Memoirs of a Sufi Master : Fawa’id min Kunnash
DESCRIPTION:
The text presented here offers a unique insight into the life of one of the greatest spiritual authorities of North Africa, the Sufi sheikh and scholar Abu al-‘Abbas Ahmad ibn Ahmad al-Zarruq al-Burnusi al-Fasi (d. 846-899/1442-93). Aḥmad al-Zarruq was the founder of the Zarruqi branch of the Shadhili Ṭarīqa, a leading authority in many other Islamic sciences, and the author of numerous major works on Taṣawwuf, Hadith, jurisprudence and other subjects. He is widely believed to have been the Mujaddid, or Renewer of the Muslim Umma, of the ninth hijri century. May Allah be well pleased with him.
Sheikh Zarrūq kept a Kunnāsh or notebook in which he recorded both important aspects of his personal and scholarly life and also his own brief notes and reflections on many diverse subjects. The surviving manuscripts of his Kunnāsh are based on a transcription of his autobiography.
Memoirs of Sufi Master contains a fluent English translation of those portions of the text which concern the Sheikh’s outward life, his spiritual life, and his teachers and companions. Also included are an introduction and a full scholarly commentary providing detailed and wide-ranging background information, much of it never previously published in English.
Contents:
1 - My Birth
2 - The Deaths of my Mother, Father and Grandfather
3 - My Father’s will, in accordance with the Sunna
4 - My suckling and Journey to Hajj
5 - The number of my wives
6 - Names I was given
7 - My nickname and the Duration of my Suckling
8 - Good news of a fortunate child
9 - Education through storytelling and learning the ritual prayers
10 - Strange Occurrences
11 - Troubles of the Jews in Fez
12 - Some of those I associated with during this period
13 - Some of the virtuous and the righteous whom I met during this period
14 - Addendum: Devoting myself to the pursuit of knowledge
15 - My close attachment to al-Zaytuni; the death of al-Jazuli
16 - Accounts of ‘Umar al-Maghiti
17 - Visiting the tomb of Sheikh Abu Ya’azza
18 - Accused of divulging a secret
19 - The Sufi journey
20- Accused of being a Jew
21 - The perils of travel
22 - Safety, followed by arrival in Tlemcen and a visit to [the tomb of] Abu Madyan
23 - Renewed hardships on the journey back to Fez
24 - The Solicitude of Allah
25 - The theft of the burnouts
26 - The thief is justly requited
27 - Continuation of the journey, under Allah’s care and consoling fellowship
28 - Arrival in Taza, and accusation of espionage
29 - The burnous is given back
30 - Encounter with the Sultan
31 - Arrival in the city of Fez
DETAILS:
ISBN: 9781909460355
AUTHOR: Ahmad Zarruq
TRANSLATOR: Abu Salif Ahmad Ali al-Adani
LANGUAGE: English
BINDING: Paperback
PAGES: 119 Pages
DIMENSIONS: 24 x 16.5 CM
PUBLISHER: Visions of Reality Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ahmad Zarruq also known as Imam az-Zarrūq ash Shadhili was a 15th-century Moroccan Shadhili Sufi, jurist and saint from Fes. He is considered one of the most prominent and accomplished legal, theoretical, and spiritual scholars in Islamic history, and is thought by some to have been the renewer of his time.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR:
Advocate Abū Sālif al-‘Adanī, born in the Yemen, is an Italian Muslim and one of the prominent scholars devoted to the revival of the classical knowledge of Ahl as-Sunnah, in particular the existential legacy of the Islamic West.
He has studied in Tunis, with Shaykh an-Nayfar, the then greatest exponent of traditional Mālikī knowledge together with Shaykh al-Akhwah, and a student of inter alia Shaykh Muhammad at-Tāhir b. ‘Āshūr at the Zaytūnah Mosque before the interruption of traditional teaching therein; at the Bourghiba School for Arabic; and at the Zaytūniyyah University.
He then moved to Cairo, where he studied at Ourman School, at the Dirāsāt Khāssah in al-Azhar, and at Kulliyyah Dār al-’Ulūm (under the late Dean Muhammad Beltāji) by the Cairo University, including with the late Dr. ‘Abdus-Sabūr Shāhīn, the head of the linguistics department. At the latter institute, he studied, at university level, Arabic (nahwu, sarf, balāghah and linguistics = ‘ilm al-lughah or al-lughawiyyāt), tafsīr, hadīth, fiqh and usūl, kalām, sīrah, history and politics, philosophy and Sufism, poetry, prose and literary criticism, and a miscellany of general subjects.
