I went to Damascus on Friday morning with some relatives (three aunts and an uncle), and I booked for us three rooms in a boutique hotel that I found on TripAdvisor.com. I stayed there one night, and came back to Jordan Saturday night. The hotel was a house that was built in the 17th century, with an inner courtyard and fountain in the middle. It had a great old vine tree across the roof, which gave the hotel its name: Old Vine. There was lots of beautiful greenery in the courtyard. It was turned into a 9-room boutique hotel recently. When I went into my hotel room, I was pleasantly surprised to see, among the pictures of old Damascus, a picture of the great emir Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi. I took that as a good sign, as the picture was not in the two other rooms in the hotel!

Then I found out something even better! Sidi Abdul Qadir actually stayed in that house when he came to Damascus, and it was sold by his descendants two years ago to the owners of the hotel! I was staying in the house of Abdul Qadir! Possibly the same room he stayed in! The best thing about the hotel (or worst, depending on the person), is its location. It’s exactly two minutes away from the tomb of Salahuddin and the Umayyad Mosque, and exactly opposite the tomb of sayyida Ruqayya bint al-Husayn (radi Allahu anhum). This means that as soon as you leave the hotel you’ll be stuck in a crowd of hundreds of Iranian pilgrims, who have come to visit Sayyida Ruqayya. Getting out of such a crowd is tougher than you think, but is quite interesting and fun!

Because of this, I thought I’d write a quick summary of who he was, but because of the abundance of information on him, I will introduce two unknown stories about him, each involving an interaction with someone related to me. The first is with one of my spiritual ancestors, and the second with one of my actual ancestors.

Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi’s meeting with Al-Sanusi

Abdul Qadir al-Jazairi’s grandfather, the sharif Mustafa, received the Qadiri and Akbari tariqas in the Eastern lands of Islam, before returning to Algeria where he founded a religious center, Qaytana. His son Muhyiddin, a great scholar, became the main Qadiri shaykh in Western Algeria. His son Abdul Qadir was born in Qaytana in 1807.

In 1826, at the age of 19, he accompanied his father to the Hijaz for the Hajj. In 1827, they went to visit the great scholar and Sufi, sayyidi Muhammad ibn Ali as-Sanusi, who was of Algerian origin. Al-Sanusi invited them to his zawiya in Mecca, on the mountain of Abu Qubays, and invited them to some Couscous.

“Al-Sanusi himself was too ill to partake of this rather filling dish, but he stayed with his guests at the table. He folded his hands and watched the young Abd al-Qadir eating, keeping track of how much food he took. When he had finished fourteen mouthfuls, Abd al-Qadir stopped. Al-Sanusi  urged him to eat more, but the latter excused himself, saying he was not able to eat another bite. Al-Sanusi insisted, “My son, (eating) more will make you greater,” but Abd a-Qadir still refused, and the former said, “This is what God has prescribed.” The youngster did not understand this prediction, which referred to the land that Abd al-Qadir was later to rule….[Then] al-Sanusi said to Abd al-Qadir’s father Muyi’l-Din:

The religion of Islam requires every Muslim to defend it, as far as he is able to, and forbids the Muslim to surrender to the enemy. I say to you that I have the best wishes for this our son Abd al-Qadir, indeed he is of those who are going to make the sacred lands of Islam expand and raise the banner of jihad.

According to the historian al-Libi, this was the reason that three years later, Muhyiddin and Abdul Qadir would decide to begin the revolt, the jihad, against the French invaders of Algeria.(1) Indeed, Abd al-Qadir would lead the resistance against the French for almost 15 years.

On the way back from the Hajj, they joined the caravan to Damascus, and met shaykh Khalid an-Naqshbandi, who let them enter the Naqshbandi path. (2) While they only took this path for the sake of blessing, another great man who would later meet and correspond with Abd al-Qadir took this Naqshbandi-Khalidi path as his main tariqa: Imam Shamyl of Daghestan. Abd al-Qadir and his father then traveled to Baghdad to visit the tomb of shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, and then returned to Algeria.

Abd al-Qadir’s father Muhyiddin began the revolt against the French invaders, and benefited greatly from the networks created by Sufi tariqas. His son Abd al-Qadir succeeded him as the leader of the resistance, and fought the French for almost 15 years. During this time he created a fully-functioning state in the areas that he controlled, in which he enforced the Shari’a very strictly. A saying became popular, that a child with a crown of gold on his head could cross all the lands under his jurisdiction without fear. He also established weapons factories, and was able to fight the French bravely until he was forced to sign a treaty with them in 1847. The french broke their treaty and tricked him, sending him to jail in France, and then in 1855 they allowed him to move to Damascus, where he would teach the hadith and the ideas of Ibn Arabi.

