I only have about one month left in Cairo before I leave it, inshaAllah, and today seemed like a good opportunity to visit some of the great inhabitants of this city that I have not visited before, and say farewell to those I have visited. I mean the Ahlul Bayt and the great scholars and awliya that reside beneath their tombs in gardens of Paradise, as wide as the horizon, though we see them not.

So I thought I’d begin with sayyidna al-Husayn (r.a.), and on the way I visited my shaykh, Shaykh Saleh al-Jaafari (r.a). Then when I got to sayyidna al-Husayn, I sat in front of the locked room in which some of the belongings of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) are kept, and recited a poem by shaykh Saleh about visiting the Prophet, and while I was doing that the Imam of the mosque of Shaykh Saleh spotted me and came and hugged me. He had also come to visit.

صلّ يا ربّى وسلّم       عالنبى خير البرية

عند باب الله سلّم       واقصد الروضة الزّكيّة

وانظر البدر الملثّم       أحمداً خير البرية

ثم نادي يا مكرّم         يا خيار الهاشميّة

يا حبيبي يا معظم        رحمة الله الوفية

…

Then I entered the chamber of sayyidna al-Husayn and read a poem by Shaykh Saleh about the Ahlul Bayt that starts with,

الجعفري له في حبكم أملٌ        ما خاب من جاءكم بالحب والأمل

يرجو بكم من رسول الله نظرته       تهدي الفؤاد لفهم العلم والعمل

Al-Jaafari has high hopes in loving you,

he’s not disappointed who comes to you with love and hope

hoping through you a glance from Allah’s messenger,

that would guide the heart to understand ilm and do good works.

I would read that poem at many of the Ahlul Bayt that I would visit next, and as is done in our tariqa, I read the same poem to Shaykh Saleh himself, substituting “al-Jaafari has” with “O Jaafari we have”, making it about shaykh Saleh, who is also a descendant of the Prophet through Jaafar al-Sadiq (r.a.), hence his name.

After that I visited, for the first time, sidi Ahmad al-Dardir (d. 1787), one of the most famous scholars of al-Azhar, nicknamed “the little Malik” because of his greatness as a Maliki scholar, and a very famous wali. Shaykh Saleh loved him and would visit him often and recite poems at his tomb, may Allah benefit us from his great knowledge and learning. He resides in a mosque behind the Azhar, in the al-Husayn area.

Then I went to sayyida Fatima al-Nabawiyya, daughter of Imam al-Husayn, who married her cousin al-Hasan son of al-Hasan. She was nicknamed “Mother of the Orphans” because she adopted seven children who were orphaned at Karbalaa; and she was constantly with her aunt, the sayyida Zaynab, acquiring ilm from her. I will get to sayyida Zaynab in a minute.

One time shaykh Saleh al-Jaafari wanted to go visit Fatima al-Nabawiyya but it was so hot outside that he decided to sit in the shade in al-Azhar a bit, and he fell asleep. In his sleep he saw Ibn Arabi walking walking with a cloak over his head to visit Fatima al-Nabawiyya, so he got up from the dream and said to himself, “Ibn Arabi comes to visit her from Damascus, and I sit here at the Azhar too lazy to go?!” So he went and visited her, may God be pleased with them all.

I visited another daughter of Imam al-Husayn also, the sayyida Sukayna, and also their brother sayyidna Ali Zaynul Abidin. I read a theory in one scholarly article about architecture in Cairo that this was actually the tomb of his son the famous Imam Zayd, and that his name was dropped when the Ottomans came to restore the place, but I seriously doubt that, and the great awliya have confirmed his presence there. Furthermore, I am currently reading the travels of Ibn Jubayr who visited Cairo in the 12th century and said that both Zaynul Abidin and his son Zayd are buried there. I was pleased to find there a poster on the wall with a poem praising sayyidna Zaynul Abidin, written by shaykh Saleh, so I read that.

To move back up a generation, I visited the elder sister of Imam al-Husayn, and daughter of Imam Ali (r.a.), sayyida Zaynab. It’s probably her great knowledge and ilm that made sayyida Zaynab so famous, not just her genealogy. I have a book which is a collection of all of shaykh Saleh’s poems about sayyida Zaynab. One time shaykh Saleh wrote a poem about her and the Ahlul Bayt, and then he saw her in a dream, from behind a curtain (hijab), and she extended her arm out and gave him a piece of paper, saying to him “this is your permission for Hajj”. After that, he was able to do Hajj every year until his death (except one year which has its own special story).

I also visited Muhammad Ali son of Jaafar al-Sadiq, and his sister Aisha. As you can see, Jaafar al-Sadiq named his daughter after the Prophet’s beloved wife, whom the Shi’a don’t like, despite al-Sadiq being their great Imam. Al-Sadiq was also descended from sayyidna Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (r.a.), which shows that the descendants of Imam al-Husayn married descendants of sayyidna Abu Bakr, whom the Shia again don’t like. But I digress.

Another important tomb belonged to Ruqayya, daughter of Ali al-Rida, son of Musa al-Kazim, son of Jaafar al-Sadiq. Most people think she’s the daughter of Ali b. Abi Talib. Next to her is sayyida Atika, wife of Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr.

Then there was the great sayyida Nafeesa, or Nafeesat al-Ilm. Nafeesa is feminine for “highly valuable and precious” and her name meant “she of precious ilm“. Indeed she was a great scholar, and a descendant of sayyidna al-Hasan, who would sit with Imam al-Shafi’i and they would teach each other hadiths and other sciences. Imam al-Shafi’i would always ask her to pray for him, and he requested in his will that she pray in his funeral prayer, hoping to gain Allah’s acceptance through her. She was very famous for her miracles, and I read somewhere that the Shaykhul Islam in hadith sciences, Imam Ibn Hajar, documented more than 120 miracles from her. Her tomb is famous as a place where prayers are answered. I had also visited, a long time ago, her khalwa, being a tiny space beneath a rock, barely large enough for a human to sit inside, on top of what used to be an empty mountain. It is said that when she would go there to worship, animals of all kinds would flock around her. She married one of the sons of Imam Jaafar al-Sadiq, probably the same one I visited, but I didn’t pay enough attention to his name to remember. I remember there being a chapter about her in Camille Helminski’s wonderful Women of Sufism: A Hidden Treasure.

Alhamdu li’Allah for making this easy for me, and for inspiring me to do this.

InshaAllah my next visits will be to the sahaba who are buried in Cairo (I’m sure of the existence of one, and I heard there is another, but I’m not sure where to find them). Then there are all the great scholars and awliya. May Allah enable me to visit them before I leave Cairo, and to visit the seal of Prophethood, His Messenger Muhammad, salla Allahu alayhi wa ala aalihi wa sallam.

There are many who say, and I believe that it is true, that if it were not for all the Ahlul Bayt and awliya who are buried in Cairo, the city would have been ruined so long ago, and indeed, one wonders how the city has not self-destructed by now, with all that is wrong in it.