From a mountain in the Rif to Marrakech.

The Shadhiliyya is one of the great Sufi paths of Islam, and the one most deeply rooted in Morocco. It takes its name from Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, born around 1196 among the Ghumara of northern Morocco. He studied in Fez, then travelled east in search of a master. In Iraq he was told that the one he sought lived in his own country. He came home to Jbel Alam and became the disciple of Moulay Abdessalam Ibn Mashish.

From there he carried the teaching to Tunisia, where the village of Shadhila gave him his name, and on to Egypt. He died in 1258 at Humaithara, on the road to the pilgrimage. His successors in Alexandria wrote the teaching down, above all Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh, whose Ḥikam are still read wherever Sufism is taught.

The path asks for no special dress and no withdrawal from the world. Its followers keep their work and their families, hold to the Sharia and the Sunna, and fill ordinary days with remembrance of God, gratitude, and a litany recited morning and evening. Its best-known prayers are the Ṣalāt al-Mashīshiyya of Ibn Mashish and the Ḥizb al-Baḥr, the Litany of the Sea, of al-Shadhili.

In Morocco the path was renewed in the fifteenth century by Imam Muhammad al-Jazuli, author of the Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, and again around 1800 by Moulay al-Arbi al-Darqawi. Many of the country’s orders trace their chain through it. Our retreats follow that chain on the ground, from the mountain of Ibn Mashish to the tomb of al-Jazuli and the Nasiri zawiya of Tamegroute.