Sidi Abu Yaaza Yalnour (d. 572/1157)

One of the most apologists for Islam in premodern North Africa was a legist from Sabta (modern Ceuta) named Sidi Ahmed al-Azafi (d. 633/1218). The son of the chief jurist of Sabta and a respected member of the Banu al-Azafi clan of legal scholars who were to rule the city throughout the thirteenth century, Ahmed al-Azafi made his reputation as an expert in the analysis of oral tradition (riwaya wa diraya). His most significant work is Di'amat al-yaqin fi za'amat al-muttaqin (The Pillar of certainty in the leadership pf the God-conscious), a sacred biography of the Berber saint Sidi Abu Yaaza Yalnour ibn Maymun ibn Abdellah Dukkali Hazmiri al-Gharbi (d. 572/1157).

The subject of Di'amat al-yaqin, the widely venerated "Moulay Bouazza" of the Middle Atlas mountains, is one of the great enigmas of western Islamic spirituality. Nearly everything about this saint, including his genealogy and the vocalization of his name, is open to dispute. Most traditionists agree, however, that he was an illiterate and monolingual Masmuda Berber from the mountainous region of Hasqura. His tomb now stands on the site of the ribat he built at Jabal Iruggan near the Middle Atlas village of Taghiya, between the present day towns of Rommani and Oulmés. To his Sufi counterparts, Abu Yaaza was "Shaykh of the Shaykhs of the Maghrib." To the masses who came to partake of his baraka, however, he was the wonder of his age in the working of miracles. When he died of an epidemic at over one hundred years of age, he enjoyed the veneration of all classes of Moroccan society, with the partial exception of some ulama from Fez.  As late as the sixteenth century, it was not unusual for pilgrims to prove their devotion to Abu Yaaza by walking barefoot the eighty kilometres from Meknes to his mountaintop tomb. 

The themes that appear most often as the foundations of Abu Yaaza's spiritual method are the futuwwa doctrines of humility and service to others. These he combined with a strict vegetarianism and a hypercautious concern for purity that prevented him from eating anything grown by another. Traditions related by at-Tadili in at-Tashawwuf, as well as the firsthand testimony of Abu Yaaza contemporary, the hagiographer Mohammed ibn al-Qacem at-Tamimi, show that this cautiousness was a part of a systematic asceticism and not a mere idiosyncrasy. At-Tadili, for example, reports: "I heard Mohammed ibn Ali ay that he heard Abu Abdellah al-Baji say: "I saw Shaykh Abu Yaaza gather mallow (khubbaza) and cook it, dry it, and winnow it. When he wanted to eat some of it he would divide it into portions, take a handful or two, and roar like a tyrant to himself, saying to his ego (nafs), 'Nothing of you belongs to me but this!" Similarly, at-Tamimi, who once visited Abu Yaaza at his mountaintop retreat on Jabal Iruggan, testifies that the Shaykh refused to take more for a meal than the portion of a small child.

In a later biography of Abu Yaaza, the Jazulite Sufi Sidi Ahmed Suma'i (d. 1013/1598) reports that for more than a quarter of a century that saint wandered about the uninhabited regions of Morocco, where he subsisted on wild plants and was befriended by lions, birds, and other beasts of the forest. At one point of his career, he may have been a partisan of the Almohad cause, for at-Tadili tells us that for another twenty years Abu Yaaza lived on the high peaks of the Atlas mountains above Tin Mal, where the mosque and former tomb of Sidi Mohammed Mahdi ibn Toumart (d. 524/1130), the student of al-Ghazali and founder of Almohadism, can still be found. During this period Abu Yaaza was known as Bu Agartil (The One With Prayer Mat), because he used a woven reed mat to cover his nakedness.

