If you’ve read Amin Maalouf’s great classic Leo Africanus, then I’m sure you haven’t forgotten Shaykh Astaghfirullah, the fiery preacher of Granada, whose sentences were peppered with the word “astaghfirullah” so much that they would count how many times he said it in every sermon. When Granada was lost, and the Muslims left for Fez, Shaykh Astaghfirulah stopped preaching and stayed at home, his health growing weaker by the day. Yet one day, the novel’s protagonists go to him asking him to expose the corruption of a certain man, and by the next day, “the shaykh seemed to have been restored to health.” And now you can’t help but cheer him on as “his turban could be seen circulating feverishly in the suqs, fluttering under the porticos, before sweeping into a hammam” where he would get all the information that he needed about the villain for his upcoming sermon. Yes! Shaykh Astaghfirullah is back, walking the streets of Fez, and is about to deliver a sermon about a man so evil that it would undoubtedly score very high on the “astaghfirullah” count!

Well, when I was in Fez this summer, I had some interesting encounters with our neighborhood’s very own Shaykh Alhamdulillah, as I like to call him. Now bear in mind that while the fictional Shaykh Astaghfirullah was a “real” shaykh, Shaykh Alhamdulliah was only a shaykh in his own mind. He was always outside in the streets, talking to little kids, or towering over young men not much younger than himself, putting his large arms around their shoulders, counseling them. I don’t think I ever didn’t find him outside in the streets. He dressed, and looked, very Salafi.

One Friday, I was waiting for a taxi outside Bab Ziat, where empty taxis are rarer than Red Sulphur, as I traveled every Friday from the old medieval Fez (Fez Medina), to the modern french-built Ville Nouvelle, where my Fiqh teacher would take me to pray in a nearby mosque, before we returned to his apartment to study Ibn Abi Zayd’s Risala. So I’m waiting for a taxi and one finally shows up when Shaykh Alhamdulliah - and I hadn’t talked to him yet so I hadn’t given him that name yet- appears, pushing another man in a wheelchair. I told him that he can have the taxi, and he was really grateful about that, but then he came back to ask where I’m headed, and it turns out they were on my way, so I joined them.

They were going to pray in a certain mosque in the ville nouvelle. I asked my teacher later why Shaykh Alhamdulillah would go specifically to that far away mosque every Friday, and he said because its preacher was known for not being afraid of criticizing the government in his khutbas. So I had the pleasure of hearing “alhamdulillah” for every single word that came out of my mouth. When we got to that mosque he asked me to come out and help him get the other man out of the car and into the wheelchair. Then he said to that man in the wheelchair, as if reassuring him about my white looks, “He’s Muslim! Alhamdulillah!”

From then on I would bump into Shaykh Alhamdulillah (which is shorter than Shaykh Alhamdulillah-and-Allahu-Akbar if I wanted to be more accurate about it), and have to suffer from his handshakes every single day. You see, Shaykh Alhamdulillah had read how the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam, never pulled back his hand from a handshake until the other man did so first, but he seems to have misunderstood how that works. In fact, Alhamdulillah was determined to let everyone in the world know that he was following the sunnah, so he would grab your hand and squeeze it real hard and hold on to it next to his body until you attempted to jerk it free, only then releasing it to you. I really wanted to tell him that that’s not how it worked, but I never got myself to do it.

So one day I’m walking back home when I see Shaykh Alhamdulillah coming out of a small room that was built as a tiny mosque on the side of one of Fez’s ancient walls, but as the paper on the door said, prayer was now shifted to another, presumably larger mosque, in the vicinity. Yet it seems he was in there with a bunch of men and an old shaykh in a wheelchair, and right after they parted and began dispersing, he spotted me and shouted back to them, telling them he wanted to introduce someone to them. Oh no! So one man, knowing that I come from Jordan, insisted that I meet a friend of his family’s, an engineer of my age, who lives in Jordan. So he took my name, and when he heard my last name he said, “Are you related to shaykh so and so, who passed away a couple years ago?” And I said, “yes, in fact I lived in his house for the past three years, in Cairo!” Turns out he knew my uncle and my cousin! Shaykh Alhamdulillah could not believe what he was hearing and was exuberantly shouting out SUBHANALLAH! ALHAMDULILLAH! ALLAHU AKBAR! again and again and again! Then when that man informed them that my family was Palestinian, again we heard ALHAMDULILLAH! MASHA’ALLAH! ALLAHU AKBAR! Having given them my number, I said my salaams and hurried back home.

