Ahmad al-Tijani was born in 1737 at Ain Madhi, an oasis town in the desert of present day Algeria, into a family of some local religious standing, and like most Sufi teachers of his era he began his own path within an already established order, the Khalwatiyya. What set him apart from other reformers of existing tariqas was his own account of how his order began: not through study with a living master, but through a series of waking visions in which he reported meeting the Prophet Muhammad directly, who instructed him to found a wholly new path rather than continue transmitting anyone else's.
Al-Tijani dated the order's definitive founding to 1782, while he was still travelling in the Sahara, but it was only after he settled at Fez in Morocco in 1789 that the order took the organized, lasting shape by which it has been known since, helped by the favour he found with the reigning Moroccan sultan even as some of the city's established religious scholars viewed his claims with suspicion.
Central to al-Tijani's teaching was a claim rare among Sufi founders: that his order did not merely add to the existing paths but superseded them, representing what he described as the final and most complete renewal of Muhammadan spirituality available before the end of time. From this followed the order's most distinctive practical rule, in force from its founding to the present: an initiate joining the Tijaniyyah must first leave any other Sufi order entirely, and may not maintain membership in both at once, a demand of exclusive allegiance that most other tariqas, comfortable with followers holding multiple affiliations, have never made of their own initiates.