Transmission and Practice in Sufi adab of the Ḥāfiẓiyya Khalwatiyya, a Sufi brotherhood of Middle- (19th–20th Century)1

Renaud Soler

Two Sufi books of the Ottoman period recently presented by Rachida Chih, the Tuḥfat al-ikhwān (“The Treasure of the Brothers”) by Aḥmad al-Dardīr (d. 1786) and the Sayr wa-l-sulūk ilā malik al-mulūk (“The Walk and the Journey towards the King of Kings”) by Qāsim al-Khānī (d. 1697),2 hold a prominent place in the literary heritage of a small Egyptian Sufi brotherhood, as they have never ceased to be present in its collective memory and to influence its reli- gious practices. This brotherhood, the Ḥāfiẓiyya, a discrete branch of the better known Khalwatiyya,3 is located in Middle Egypt near al-ʿAyyāṭ at the southern tip of the Giza governorate. These two texts give us the opportunity to study in detail the relationship between the literary foundations of a brotherhood and its everyday life. Adab, the literature organizing the social and religious behavior of Sufis, is often described as abstract and normative, but this study reveals a more complex relationship with both the memory and practices of the brotherhood. Were the Ḥāfiẓiyya founded in the middle of the nineteenth century by Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ ʿAlī (d. 1886)? The hagiographic texts and testimonies that have been collected all agree on this point, but this claim is historically ­erroneous.4 Although specialists knew about this shaykh previously, they had no idea that a Sufi brotherhood had appeared and claimed his legacy. This region of Egypt remained for a long time difficult for researchers to access. We can now rely on our field studies, which have been conducted on this brother- hood since 2013, and on the access we gained to manuscripts and rare prints

1 This article is the English translation of the original French, “Transmission et pratique de l’adab soufi dans la Hāfiẓiyya Ḫalwatiyya.” 2 Chih and Mayeur-Jaouen, Le Soufisme à l’époque ottomane, 39. See also Rachida Chih’s contri- bution in this volume. 3 For early historiography, see Le Chatelier, Les Confréries musulmanes du Hedjaz. More recently, especially on the Khalwatiyya, see Bannerth, “La Khalwatiyya en Égypte”; Martin, “A Short History of the of ”; Chich, Le Soufisme au quotidien; Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the . 4 The question of the foundation and of the memory is dealt with in my master’s thesis “Histoire de la confrérie Khalwatiyya Ḥāfiẓiyya (XIXe–XXe siècles).”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004335134_027 650 Soler held by the shaykh’s family. This justified the reopening of the dossier and the completion of the writings that Gilbert Delanoue devoted to the shaykh.5 ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ ʿAlī (d. 1886) was a student of Shaykh Ismāʿīl Ḍayf (d. 1863), from whom he received initiation into the Ḍayfiyya, an important branch of the Egyptian Khalwatiyya, when he studied at al-Azhar in Cairo in the first half of the nineteenth century. He remained throughout his life a khalīfa (suc- cessor) of the Ḍayfiyya, as did his three sons, Muḥammad al-Amīr (d. 1926), Muḥammad al-Bashīr and Muḥammad al-Ḥusaynī (the latter two died in the 1930s), who succeeded him at the head of the brotherhood as disciples of Ismāʿīl Ḍayf’s successors. The bonds between the two brotherhoods are tight. They meet during the great pilgrimages of Egyptian , or visit each other on more internal occa- sions, like visiting the mosque and grave of Aḥmad al-Dardīr on the eve of the great night of the al-Ḥusayn pilgrimage in Cairo or the pilgrimage to Ismāʿīl Ḍayf, buried in the Qarāfa (a Muslim graveyard in Cairo). These are pilgrim- ages related to the shaykhs of both brotherhoods. Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ was a prolific writer, dealing with many esoteric and exoteric Islamic subjects. He had a predilection for and devotion to as well as to Islamic Mālikī law; he was born in ʿUnaybis, a village of Upper-Egypt traditionally linked to this legal rite. Some of his works were published near the end of his life, but most of them at the beginning of the twentieth century by his son Muḥammad al-Amīr. To this day, some manuscripts still have not been edited. It was probably after Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ’s death, during his children’s rule, that the Ḥāfiẓiyya acquired its own identity. Prior to this, they were one with the Ḍayfiyya, who were periodically acknowledged by the council of Sufi brotherhoods in the nineteenth century,6 and then again from the 1910s on.7 We will begin with an analysis of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ’s Sufi works. There we can find the first stage of the transmission of the two aforementioned books, the Tuḥfat al-ikhwān and the Sayr wa-l-sulūk. We will then study the modes of transmission of these works inside the Ḥāfiẓiyya in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and ascertain more precisely the changes operant through this transmission. Finally, we will use the results of our field work among the

5 Delanoue, Moralistes et politiques musulmans, 1: 284–309. 6 De Jong, Ṭuruq and Ṭuruq-Linked Institutions, 69–70, 74, 117–18 and 143–44. 7 National Archives of Egypt, Mashyakha al-ṭuruq al-ṣūfiyya, 581, document 4, a handout pre- senting the revelry linked to the celebration of the al-Nabī (birth of the Prophet) in 1914, in Cairo.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