To begin with, in the text of the
recollections of Dr. Marcel Carret which Dr. Lings has included in
Chapter I of his book as a means of broaching his subject,[4] we find
almost at the outset a record of the impression made by the Shaikh
al-'Alawi on the French doctor during his first visit to the Shaikh at
the Mostaganem zāwiyah: "The first thing that struck me was his likeness
to the usual representations of Christ. His clothes, so nearly if not
exactly the same as those which Jesus must have worn, the fine lawn
head-cloth which framed his face, his whole attitude—everything
conspired to reinforce the likeness. It occurred to me that such must
have been the appearance of Christ when he received his disciples at the
time when he was staying with Martha and Mary". We must bear in mind
also, in this connection, the doctor's final impression of this first
meeting: "I withdrew discreetly, carrying with me an impression which,
after more than twenty years, remains as clearly engraved on my memory
as if it was barely yesterday since all this took place". Some
paragraphs later, still speaking of the Shaikh Al-'Alawī, Dr. Carret
uses the phrase "that Christ-like face". Many readers will think,
especially since these phrases come from the pen of a modern European
who would have neither the inclination nor the means of making finer
distinctions in recording his impressions, that this is a summary
reference to a wide-spread notion of sainthood based on an aesthetic
kind of analogy. There are however reasons for thinking otherwise, and
several further considerations may serve to explain, at least to a
certain extent, the "likeness" brought out in the doctor's account
which, in the opinion of the present writer, serves to convey an element
more subtle than mere physical appearance.
At the time of the events which followed
the death of the Shaikh Al-Būzīdī who had not wished to name his
successor himself, leaving it expressly to the decision of Providence,
and when the group of those who were attached to the Mostaganem Zawiyah,
together with their muqaddams, were wondering whom they should
recognize as their new Shaikh, many members of the brotherhood had
spiritual dreams from which it was to be concluded that the successor to
the maqām of the Shaikh Al-Būzīdī was the Shaikh Al-'Alawī. The Shaikh
Sidi `Addah bin Tūnis, in his book Ar-Rawdat as-saniyyah (Mostaganem,
1354 A. H. = 1936), says that these "visions" were very numerous: he
gives as many as sixty; Dr. Lings has translated six of them (11.
64-66), one of which was seen by the Shaikh Al-'Alawi himself. Apart
from these, the ones related in the Arabic text comprise some others
which are of such particular significance with regard to our present
subject that it would be truly regrettable to make no mention of them
here in this connection. The following is a translation of the passages
in question:
"One of these visions was recounted by Shaikh Sidi 'Abd ar-Rahmān Bū'Azīz, the head of the Zāwiyah at Ja’āfirah:
"One of the fuqarā’ told us that he had
had a vision of the moon cloven in two. Then a plank (lawhah) was let
down from it on chains, nearer and nearer the earth until it was only a
little above us and we could see on it the Master al-'Alawī—may God be
pleased with him!—and beside him Sayyidnā Īsā (our Lord Jesus)—on him be
Peace! Then a herald stood up and cried out: "Whoever wishes to see
Jesus—on him be Peace!—with the supreme Master, they are both here,
descended from Heaven, so let him come with all speed." Then the earth
trembled and shook and all upon it were shaken, and all the people
gathered together and asked to mount up beside the Master on that plank,
but he said: "Stay where you are, we will come back to you" (p. 138).
"Another vision recounted by Shaikh Hasan ibn 'Abd al-'Azīz at-Tilimsānī, is as follows:
‘I had a vision in which I was in the
valley of the town of Tlemcen, and it was filled with a large crowd of
people who were waiting for the descent (nuzūl)[5] from Heaven of
Jesus—on him be Peace!-and then a man did descend, and the people said:
"This is Jesus", and when I was able to see his face I found that he was
the Shaikh Sidi Ahmad Bin ‘Alīwah (=Al-‘Alawī)—may God be pleased with
him!'
The following vision was
recounted by the revered Shaikh, God's Saint, Sidi Muhammad bin
at-Tayyib bin Mawlāy al-‘Arabī ad-Darqāwī-may God give us the favor of
his blessings:
‘I saw a group of people who told us of
the descent of Jesus—on him be Peace!—and they said that he had already
descended, and that he had in his hand a wooden sword with which he
struck stones and they became men, and when he struck animals they also
became human. Now I knew the man who had descended from Heaven, he had
written letters to me and I to him. So I made ready to meet him, and
when I reached him I found that he was Shaikh Sidi Ahmad al-‘Alawi—but
in the guise of a doctor, tending the sick, and with him were more than
sixty men to help him—may God be well pleased with him!' (p. 137).
