We’re pleased to announce that a new translation of the Letters of Moulay Al-Arabi Darqawi has been scheduled for release this coming May. The following blurb by the translators, which will accompany its release, is self explanatory and hints at the importance of this new and complete edition as published by al-Madina Institute.
Letters on the Spiritual Path
Mūlay al-ʿArabī al-Darqāwī (d. 1239/1823)
Translated and annotated by Mohamed Fouad Aresmouk and Michael Abdurrahman Fitzgerald 356 pp.
Around the year 1182/1769, shortly after Mūlay al-ʿArabī al-Darqāwī’ had received the litany and invocations of the way, his shaykh, Sidi ʿAlī al-Jamal, said to him, “Whenever a spiritual insight comes to you, be quick to write it down before it escapes, because it comes to you first as huge as a mountain, and if you are quick to write it down, you will seize it as came to you. But if you hesitate, it will return like a camel, and if you hesitate again, it will return like a swallow, and if you hesitate again, it will escape you altogether.” Later, when the young disciple became a master in his own right, his record of those initial insights were put into the form of letters that he would share with his own students throughout the mountainous Jbālī region of northeastern Morocco, adding to them and expanding upon them over the period of fifty years during which he called people to God. Eventually, the letters themselves would be assembled by students and representatives among the tens of thousands who had entered the ṭarīqa by the time Mūlay al-ʿArabī passed away, and hand-made copies of the collection were kept and regularly read in the scores of zawiyas of the Darqāwi order in both Morocco and abroad.
These letters include teachings which cover nearly every conceivable aspect of spiritual practice, conduct, and doctrine. They are also the personal record of a man in search of a life in God, confronting the both the mountains and valleys of that path, as well as living with and participating in the lives of the people around him. From an even broader perspective, they are also a picture of Islam in late 12th/18th century Morocco, a land that was in the process of becoming a nation, seeking to deal with factionalism and political unrest from within and an influx of foreign ideas from without, including the teachings of the Wahhabī movement in Arabia which had just begun to preach its point of view to other Arabic-speaking countries.
Letters on the Spiritual Path is the first complete translation into any western language of all 272 of these letters. Besides a meticulously researched translation based on both manuscript and printed editions of the letters in Arabic it includes an introduction to the times and place they were first taught and a summary of their main theme, as well as abundant footnotes on the contents, a biographical index to nearly all the persons mentioned, and a general index of terms, places, and books.
One point of interest is in the image on the cover (above) which is of part of letter 271, an important letter ignored in other earlier editions. The authors are 99% certain this is in the actual handwriting of the shaykh. The letter was discovered on a journey to the Sahara in 2008. Within the book the whole page will reproduced full frame.
This book is now available from Mecca Books
C A M B R I D G E C E N T R A L M O S Q U E
Ian Whiteman 