Ahmad al-Tijani

A Sufi order normally authenticates itself by a silsila, a chain of teachers running back from the living shaykh through named masters to the Prophet. Al-Tijani had several such chains. He had been initiated in the Qadiriyya and in the Nasiriyya among others, and he had studied in Egypt and the Hijaz. What he announced at Abu Samghun in 1782 set all of it aside. He said that the Prophet had appeared to him while he was awake and in his ordinary senses, had made him a shaykh directly, and had instructed him to give up every other affiliation.

Two consequences follow and both shaped the order. First, a Tijani may belong to no other tariqa, which is unusual, since multiple affiliations were normal; the exclusivity produced a tight, disciplined membership and a good deal of hostility from other orders. Second, al-Tijani is held by his followers to be the seal of the saints, the point at which the line of sainthood closes as prophecy closed with Muhammad, which places him above the founders of the older orders and is the claim his critics attack.

Jawahir al-Maani, compiled by his companion Ali Harazim Barrada, is the principal record of his teaching and of these claims. The devotional core is simple by comparison: a daily litany, a weekly gathering, and a heavy emphasis on the prayer on the Prophet.

Al-Tijani was born in 1735 at Ain Madi, an oasis on the northern edge of the Algerian Sahara, into a family of religious scholars. He studied at Fez, made the pilgrimage in the 1770s and took initiations in the east, and then spent years in the desert south of Tlemcen, which is where the founding vision is placed.

Relations with the Ottoman authorities at Algiers were bad, and in 1789 he moved to Fez, where the Alaouite sultan Mawlay Sulayman received him and gave him a house. He stayed until his death in 1815 and is buried there. The zawiya around his tomb is one of the busiest visiting places in Morocco, and a large part of the traffic comes from Senegal, Mali, Nigeria and Mauritania.

The spread of the order to the south is the largest part of its story and happened mostly after him. Muhammad al-Hafiz carried it into Mauritania in his lifetime. In the nineteenth century Umar Tal, a scholar from Futa Toro who had been appointed the order's representative for the western Sudan, took it through the Senegal valley and into the middle Niger, and later Ibrahim Niasse of Kaolack built a mass following across West Africa on a teaching of direct spiritual realisation available to ordinary members. Today far more Tijanis live south of the Sahara than north of it, which makes an Algerian shaykh buried in Fez a West African figure as much as a Maghrebi one.