From Anas ibn Malik radi Allahu ‘anh that the Prophet salla Allahu alayhi wa aalihi said:

“If you pass by the gardens of Paradise, then eat from them!” They said: “And what are the gardens of Paradise oh Messenger of Allah?” He said: “The circles (halaqas) of dhikr“. (Narrated by Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Tirmidhi, and al-Bayhaqi).

Sayyidi Shaykh Saleh al-Ja’fari said that his shaykh sayyidi Muhammad ash-Sharif ibn sayyidi Abd al-’Aali ibn sayyidi Ahmad ibn Idris, may Allah be pleased with them said:

“It is taken from this the desirability of coming together in circles of dhikr, and that the knowers find pleasure in the dhikr of Allah Most High like the people of Paradise find pleasure in its bliss”.

I wanted to explore the gardens of Paradise in the little desert country of Jordan, so I contacted someone who’s been to most of them and got some information on where to go.

I began with Dar al-Iman, home of the Khalwatiyya Rahmaniyya Jaami’a tariqa. The tariqa was founded by shaykh as-sayyid Abd al-Rahman ash-Sharif. The shaykh began as a Khalwati, but later took all of the following tariqas and combined them all into his tariqa: The Qadiriyya, Rifa’iyya, Ahmadiyya (of sidi Ahmad al-Badawi), Dasouqiyya, Shadhiliyya-Yashrutiyya, Naqshabandiyya, and the Idrisiyya (aka Ahmadiyya Muhammadiyya) through the line of sidi Ibrahim ar-Rashid. Thus the tariqa is called the Khalwatiyya Rahmaniyya Jaami’a: Al-Khalwatiyya because it was his first tariqa, al-Rahmaniyya because of his name Abd al-Rahman, and al-Jaami’a, meaning: combining and bringing together many.

Dar al-Iman was founded by his grandson, the current shaykh of the tariqa, shaykh Husni Hasan ash-Sharif. It is an absolutely impressive place: It has a large cultural centre that teaches the religious sciences and is mainly concerned with teaching memorization of the Qur’an for free to anyone or any group that needs it, at about any time and any day. They also have an orphanage and a charity center, with a group of minivans to help with their work. Then they have the mosque which includes a room that is considered the zawiya. In it the murids meet every day after maghreb to read their daily wird until Isha time. But the shaykh reads his wirds in his own time I think, and because of all his busy work, leaves his deputy to lead the wird. I only went once, on a Saturday, and there were about 10 people, but they said that on Thursdays it’s much bigger so they do it in a bigger hall beneath the mosque. The wird consists of salawaat, a few beautiful poems by the founder of the tariqa, one of which is modelled after the Burda, and a selection of Quranic suras. The people there were beautiful and I loved it. Very quiet and serene. You get the feeling that this is such a blessed place: that Allah Most Generous blessed them in their actions and their charity work, and in the teaching of the Qur’an, and made from this place a great centre of light for the city.

Next was the Zawiya of Abul Hasan al-Shadhili, where the Shadhili-Darqawi-Hashimi tariqa is lead by shaykh Nuh Keller. I went there twice. Once a few weeks ago, for the Latifiyya dhikr, and yesterday for the hadra. The zawiya is absolutely beautiful, full of noor, very serene, and immaculately designed. When you first enter the zawiya, there is a door on the right to a room in which lessons are taught, and the door is called Bab al-Qurb (The Door of Nearness).

I took my friend Humzah who’s visiting from London yesterday to the Hadra, and was explaining to him my previous experience of the Latifiyya. I said to him: The shaykh came in and sat down, did the dhikr, then began giving a lesson with a very faint voice, as if only talking to himself, and then stood up and left. It was as if there was no one else in the room. You had to strain to hear him talk. He said to me: Maybe that’s because there was no one in the room. Maybe if we had a shaykh with us, it would be different. I said: You’re right, maybe none of us matter!

The shaykh said a couple very important things:

1) If you want to know if you are one of the elect, or on the path of the elect, then ask yourself one simple question: Do you pray Fajr in the mosque with the jamaa’a? If you do, then glad tidings! And if you don’t, then you have none to blame but yourself!

2) He read to us some of the ishaaraat, the signs that sayyidi Abul Hasan al-Shadhili understood from a verse of the Qur’an that talks about how some people are blessed by daughters, others by sons, others by sons and daughters, and others bear no children. Sayyidi al-Shadhili said that the daughters stand for the actions, and the sons stand for the spiritual states. Having both is combining both, and having none is to be at great loss, having neither actions nor states! The important thing that shaykh Nuh said is that such an interpretation is NOT a deeper meaning of the verse. This meaning is not in the verse itself. It is simply something that occurs to the shaykh according to his spiritual state at the time. It’s more of a meaning that is inspired by the words of the verse, not a meaning from the verse itself.

After hearing these very important words from shaykh Nuh, I found the following while flipping through the teachings of sayyidi Shams al-Tabrizi:

Listen to the Qur’an’s exegesis from God. If you listen to any exegesis other than God’s, that is the exegesis of the speaker’s state, not the exegesis of the Qur’an.