The next day I’m walking, praying not to have to shake Alhamdulillah’s hand again, which he always insists that you do, by very deliberately, carefully, slowly extending his arm to you, as straight as an arrow, and keeping it there until you shook it, after which he would lock down on it like a bulldog’s jaw on a thief’s arm, and bring it close to him until he saw you trying to save it with desperate jerks. Having been satisfied that you KNOW he’s following the sunnah, he lets you go. So while I was praying not to have to suffer that for maybe the fourth time that day, he jumps at me, grabs my hand, and says, “So are you praying with the Palestinians?” Confused, I said “what do you mean?” So he says, “You know: Oh Allah give victory to them, help them, support them…” and he kept going on and on with prayers in the same manner as the imam does at the end of the Friday khutbah, and I was going “ameen, ameen”. The thing is, I would usually be more than happy to pray for the Palestinians, but this particular situation felt so weird that I was just repeating “ameens” that were just as fake as his dua’s. After he was satisfied, and I realized that he meant “pray for the Palestinians”, I made my escape.

Perhaps more than a week (and many horrible handshakes) later, I was hurriedly trying to get to the venue for the Sufi Nights of the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, when I saw him standing in front of that same little mosque, waiting for the old man in the wheelchair to come out, this time on crutches. I’m walking fast, trying to show him I’m in a hurry, and say my salaams from far away, and he was content to return my salaams without a handshake! PHEW! But wait a minute…. you can tell from his face that he’s changed his mind, and his arm begins the same deliberate crane-like movement towards me! Nooo! So I shake his hand and try to pull it back quickly and keep walking, but he JERKS it violently, directing it (and my entire body) toward another man who was standing opposite him, actually lifting me off the ground in the process! Ok so maybe I should have shook the other man’s hand from my own initiative, but I was in such a hurry, and in such fear of Alhamdulillah’s handshakes, that I didn’t even realize there was another man standing next to him! I didn’t say anything about his attempt to dislocate my shoulder, shook the other man’s hand, then rushed away saying that I’m sorry and I was very late for something. “ALHAMDULILLAH! ALLAHU AKBAR!” came the loud reply……

After that night, I never again came close to Shaykh Alhamdulillah, always staying on the opposite side of the road, saying my salaams from far away, and he seems to have realized that what he had done was completely out of bounds and felt ashamed about it, so he never again tried shaking my hand! Alhamdulillah! Allahu Akbar!!!!!

The thing about Shaykh Alhamdulillah is that - and I hate to say this- I never felt any genuineness in any of his actions or alhamdulillahs. Everything about him, from his smile, to his handshake, to his allahu akbars felt fake, and full of riya’. But I do have one great memory about him, one time when he was expressing a religious sentiment which I was certain was free of any show or hypocrisy, and it was on that very first time I met him, in the taxi ride. As it was a Friday, and it is recommended to keep repeating the tasliya on the Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam) on that day, I heard him repeat it again and again and again (interspersed with a lot of “alhamdulillahs” as well). Then he smiled and looked at the taxi driver and said: “ALHAMDULILLAH! Allah is so generous! If we do salaat on the Prophet once, He himself does salaat on us ten times!! It says so in Sahih Muslim! SUBHANALLAH! ALHAMDULILLAH!” And he said it with such joy at the generosity of Allah, that he really brought joy to me that Friday. The taxi driver agreed with him, noting also Allah’s generosity in that for every good deed is ten times the reward, but every sin is counted only as one.

So that was Shaykh Alhamduillah, who roams the streets of Ziat in the Fez Medina, with his iron-cage handshakes and his ocean of alhamdulillahs! And it is that one thing that he talked about with pure joy and without any hypocrisy, the fact that for ever salaat we do on the Prophet, Allah Most Transcendent does ten salaats on us.. it is that about which I will write my next post, insha’Allah.

And I end by saying, salla Allahu ala sayyidna Muhammadin wa alaa aalihi, and alhamdulillah! Truly alhamdulillah!