At the Station of the Master (I)

Fez has been Morocco’s intellectual capital and, on account of the presence of the blessed mausoleum of Maulana Sheikh Sidi Ahmad al-Tijani [RA] founder of the Tijaniyyah Order, it is also the indisputable religious capital of the kingdom and perhaps of the entire Maghrib. When followers of the International Organisation of Tijaniyyah Brotherhood gathered there […]

Fez has been Morocco’s intellectual capital and, on account of the presence of the blessed mausoleum of Maulana Sheikh Sidi Ahmad al-Tijani [RA] founder of the Tijaniyyah Order, it is also the indisputable religious capital of the kingdom and perhaps of the entire Maghrib. When followers of the International Organisation of Tijaniyyah Brotherhood gathered there mid-May for a three-day retreat, it was a moment for stock-taking and fraternal self-congratulation.
As speaker after speaker alluded to the virtues of the order, one of them reeled off a list of the best of the continent’s best in various areas of Islamic scholarship—fiqh, tafsir, philosophy, tarikh, kalam, akhlaq, tasawwuf, Arabic grammar, matiq and aqa’id. And all of them were Tijani scholars. Another alluded to the fact that we owe the very Islam that we practice and the very independence we enjoy today to the sacrifice of Sufi scholars of the Tijaniyyah and allied orders.
For Muslims of the Western Sudan, the Sahelian and the Savannah regions of sub-Saharan West and Central Africa, most especially those in areas where Sufi orders have had such a strong hold, Islam has remained close to heart; and the people have retained and, through thick and thin, guarded their Islamic identity. Confronted by the spectacle of an invading force of European armies in the 18th and 19th centuries, the sheikhs of the Tariqa brotherhoods met at the Hajj and decided to abandon the traditional quietism often associated with Sufi orders and led their societies in heroic and epic resistance in defence of Muslim land and honour. The discipline of Sufi brotherhoods helped in no small measure for the mass mobilisation of society in readiness for the process of resistance to colonialism. Obviously, Tijaniyyah has more than enough to be proud of for its legacy of knowledge and muscular independence.
It was the Jihad of Imam Mansur Ushurma in Chechnya towards the end of the 18th century that pioneered and seemed to have set the stage for the series of religion-inspired anti-colonial struggles that were to sweep the Muslim World from the Caucasus to the Atlantic Ocean and West Africa to the west, and to the Horn of Africa, China and the south-eastern reaches of the Indian Ocean to the south, east and the south-east.
Imam Ushurma’s struggle against royal Tsarist, pre-Soviet Russia was picked up and continued by his younger contemporary, the legendary Imam Shamil of Daghestan. Though outnumbered 100 to 1 by Russian forces, the Imam and his Chechen and Daghestani murids of the Naqshbandiyyah continued to resist and battle the Russians for 25 years until his capture in 1859.
In West Africa, Sheikh Umar al-Futi, or Hajj Umar Tal, as he is more popularly known to history, was the scourge of French colonialists in the West African sub-region, where he set up the largest, if shortest-lived, state ever in Africa, covering the areas of present-day Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Mali.
He fought gallantly and refused to surrender to the French until he and his Tijaniyyah followers attained collective martyrdom, aware that their end would not be the end of Islam, which was by then already flourishing as a viable state to the west in Sokoto under the leadership of his in-laws. Umar al-Futi, a Tijaniyyah Sufi par excellence, wrote Rimah al-Hizb and Jawahir al-Ma’ani, with which critics of the Tijaniyyah in Nigeria seem to be overly obsessed.
In North Africa, the strongest opposition to French colonial presence in Algeria was led by Amir Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi, a Sufi sheikh of the Qadiriyya. It was a struggle that was bitterer and more of an epic than the Algerian War of Independence; but it was nevertheless prosecuted with full Islamic chivalry. Many were the times Sheikh Abd al-Qadir would apologise to, and release all, his French prisoners because he didn’t have enough to feed them.
In 1828, Sheikh Abd al-Qadir met Imam Shamil of Daghestan during the Hajj, and discussed their respective Jihads against the Russians and the French and appealed to fellow Muslims for support. It was also during this meeting that Abd al-Qadir taught him the guerrilla tactics that he used to keep the Russians at bay for so long. If they were to do this today, they would be put in jail by the Saudis who would not allow a discussion of the problems of the Muslim; they and their minions would say there should be no politics during the Hajj.
