismatic distribution of baraka. Al-Dabbāgh's appearance introduced what this study terms "the third authority": a form of spiritual sovereignty that operated outside formal institutions yet claimed jurisdiction over the invisible architecture of the cosmos itself.
In the 13th/19th century, the Fāsī scholar and mystic Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥadīdh al-Dabbāgh (d. 1291/1874), known as Abū Ṭarbūsh, reported a vision that crystallized his family's self-understanding. As recorded by ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Kattānī in al-Maẓāhir al-Samiyya, Abū Ṭarbūsh encountered the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ near Wādī al-Shurafāʾ in Fez. The Prophet ﷺ commanded him to accompany him to Rāʾs al-Jinān Gate, where they found a great quantity of the finest white flour. When asked his opinion of its quality, Abū Ṭarbūsh confirmed it was of the finest kind. The Prophet ﷺ then declared that the Dabbaghs were the best of his progeny.