Ahmad ibn Idris
1749 CE–1837 CE · Fez
Ahmad ibn Idris was a Moroccan-born Sufi scholar and teacher whose reformist current shaped much of nineteenth-century Sufism. (Sufism, tasawwuf, is the devotional and mystical dimension of Islam; a tariqa is a Sufi order or "path.") According to his biographers he was born in the village of Maysur, in the Larache (al-Araish) district of Morocco; his birth year is disputed, given as either 1163/1749-50 (favored by family tradition) or 1173/1760. He studied at the Qarawiyyin mosque-school in Fez — hence the nisba "al-Fasi" — and is reported to have taken his main Sufi training from the shaykh Abd al-Wahhab al-Tazi.
Around 1797-98 he left Morocco on pilgrimage, never to return. He passed through Egypt — lecturing, it is reported, at al-Azhar in Cairo — and reached Mecca near the end of 1213/1798-99. There, except for a stay in Upper Egypt around 1813-1817, he taught for some three decades and drew students from across the Muslim world. His central message was a return to the Qur'an and the Sunna (the Prophet's example) and criticism of what he saw as popular Sufi excess.
After disputes with Meccan scholars, he left in 1827-28, traveled through the Yemeni coastlands (Zabid among them), and settled in Sabya in Asir, where he died on 21 Rajab 1253 (21 October 1837). Followers founded the Sanusiyya, Khatmiyya, Rashidiyya and Salihiyya orders; the degree of his own organizational role is debated by historians.
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FezפאסMorocco
What they did here
From roughly age twenty he studied the religious sciences and Sufism at the Qarawiyyin mosque-school in Fez; his reported principal Sufi master was the shaykh Abd al-Wahhab al-Tazi (d. 1198/1783). The years here are approximate, bracketing his Fez period up to his departure on hajj.
About Fez
Fez (Fas), in north-central Morocco, was founded by Idris I in 789 and expanded by Idris II in 809. The Qarawiyyin mosque, founded in 857-859 by Fatima al-Fihri, grew into one of the Islamic world's great centres of learning. Under the Marinids (13th-15th centuries) Fez was again the capital and gained many madrasas. Scholars and Sufis such as Ibn Khaldun and al-Wansharisi worked there, and the Tijani order has been centred in the city since 1789. Fez also had one of Morocco's oldest and largest Jewish communities. The poet Dunash ben Labrat was born there, Maimonides lived there around 1159-1165, and Jews later lived in the Mellah beside the Marinid royal district.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Ahmad ibn Idris’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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