He also passed the American University in Cairo exam on translation and simultaneous interpretation (Arabic-English and vice versa).
Apart from his Islamic credentials, he is an expert in law and legal thinking generally. He has a BA and cum laude LLB (Bachelor of Laws) degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand. He is an admitted advocate of the High Court of South Africa since 1995. He practices as advocate, specialized labour consultant, and private arbitrator, and he has served 8 and a half years at the parastatal Commission for Conciliation, Mediation & Arbitration (CCMA) in South Africa in a capacity of statutory conciliator, facilitator & arbitrator in labour disputes, that is, essentially in a judicial capacity. He also practices as specialized translator for Italian and Arabic to English, especially in the field of legal, commercial, and international politics documents.
He is running at present the Sulwān School of Fiqh (Madrasah Sulwān al-Fiqhiyyah) in Johannesburg.
It is the first such school in Southern Africa which panoramically educates students in “thinking and acting” juristically in accordance with the classical approach and how that approach flexibly caters for modern contexts and circumstances.
He is planning to shortly make the essence of what is taught at that school available worldwide through online video presentation. He has done arbitrations in sharî`ah matters in the field of family law, and has long campaigned for the activation of sharî`ah judgments on all civil disputes through the use of arbitration mechanisms in South Africa.
He does translations of classical Arabic texts covering a plethora of subjects. Some are published, and others are under print or in the process of being available in Kindle format. It is an activity he has engaged in for some 20 years by now.
He is the leading world translator of masterworks of the written heritage from the Islamic West.
He has set up the first E-publishing house specializing in e-books on classical Islam, Hamām Press.
The growing number of titles in its catalogue will be duly advertised on Amazon and other channels timely.
They include: Zarrūq’s lovely manual on Allah’s Most Beautiful Names and how to draw optimal benefit from them, as part of a series of never-before-translated works by Zarrūq and other Shādhilī masters, “the” masterwork of all times on Prophetic intercession, al-Muzālī’s Misbāh az-Zalām, Ibn Zafar’s suave book on counseling high-minded people through an ornamental necklace of Qur’ānic āyāt and Prophetic sayings, historical accounts, fables, proverbs, poems and parables, al-Kattānī’s astonishing writing on the knowledge of the unseen possessed by the Prophet, Sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa-Sallam, and his foretelling of the appearance of the railway in al-Madīnah, Ibn al-Aqlīshī’s superlative text on the lasting right sayings (al-bāqiyāt as-sālihāt), al-Fāzāri’s brilliant anthology of literary and human gems, historical rarities strewn together by Ibn Tūlūn and ath-Tha`ālibī, a treatise on love and lovers by Hāfiz Mughlatāy, ar-Rassā`’s luminous commentary on the names of the Prophet, Sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa-Sallam, and a cornucopia of magically rewarding offers on such disparate subjects as animals and hunting, women, houses in Islam, nightly conversations and symbolical tales, outstanding feats of generosity and the principles of physiognomy, clever people, madmen and sightless geniuses, and shy jinn posing questions to a Sufi master. An-Nābulusī’s eye-opener discourse on music in Islam will be the first such title to be available shortly.
He is currently working on making those titles internationally available in hard copy format as well, and is looking for partners or sponsors in that connection.
He is also the editor of the first holistic magazine of Ahl as-Sunnah wa’l-Jamaa`ah, Sulwān (with its rich insert As-Sundus). Available now as an e-magazine, it likewise aims, inshallâh, to be distributed even in printed version.
He co-hosts a website, mostly activated by his contributions, www.theislamiccommunity.com, which is unparalleled as a portal to knowledge and action within the Ahl as-Sunnah camp, without any promotion of sectarian groupings or organizations and without any solicitation of funding or a basis of followers.
He has run online courses on Arabic and the fiqh of mu`āmalāt or man-to-man transactions according to the madhāhib of Ahl as-Sunnah.
He is planning to co-host of a TV show on the fiqh of pecuniary transactions, and has written scripts for Islamic plays, both storytelling and moot court cases on jurisprudence, the staging whereof he is aiming to assist in within the short term.
He has participated in conferences and seminars in South Africa on a variety of Islamic topics.
