Tijaniyyah

One of the major tariqas of Sufism.

Founded the order at Fez after reporting a vision of the Prophet authorising a wholly new path.

Tijani shaykhs in West Africa write protective texts for petitioners, part of what a marabout is understood to do.

Tijani learning passed through the zawiya and the shaykh's authorisation rather than the college, though its West African shaykhs were often trained in the schools of law as well.

The Tijani shaykh in West Africa is a marabout with a lay following, and the order spread through the Sahel by that relation as much as by teaching.

The Tijaniyya spread across West Africa in the nineteenth century, al-Hajj Umar Tal carrying it through the Sahel, and Timbuktu lay on its road.

The Tijani wird counts a hundred askings of forgiveness morning and evening, a fixed number received with the order's authorisation rather than a devotion left to the disciple's discretion.

The Tijani prayer on the Prophet is the Salat al-Fatih, which Ahmad al-Tijani taught that he received from the Prophet in a waking vision and whose single recitation the order holds to outweigh many times its number of other prayers.

The Friday assembly counts the formula of divine unity in the hundreds in a form fixed by the founder, and no Tijani may take a wird from another order alongside it.

Trust in God is a station of the path in Tijani teaching, held to follow from faithfulness to the wird rather than a disposition a believer simply has.

Blessing is held to attach to the founder's litany itself and to be forfeited by anyone who takes a second affiliation, since the order requires exclusive allegiance.

Annihilation of the self in God is affirmed as the goal, approached through the founder's litany.

The order understands itself as the cultivation of ihsan through a prescribed daily litany rather than through extended retreat.

The litany may be transmitted only by a licensed muqaddam, which is how the order retained coherence across West Africa without a single hierarchy.

The Tijaniyya calls its deputized teachers muqaddams: authorized to induct members into the order's distinctive wird, and made unusually centralized by the rule against dual order membership.

Tijani sheikh authority is unusually centralized: a member may not also belong to another order, and deputized teachers are called muqaddams rather than khalifas.

Ahmad al-Tijani taught that he received his litany directly from the Prophet in a waking vision rather than through a chain of living masters, so the order presents itself as beginning with him rather than continuing an older line.

Instruction received from the Prophet without a living intermediary is the Uwaysi form of transmission, and it is the ground of the Tijani order's independence from every earlier chain.

The finality of prophethood is affirmed in the Tijaniyyah.

The distinction between stations attained by effort and states that arrive as a gift is affirmed in the Tijaniyyah.

Sabr is affirmed in the Tijaniyyah as a station of the path.

The Tijaniyyah holds the sharia binding, and the order's insistence on observance is part of what carried it into the reformist currents of nineteenth-century West Africa.

Shukr is affirmed in the Tijaniyyah as a station of the path.

Taqwa is affirmed in the Tijaniyyah as a station of the path.

Tawakkul is affirmed in the Tijaniyyah as a station of the path.

Tawbah is affirmed in the Tijaniyyah as the first station of the path.

Tawhid is affirmed in the Tijaniyyah.