Apart from these dream visions we will
quote another vision which seems to have started in a state of waking
but which must have been transferred to a state between wake and dream
(in which case it would be more precise to call it a wāqi’ah, ("event"):
"This was recounted by the faithful in love, the inwardly pure, Sidi Ahmad Hājji at-Tilimsānī
`Whilst I was absorbed in the supreme
invocation (adh-dhikr ala-‘zam)[6] I saw the letters of the Name of the
Divine Majesty fill the whole universe, and out of them shone the
Prophet himself in a luminous form—may God grant him the graces of Union
and the graces of Peace! Then the letters manifested themselves in
another shape, and I saw in them the face of Shaikh Sidi Ahmad
Bin-`Alīwah, and on his body was written Mustafa Ahmad Bin-'Alīwah. Then
I heard a voice cry out: "Witnesses! Observers!" (shuhadā', ruqabā').
Then the letters were manifested a third time, in the image of the
Shaikh with a crown on his head, and while we looked a bird alighted on
his head and spoke to me, saying: "Behold, this is the spiritual station
(maqām) of Jesus—Peace be on him!" (p. 145).
Ten others of the visions related in
Shaikh `Addah's book show an explicit and direct relationship between
the Shaikh Al-`Alawi and the Prophet Muhammad which in such a case may
be considered as perfectly normal; one of these, related by the Shaikh
Al-'Alawī himself, is quoted in Dr. Lings's book. But those which have
just been given and which mention, each one of them, a particular
relationship connecting the Shaikh Al-‘Alawī with "Sayyidnā ‘Isā" and,
to be more precise, with his "spiritual station" (maqām) in Islam,
constitutes an exceedingly rare phenomenon which has not yet been
explained, at least not to our knowledge: in any case, Shaikh ‘Addah
gives no commentary on them in the volume from which we have been
quoting, and Dr. Lings for his part makes no mention of them at all.[7]
For us, this particular group of "visions" is significant not only as
regards the spirituality of the Shaikh Al-‘Alawī, but also as regards
his initiatic function. To be more exact, we have there, in the first
place, an example which illustrates those initiatic types which exists
in Muhammadian norms and of which Ibn `Arabī speaks in his Futūhat, as
we have already mentioned on other occasions.[8] Suffice it to say here
again that the prophetic form of Muhammad, as final synthesis of the
prophetic cycle from Adam onwards, includes and sums up all the types of
spirituality represented by the previous Prophets of whom the most
important and most characteristic are mentioned in the Qoranic
revelation and in the Hadith.[9]
The doctrine of Ibn `Arabī gives the
following explanation: the Prophet Muhammad, or his light, was God's
first creation: from this light were drawn the lights of the other
Prophets who came successively into the human world as his
"representatives"; he himself came in body at the end of the cycle of
prophetic manifestation, and it is thus moreover that the laws of his
representatives come to be "abrogated" and replaced by his own law which
potentially has contained them all ever since the beginning, and which,
when it rejoins them in operation on the historical plane, either
confirms them or not, according to the rule providentially allotted to
the last part of the cycle wherever tradition continues to be followed.
In any case, independently of the actual presence, in the world, of laws
formulated by the previous bearers of Revelation, the spiritual
entities of these messengers figure as inherent realities which go to
make up the Muhammadian form itself and as ever present functions in the
initiatic economy of Islam. It is in virtue of this that the spiritual
men of Tasawwuf live and develop initiatically, without any deliberate
choice on their part, according to this or that spiritual type which
corresponds to them by natural affinity, either in general or during one
phase of their career; they only realize needless to say the
possibilities of the type in question insofar as these are to be found
in themselves. Some may thus have to pass successively beneath the
initiatic rule of several of these particular prophetic entities
inscribed in the Muhammadian sphere which sums them up.[10]
As to the Shaikh al-'Alawī's case, it is
true that the "visions" in question are merely indirect documents
limited to one particular moment in his life, but this moment was
particularly important for the Master's personal career and for the
historical destinies of the tarīqah to which he belonged. This tarīqah,
apart from the normal part it had to play within its Islamic framework,
had also to constitute the presence of Tasawwuf as a viable initiatic
path on the very borders of the Western world and even within the zone
of European influence on the Moslem world which thus became also a zone
of penetration in the opposite direction; it had therefore to express
itself through means that were appropriate to a real and effective
contact with the intellectual sensibility of the West. Despite the
alterations and losses of memory inflicted on it by anti-traditional
modernism, this sensibility—or what was left of it—could not but be
mainly Christic in character. This being so, the presence in our times
of a Moslem spiritual leader of `Īsawī[11] type at the head of a North
African branch of the Tarīqah Shādhiliyyah is most understandable, and
other concomitant or subsequent facts serve to confirm this way of
looking at things.
As regards the Shādhilīs, let us recall
here what we wrote about the Islamic sources of the work of René
Guénon.[12] When mentioning the more direct interest of Islam, amongst
all Eastern traditional forms, in everything that concerns the fate of
the West and the possibilities of its spiritual redressai, we drew
attention to the part played by the Egyptian Shādhilī Shaikh 'Ullaish
al-Kabir. This Shaikh is the author of the famous statement quoted by
René Guénon in Chapter III of his Symbolism of the Cross (written 1931):
"If Christians have the sign of the Cross, Moslems have its doctrine".
