Ahmad ibn Idris

Ahmad ibn Idris was a Moroccan-born Sufi scholar and teacher whose reformist current shaped much of nineteenth-century Sufism. (Sufism, tasawwuf, is the devotional and mystical dimension of Islam; a tariqa is a Sufi order or "path.") According to his biographers he was born in the village of Maysur, in the Larache (al-Araish) district of Morocco; his birth year is disputed, given as either 1163/1749-50 (favored by family tradition) or 1173/1760. He studied at the Qarawiyyin mosque-school in Fez — hence the nisba "al-Fasi" — and is reported to have taken his main Sufi training from the shaykh Abd al-Wahhab al-Tazi.

Around 1797-98 he left Morocco on pilgrimage, never to return. He passed through Egypt — lecturing, it is reported, at al-Azhar in Cairo — and reached Mecca near the end of 1213/1798-99. There, except for a stay in Upper Egypt around 1813-1817, he taught for some three decades and drew students from across the Muslim world. His central message was a return to the Qur'an and the Sunna (the Prophet's example) and criticism of what he saw as popular Sufi excess.

After disputes with Meccan scholars, he left in 1827-28, traveled through the Yemeni coastlands (Zabid among them), and settled in Sabya in Asir, where he died on 21 Rajab 1253 (21 October 1837). Followers founded the Sanusiyya, Khatmiyya, Rashidiyya and Salihiyya orders; the degree of his own organizational role is debated by historians.