Later is his life, Abu Yaaza went down to the Dukkala coast, where he stayed for another eighteen years. During this phase, he was nicknamed Bu Wanalgut, after a plant he would eat that grew out of trash and compost heaps. For a time, he subsisted on nothing but the edible hearts of oleander and wild acorn mash, which he would make into flat breads and carry in a small pouch on his belt. During his sojourn in Dukkala, Abu Yaaza became a disciple of Moulay Abu Abdellah Amghar's disciple Moulay Boushayb as-Sariya (d. 561/1166), patron of Azammour and Shaykh of Tariqa Nuriyya, which he took from both Sidi Abdelljalil ibn Wayhan (d. 541/1126) and Sidi Bannour al-Mashanzai (d. 550/1135) simultaneously. By this time Abu Yaaza had begun to practice a form of Malamatiyya-inspired role playing which scandalised the exoteric ulama of Fez. AT least once, this led him to engage in cross-dressing and the reversal of gender roles:

One of the companions of Abu Yaaza got married. His wife asked him for a female slave, but he did not have one. So Abu Yaaza said to him, "I will substitute myself for the female slave," for he was black and had no hair on his face. He dressed himself in the clothes of a female slave and served the man and his wife for an entire year. He grounded wheat, kneaded dough, made bread, and poured the water –all at night—while in the day he performed his devotions in the mosque. After a year had gone by, the wife said to her husband, "I have never seen anyone like this slave! She does all that is [normally] done during the day at night, and never appears in the daytime." Her husband turned away from her and neglected o answer, but she continued to ask him until he said, "No one works for you but Abu Wanalgut and he is no female slave!" then she knew it was Abu Yaaza and said, "By God, this one will never work for again, and I swear I will do my work myself!" From that time on, she did her work herself."

As a disciple of Moulay Boushayb, Abu Yaaza was instructed into Tariqa Nuriyya of Sidi Abul Hassan an-Nuri (d. 295/880). Evidence of this can be found in the frequent use of the light symbolism in the names and doctrines of this saint and his teachers. Sidi Abul Hassan an-Nuri, the founder of this tradition, was said to have received his nickname because of the light that illuminated the room when he instructed his disciples. The Masmuda murabit Sidi Bannour  (the Illuminated One), the teacher of  Moulay Boushayb, was also noted for his this phenomenon, and Abu Yaaza himself is reported to have had a countenance so bright that those who looked at him were often blinded. Last but nor least is the example of Abu Yaaza' own given name, "Yalnour," which is expressed by the Moroccan historian Ahmed Toufiq as an Arabisation of the Berber ila.innur, "Possessor of Light." 

Another connection between Abu Yaaza and the Nuriyya tradition was the saint emphasis on ithar, altruism or the practice of giving preference to others over oneself. Abul Hassan an-Nuri also made solicitousness for all human beings an important pillar of his spiritual method. Given this fact, it seems no coincidence that Abu Yaaza ended his period of reclusiveness only after meeting Moulay Boushayb, who would have taught him this aspect of an-Nuri's doctrine. Although in later years Abu Yaaza lived alone with his family atop Jabal Iruggan, at-Tamimi informs us that he would give public audiences at the mosque he built further down the hill. The visitor to Abu Yaaza paints a vivid picture of the Shaykh sitting motionless at these sessions, patiently hearing the petitions of the hundreds of the people who sought his baraka. His forbearance was so great, we are told, that he would give up pieces of his of his turban, the food on his plate, and the even the hairs on his head to those who desired them. At times, however, Abu Yaaza's altruistic behaviour smashed of irony.  The nineteenth-century Sufi and biographer Sidi Mohammed ibn Jaafar Kattani (d. 1345/1930) notes that when ulama from Fez came to visit him, Abu Yaaza would drop to his knees, kiss their feet, and exclaim: "Welcome, my lords! Welcome, oh lams of the material world!"