In 1860, severe anti-Christian riots broke out in Damascus, mostly because of the wealth they were acquiring from their relations with the West, and Abd al-Qadir used his influence with the notables of Syria to contain the violence, and, when the massacre begun, he organized his compatriots and supplied them with arms, saving the remaining survivors, more than 30,000 Christians, and leading them to safety in Beirut. This led the French, who used to hold him as their greatest enemy, to give him their highest honors and awards. But probably more important for him, he received a letter of praise from Imam Shayml, the Naqshbandi-Khalidi leader of the resistance in the Caucasus, telling him that his action complied with the Shari’a.

In 1862, he went to Hajj, and took shaykh Muhammad al-Fasi of the Shadhili-Madani tariqa as his guide on the Sufi way. He quickly rose through the spiritual stations until he reached his goal on Mount Hira, after which he went into seclusion at the Prophet’s tomb, salla Allahu alayhi wa aalihi wa sallam.(2)

Upon his return to Damascus, he dedicated himself to teaching from the hadith and the Futuhat al-Makkiyya of Ibn Arabi. When he died in 1883, he was buried next to Ibn Arabi, as he had requested. But in 1962 the Algerian government, celebrating its 4th anniversary of independence, moved the body of their national hero back to Algeria.

During the Russian-Ottoman War of 1877-1878, a group of notables from Beirut asked him to be the King of Syria in case the Ottomans were defeated and the independence of the country was jeopardized. He agreed as long as the people gave him allegiance, and the kingdom maintained an attachment to the Ottoman Caliphate. This never happened.

Abdul Qadir and the Mufti of Jaffa


Having described the encounter shaykh Abdul Qadir and my spiritual ancestor, sayyidi Muhammad ibn Ali as-Sanusi, I would like to add this story of his meeting with the great-great-grandfather of my grandmother, the Mufti of Jaffa, Shaykh Husayn al-Dajani.

al-Shaykh al-Qadi Yusuf an-Nabahani says of him:

“Shaykh Husayn al-Dajani, the Mufti of Jaffa. He is the shaykh, al arif billah, the shaykh of the Tariqa, Haqiqa, and Shari’a, the great wali of famous karamaat and manaqib, the shaykh and cousin of my shaykh Abd al-Qadir Abu Rabah al-Dajani, may Allah have mercy on them both and benefit me with their blessings.”

He studied in the Azhar under many great scholars, amongst whom Shaykh al-Islam Ibrahim al-Bajuri ash-Shafi’i, and among the Hanafis, as-sayyid Muhammad ibn Husayn al-Kutubi the Mufti of the Hanafis in the Holy Sanctuary of Mecca. He worshipped according to the Shafi’i school but gave fatwas in both schools. He took the Khalwatiyya tariqa while in the Azhar from shaykh Ahmad as-Sawi, and then was given permission in khilafa and guidance by shaykh as-Sawi’s khalifa when he visited him in Jaffa. He took all the famous and high tariqas from great shaykhs, and has many writings in various sciences. After Allah made the people benefit from him completely, he went to the Hajj and died in the Holy Sanctuary, and was buried next to sayyida Khadija, radi Allahu anha.

Among his famous karamaat is that if someone close to him was coming, either  by land or sea, his legs would start moving against his will in their direction until he would meet whoever is coming, without prior knowledge of their coming. This happened to him many times and many of his students, including shaykh Yusuf an-Nabahani himself, saw this happen to him many times.

One time after Fajr, shaykh Husayn told his wife that he heard a voice say to him: Ya Husayn, rise and go to meet one of the awliya of Allah Most High!

So he commanded his wife to cook food and prepare the house, and walked out of his house, not knowing who he was going to meet. Whenever someone asked him where he was going, he told him that he left to meet one of the awliya of Allah, but that he didn’t know who it was. He kept walking to the north side of Jaffa, on the beach, until he met one of his students, Shaykh Sa’eed al-Ghabra, one of the scholars of Damascus. He said to him: “as-sayyid al-amir Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri is now coming to you, and will be a guest at your house, and I came quickly to tell you to prepare to host him.” Because the Mufti had already told his wife to prepare the house, he continued walking until he met the emir, and brought him and the accompanying notables of Damascus to his house, where they stayed, until he sent with them someone to take them to visit Jerusalem and the blessed places there. This was in the year 1273 A.H. (3)

———
1) Vikor, Knut S., Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge, London: Hurst & Company, 1995, pp. 125-6.

2) Based on the summary in Itzchak Weismann’s Taste of Modernity: Sufism, Salafiyya, & Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 148-153 and other sources.

3) Summarized from, An-Nabahani, Yusuf, Jaami’ Karaamaat al-Awliyaa, vol 2,  Beirut: Dar al-Kotob al-Ilmiyah, 2005, pp. 42-3.