Meanwhile, in the Sudan, already in ferment as a result of Messianism, Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi led his Sufi followers to confront the invading British. Brought up on the Ratib and cross-fertilised spirituality of Samaniyyah, Khalwatiyyah and his own Mahdawiyyah, he routed the combined forces of a British-Egyptian partnership. By 1882 the Mahdist Army had taken control of suburban Khartoum, and by the end of the following year, his Ansar had annihilated three Egyptian armies sent against them; and when the last contingent, numbering 8,000 men, was sent under the command of British General William Hicks, it was cut down almost to a man.
Three years later, the Mahdi overran the garrison defending Khartoum, captured General Charles Gordon, the commander of the joint British-Egyptian forces, and beheaded him. Thereafter, the British took to their heels, and as long as the Mahdi lived, they left Sudan in peace.
In Libya’s Cyrenaica, Omar al-Mukhtar, a follower of the Sanusiyyah Sufi order, was the one who singlehandedly organized and led the powerful guerrilla resistance struggle against the Italian colonization of that country.  He fought this way for 20 years against Italian invaders, and when he was finally captured on September 11, 1921, Italian justice was on full display. He was captured on September 11, put on trial on September 13, convicted on September 14, and publicly hanged on September 16.
It was the same story in all other parts of the Muslim World. In Indonesia, it was a combination of the efforts of the sheikhs of Naqshabandiyyah, Qadiriyyah and the Shattariyyah orders that decimated the Dutch in the famous ten-year Padri War of 1821; in China, it was sheikhs of the Naqshabandi order who led the other bitter ten-year long struggle against Chinese colonialism in 1862; and Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Hasan of the Salihiyya Sufi order led the 20-year long Somali anti-colonial war against a combination of British, Italian and Ethiopian forces up to 1921. In Morocco, the Tijaniyyah Sufi shaykhs Sidi Muhammad ibn Abd al-Qadir al-Kattani and the Mauritanian Sufi Ahmad al-Hibah led the anti-colonial struggle against the French and Spanish forces and laid down their lives in the course of their people’s freedom.
It is clear that sheikhs of the Tariqah orders have been, not only the commanders-in-chief of the fight for the survival of Muslim societies, they have been the true saviours of the Islamic spirit. Without their efforts, all those today vilifying the Tariqah will have been devout and devoted idol-worshippers, falling prostrate with full ikhlas before the crocodiles of River Kaduna, the jinns of Shere Hills, and some of them will have been the high priests of Dala and Tsumburbura gods and goddesses.
In every clime, Tariqah has been the armour that ensures Muslim physical and spiritual safety and sense of community; but, unfortunately, even as it rose to the defence of Islam, that sense of Ummah as an integrated world community of believers, was at that very time being breached by the rise of Anglo-Wahhabism and related misfortunes, whose specialty lies in giving great comfort to the international enemies of Islam. So, now, it may begin to be clear why British colonialism and Orientalism will be interested in supporting or even sponsoring a phenomenon that fights Sufism, especially the Tijaniyyah Order that had such a proud spiritual past and promises of an even greater and more glorious future.
Among Muslims the most learned have always been the true Sufis—that is, the real urafa—who, besides cultivating Islamic scholarship to the level of profoundest erudition, possess a body of knowledge no scholarship, research or instruction can bestow, because it is ultimately supra-rational and essentially experiential. But the critics, without knowing the Prophet [SAW]—his blessed status, which is beyond any human limitations, the blessed sublimity of his Prophetic station and without a mature grasp of the spirit of his blessed message, they think they can be the vanguard and embodiment of his blessed Sunnah, while they in fact know nothing of Islam but the pitiless intolerance of their own invention and the narrow-mindedness that always goes with superficiality.
A little knowledge even, and especially, of religion is a truly dangerous thing, often in our case proving fatal. According to those who should know, without self-purification, knowledge—even when it is real, correct knowledge obtained from scholars and not from books on one’s own—leads only to the rise and ascendancy of corruption, divisiveness and rancour in society and among the scholars; and, for the possessor, it leads to nothing other than the intellectual arrogance that denies what it doesn’t know. These are those who pillory what they don’t understand, deny what they don’t know and reject what they can’t fathom; because they are, in the words of a contemporary saint, embarked on the straight path that leads to imperfect knowledge or a perfect ignorance.