It was moreover above all on the basis of certain points of doctrine
proceeding from this master that Guénon wrote his book which holds a
central place in his work as a whole and which concerns in the highest
degree those Westerners who participate in traditional intellectuality.
We have no intention of insisting any further on this point in the
present context, except to add by way of precision, that this book of
Guénon and all those subsequent writings of his which deal with
symbolism proceed from principles which are characteristic of “‘Īsawīs”
and from which the Science of Letters ('ilm al-hurūf) proceeds
especially in its aspect of knowledge and art of the Divine Breath or in
its aspect of Life[13] (the "letters" being above all the articulated
elements of the Word).
It may be added also that this was the
spiritual science of Al-Hallāj, celebrated “‘Īsawī” of the third and
fourth centuries of Islam (858-922), who by a coincidence which has
nothing fortuitous in it has also a connection with our times in that he
constitutes the theme par excellence of the orientalist interpretation
of Tasawwuf. The case of Al-Hallāj is fraught with particularities and
accidents which are difficult to place, especially for anyone who does
not have a traditional' point of view; it has therefore been turned all
the more easily, though not without distortions, into a subtle machine
of war against Islam as a whole; and even some modern Orientals, the
product of milieu dominated by European universities, have succumbed to
this machine. We have here, as it were, the reverse side of the already
mentioned intellectual relationships between Islam and the West.
To go back to the book which prompted
these notes, let it be added that they do not account for all the
reflections we might have made on this subject. There is one point in
particular about which Dr. Lings has been very discreet, and so have we,
without any connivance and moreover for reasons which are probably
somewhat different from his though not ultimately opposed to them; in
the hope that some day we shall be free to speak with less reserve.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
[1] Originally published in the Etudes Traditionnelles, janvier-fevrier 1968, pp. 29-34.
[2] Villain et Belhomme—Editions Traditionnelles, Paris, 1967.
[3] Etudes Traditionnelles, janvier-fevrier 1962, p. 46.
[4] Dr. Carret composed his text, dated
"Tanger, mai 1942", at the request of an ‘Alawi faqir of Western origin
who had not known the Shaikh Al-‘Alawi and who had been initiated into
the path of Tasawwuf after the death of the Shaikh by one of his
Moroccan muqaddams who was himself then living at Tangiers. The first
French edition of this text was in the form of a booklet of thirty pages
published at Mostaganem in 1947 under the title: Le Cheikh El-Alaoui
(Souvenirs).
[5] The Descent of Sayyidna 'Isa is the
second coming of Christ which is expected in Islam, as well as in
Christianity, as the climax to the events of the last days, though the
two religions differ in certain respects as regards his function.
[6] That is the invocation (dhikr) of
the name Allah, generally termed "the Name of the Divine Majesty", as in
what immediately follows.
[7] In the second edition (revised and
enlarged) of his book, published this year by Allen and Unwin under the
title A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, Martin Lings refers to this
article and gives a translation of the four visions in question. (Ed.)
[8] See especially the mention made in
Etudes Traditionnelles, nos. 372-373, juillet-octobre 1962, p. 166, note
2, and more especially, as far as the Islamic spiritual type of `Isa is
concerned, p. 169, note 12.
[9] Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. It
may be born in mind also that the spiritual form of Muhammad, apart from
its universal and totalizing function, has a particular, differential
aspect by reason of which the Prophet of Islam is also one of a
historical line together with the other Prophets of the whole
traditional cycle.
[10] There are cases of Masters or
Saints of Islam who have thus realized the possibilities corresponding
to each of the particular Prophets. The question is closely related to
the Islamic doctrine of the traditional Seals, and more especially to
the doctrine of the Seal of Muhammadian Mastery (khatam al-walāyat
al-muhammadiyyah) which has not been fully understood by those
Orientalists who have dealt with it, some of whom have gone so far as to
distort it almost beyond recognition. This question will have to be
considered another occasion.
[11] This epithet derived from the
Islamic name of Jesus, and used in Tasawwuf (by Ibn `Arabī for example)
to denote those Awliyā' (sing. walī="friend of God", saint) whose
spiritual type is the spirit of Jesus as possibility contained within
the general Muhammadian form, is not to be confused with the same word
as used to denote a member of the Tarīqah 'Isawiyyah whose designation
is derived from the name of the Shaikh Bin `Īsā, founder of a North
African branch of the Tariqah Shādhiliyyah.
[12] L'Islam et la fonction de René Guénon, in Etudes Traditionnelles, janvier-fevrier 1953, pp. 14-47.
[13] "The science belonging especially
to Jesus is the Science of Letters. Thus it is that Jesus had received
the power of inbreathing life which consists of that air which proceeds
from the depth of the heart and which is the Spirit of Life" ('Ibn
'Arabī, Futūhāt, ch.20), quoted by M. Vālsan in Etudes Traditionnelles,
no. 424, 1971. See also the same number for the author's Références
islamiques du “Symbolisme de la Croix” (Translator's note).
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