About The Book

Sidi Muhammad Ibn al-Habīb, may Allah be pleased with him, appeared at a significant time in Moroccan history at the end of a great epoch of western Sufism and was in some ways the isthmus between the old Muslim world of the East and the new age of Islam taking root in the West at the end of the twentieth century.

Morocco is significantly, the most western Muslim nation, parts of it being in fact further west than mainland UK. Ibn al-Habīb was teaching formal knowledge of the Islamic disciplines in the Qarawīyyīn mosque in Fes as long ago as the year 1900 but by the time he died in 1971 at the age of 101, he was a renowned spiritual master as well, with many disciples in Morocco and Algeria and a small number from Great Britain, France and America. He is buried in his zawiya in Meknes, Morocco, and left this famous Diwan, a collection of sacred verse, as a guide for the sincere seeker of gnostic truths.

These poems are normally sung in Arabic and this revised translation is intended to facilitate this for non-Arabic readers by including transliterated text and translation as well as the original Arabic, with numbered poems and a table of contents for easy navigation. Included is also the original introduction and litany by the Shaykh as well as a new biography hitherto unseen in English.

This revised version restores the text closer to the 1962 Meknes edition with the addition now of the recommended supplications after the five prayers and the Salat al Mashish. The Arabic text has been thoroughly checked and is now in a more readable typeface (Lotus).