The Shadhiliyya is a major Sufi order distinguished by its teaching that the spiritual path is walked within ordinary life rather than through withdrawal from it.
Sanctity without renunciation
The order was founded on the teaching of Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, a master born in Morocco who taught in Tunisia and Egypt in the thirteenth century, and its characteristic doctrine is that the seeker need not abandon work, family or a place in society to attain the highest states. The Shadhili way emphasises gratitude, trust in God and inward purification pursued while the disciple remains fully engaged in the world, and it discourages ostentatious asceticism and public display. Its litanies, above all the Hizb al-Bahr attributed to the founder, are widely recited far beyond the order itself.
A wide and respectable spread
Precisely because it demanded no dramatic breach with ordinary life, the Shadhiliyya spread broadly across North Africa, Egypt, and later the wider Muslim world, and it drew scholars and men of standing as well as the poor. It gave rise to many sub-orders and remains one of the most influential of all Sufi traditions, its later branches including orders that carried its teaching into the modern period and into the West. The order stands as the model of a Sufism integrated with normal society, the counterpart within the orders to those traditions that made retreat and renunciation the mark of the path.