Imam ‘Abd Allah al-Haddad read this book in his teaching gatherings so often that as soon as one reading ended, another would begin. He called it “the distilled essence of tasawwuf,” and said that explaining its title alone would require volumes.

Sacred Journey is the English translation of Idah Asrar ‘Ulum al-Muqarrabin, the only known work of Sayyid Jamal al-Din Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Shaykh al-‘Aydarus Ba ‘Alawi.

The distinction the book turns on

“The heart wills, while the soul wishes; the heart loves, while the soul desires; the heart hopes, while the soul craves; the heart fears, while the soul despairs.”

In the classical tradition the heart and the soul are not the same thing, and learning to tell them apart is the work of a lifetime. The same act of charity, the same tear, the same gentle word can issue from either one, and the consequences are never the same. Al-‘Aydarus works through the difference with the precision of a physician reading symptoms, and he gives the reader tests to run rather than theory to admire. A man with a hard heart can still weep, he notes, and the weeping proves nothing on its own. A man who owes a debt he will not repay and gives to charity instead has done a good thing that came from the wrong place.

The author

Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-‘Aydarus was born in Tarim in 970/1562 and raised under his father, memorizing the Qur’an and studying both the sciences and the spiritual path. In 989/1581 his grandfather sent for him to join him in Ahmadabad, India, where he studied further, received his initiation, and was eventually granted general permission for teaching and appointed his grandfather’s successor. He later settled in Surat, where he died in 1031/1622 and is buried.

He nearly did not write this book. “I was hesitant,” he says in the prologue, “because the present age does not befit such an art.” He wrote it hoping it would find readers who were suited to it.

What is inside

Twenty chapters, arranged in seven parts: Foundations of the Spiritual Path, The Conduct of the Seeker, Intention and Sincerity, The Mysteries of the Heart, Virtues and Vices of the Heart, Spiritual Principles and Practices, and The Summit of the Path. The author did not divide his book into parts or sections; he wrote it as one continuous piece, and this English edition is organized so a reader can find his way back to a passage.

The arc runs from base desire at the opening to istiqama, uprightness, at the close. Along the way there are chapters on the conduct of speech and listening, on the effect a speaker’s inner state has on those who hear him, on the deceptions the soul practices earliest, and on the difference between the pleasures of the heart and the appetites of the soul.

Who this is for

Readers who already keep the practice and want to understand what is happening underneath it. Anyone drawn to the Ba ‘Alawi tradition of Hadramawt and Tarim.

We should say plainly that parts of this book are hard. The author assumes a familiarity with the Islamic sciences and a spiritual vocabulary that many readers will not have yet. It was not written as a first book on the inward life. Read what you can grasp, practice what you understand, and return to it later. The chapters are short and each is broken into titled sections, which makes that kind of reading straightforward.

Details

• Author: Imam Jamal al-Din al-‘Aydarus
• Translator: Khalid Williams
• Editor: Muhammad Isa Waley
• Publisher: Ihya Publishing, first printing 2026
• Format: Hardcover, green cloth spine with gold foil stamping, marbled paper boards, ribbon marker
• Twenty chapters in seven parts, with endnotes
• ISBN: 978-1-939256-27-0