Finally is the Mosque of Imam al-Rawwass, which seems to be the unofficial centre of sufism in Amman, or the great sufi mosque of Amman. I had planned to visit it tonight, this Thursday, but passed by it on the way to visit the Cave of the Seven Sleepers a few days ago, which I had not been to before, with a guest from America. Coming up near the mosque, I spotted beautiful green domes with the same shade of green as the domes of the Masjid Nabawi of Madina- salla Allahu alaa sayyidina Muhammadain wa ‘alaa aalih!- and I thought, wow, what a great looking mosque. So when I passed by it I read “Imam al-Rawwass Mosque” and I thought: SubhanAllah! I found the mosque I want to go to on Thursday! So on the way back from the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, I stopped by it, to have a look, and was amazed. I had never seen anything like this mosque. On the outside, the mosque has three doors. The first one you pass by is the Bab al-Tawba (The Door of Repentance). Then you continue to the one in the middle of the mosque, which is called Bab al-Quds (The Door of Purity/Sanctity), and finally, the third door, from which we were told to enter, was the Bab al-Hadra (The Door of Presence).

When you step into this mosque in the daytime, you are transported into somewhere else. The carpets are green. The paint on the walls is green. The windows are colored green, so that the entire mosque is completely green. You are swimming in the color green. I have never seen anything like it. The wall around the mihrab is painted gold, and this gold seems to mix greatly with the green. It’s like the air around you is colored green! We found two Jordanian shaykhs from the Tableeghi Jamaa’at, who had been out in the area for da’wa, and were having a break at this mosque. Of course I couldn’t escape the 10 minute talk, but I like tableeghis and inshaAllah will write about them very soon!

Then we went up to the second floor and found a halaqa of ‘ilm: A young man was teaching nine young boys, about 12-years old, about death and resurrection. SubhanAllah, mashaAllah, Laa ilaaha illa Allah! I joined them for 5 minutes to be blessed by the gathering, knowing that the Angels and the spirits of the awliya surround such halaqas.

Then I came again this night with my friend Humzah, for the hadra after Isha. But turns out we were truly fortunate, as because of the 15th of Sha’ban, it was a very special night. There were a group of young turbaned Ulamaa there, as well as important shuyukh, including the famous shaykh Hazim Abu Ghazaleh, a shadhili shaykh with a large following in Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. He had given a lesson between maghreb and Isha, we were told.

After being led by shaykh Abu Ghazaleh in the Isha prayers, we were taken up to the second floor to eat dinner: large trays of mansaf, the Jordanian national dish, were brought to feed the very large number of people. After that, we went back down for the dhikr.

Imam al-Rawwass was a great wali of the Rifa’iyya tariqa from the late 19th century, and so this was a Rifa’i mosque. We read from three different books written by the current shaykh and imam of the mosque: The scholar Nasir al-Din al-Khateeb. First we read from the book of awraad some praise of Allah Most High, then from the Book of Salawaat, some salawaat on the Messenger of Allah, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam, then from the book of the poems of Imam al-Rawwass. Then there was a hadra, followed by Quran recitation and lessons of ‘ilm by two of the scholars.

For the blessings I will mention this Hadith Qudsi that one of the scholars mentioned:

He said that the sky said to Allah Most High: Let me fall down in pieces upon the people of this Earth, for they have eaten what you have given them of blessings, and have not thanked you. And the oceans said: Let me drown the people of this Earth, for they have eaten of your blessings and not thanked you! And the Earth said: Let me swallow the people, for they have eaten of your blessings and not thanked you! So Allah Most High said: Leave them, for if they thank me  then I am their Lover, and if they do not, then I am their Doctor!

He also said that a righteous shaykh was seen in a dream after he died and asked what Allah did with him. He said: I stood before Allah, who said to me: What have you brought to me, what do you have to offer me? So the shaykh said: Oh Allah, I am a slave, and what can a slave possibly bring to offer his Master? So Allah said: Go (to Paradise), for I have forgiven you!

Both ulamaa talked about Tassawwuf and its place in Islam, then shaykh Nasir al-Din al-Khateeb talked about the satellite TV channel that this mosque was creating, which should start airing in about four days. It’s called Soufiyya, and it will air the lessons of ‘ilm that take place regularly in this mosque, as well as the dhikr. He said: I don’t want to say that the time of the deniers has come to an end, but I will say that the time for the real Sufism, that is based on Shari’a, to appear and flourish!

The person who was next to me in the dhikr, in his early twenties, said to me: It’s been three years since I last did a hadra! I feel so good! We used to do dhikr like this every Friday after Jum’ah in Nablus (Palestine), and people would come from all over the country, from inside Israeli cities, and from Jerusalem, to join it. You could see lights coming out of the place, it was marvelous!

I said to him, why haven’t you gone for three years? He said, I was in an Israeli prison! Then he showed me his bullet wounds. He had been shot by a rubber bullet in his left knee, and by one of those special Israeli bullets that explode inside the body for maximum damage, on the right chest, leaving a huge wound across his chest and into the beginning of his shoulder! He said: “They shot me then captured me!”

He was just released last month and came to Jordan, and will go back to Palestine inshaAllah next month. If you do not know, Palestine used to be a completely Sufi country before the Israeli invasion, with a very high concentration of ashraaf (descendants of the Prophet, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam) and Sufis. I think it came third in both after Madina and Mecca.

Everyone there was given a free copy of each of the three books (awraad, salawaat, poems), all beautifully published.

After the night ended, Humzah and I went to talk to shaykh Nasir al-Din al-Khateeb. He said that he liked us and wanted us to come again, and then looked at Humzah and said about him: “He is a moon but he hides it! Many great people hide their greatness!” Then he told us many wonderous things, but this has become too long, so I will have to end it here.

والحمد لله رب العالمين على نعمه كلها

اللهم صلّ وسلم وبارك على سيدنا ومولانا محمد خير البرية

وعلى آله في كل لمحة ونفس عدد ما وسعه علم الله