In 541/1146, Abu Yaaza was summoned with his master Moulay Boushayb to Marrakech at the order of the Almohad caliph Abdelmumin ibn Ali, who had just wrested the capital city from the last of its Almoravid rulers. Although the pastoralist tribes of Dukkala at this time were Sanhaja, in origin, they had never fully supported the Almoravid 'cousins' and used the situation of weakened central authority during the Almohad revolution to attain a high degree of autonomy. This state of affairs were advantageous to the region's marabouts, whose role as tribal brokers and intermediaries allowed them to assume defacto political roles.  One of the most prominent of these saintly leaders was Moulay Boushayb, whose Sanhaja followers were among the most independent in all of Dukkala. When the pastoralists of northern Dukkala refused to pat the kharaj tax to the newly established Almohad state, Abdelmumin sent a massive force of cavalry and foot soldiers to punish them. This campaign culminated in a surprise attack on the Sanhaja near Moulay Boushayb's hometown of Azammour, in which the tribesmen driven into the sea and drowned by the better-trained Almohad forces. Ibn Sammak, the author of the fourteenth century chronicle Al-Hulal al-mawshiyya, claims that after this debacle so many prisoners were taken that a women could be bought for as a little as one dirham and a boy fetched half of that price.

To be fully understood, the inquisition of Moulay Boushayb and Abu Yaaza must be seen in the context of Dukkala tax revolt and in light of the fact that Moulay Boushayb's own Shaykh Abdelljalil ibn Wayhan, had resisted the Almohads during their siege of Marrakech. While under arrest, Abu Yaaza was kept apart from his master at the minaret of the Kutubiyya mosque. However, during his trial, he followed the same strategy as Moulay Boushayb by answering all of the questions that were put to him with quotations from the Quran. Although the details of his interrogation are not available, a mutual understanding appears to have been reached between Abu Yaaza and the Almohad caliph, for upon his release he ordered his followers to cease their criticisms of Abdelmumin, saying "Leave him alone. You have no recourse against him."

After being released from Marrakech, Abu Yaaza moved to Fez, where he hold few meetings with the Sufi and jurist Sidi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi (d. 543/1128) following the foundation of his first zawiya at Humat al-Blida, nearby the Al Qarawiyyine mosque. After an unspecified amount of time, he relocated again, this time to his final home at Taghiya in the middle of Atlas mountains. Here Abu Yaaza lived in seclusion with his family on the forested peak of Jabal Iruggan, descending from the mountain only to greet visitors, teach his disciples, and lead communal prayers. Exactly why he chose Taghiya as a place to live is not mentioned in the sources. By doing so, however, he remained faithful to one of the oldest religious customs, that of building sanctuaries at former cult centres. Soon after their occupation of Morocco in 1912, French investigators reported finding a circle of megaliths near this village, indicating that Taghiya had been revered as a holly place long before the advent of Islam.

It is curious how little of the above information –especially concerning Abu Yaaza's association with Sufism—appears in al-Azafi's monographic biography of this saint. Indeed, the reader is not even told that Abu Yaaza was a Sufi Shaykh. Instead, al-Azafi describes an illiterate holy man and miracle worker, whose idiosyncratic practices require a semiofficial exegesis to make them acceptable. The textual core of Di'amat al-Yaqin consists of manaqib, narratives of exemplary acts that are attributed to Abu Yaaza on the basis of tawatur (oral accounts) transitions. The reader finds himself in the presence of the saint for whom divinely bestowed power is counterbalances by a sense of intimacy and accessibility. The accessibility is reinforced by the simplicity of Abu Yaaza's discourse and the inclusion of Berber vocabulary in al-Azafi's text. Both of these devices are illustrated in the following account, which was related to al-Azafi as a direct testimony from his most believable witness, the Sufi Shaykh, holy warrior, and martyr Sidi Abu Sabr Ayyoub al-Fihri (d. 609/1194),

I once travelled to [Abu Yaaza] riding on a donkey that belonged to me. One day, after I had put it out to pasture, some people came to me while I was in the mosque and said: "Look after your donkey, for it is dying!" I ran to it and find it kicking its legs and hoofs and foaming at the mouth. I understood the reason for this when someone said to me: "It ate the grain of the Shaykh while it was stacked in a bundle and this happened at once: "So I went directly to the Shaykh and said: Oh, my father! My donkey has died!" "He is nor dead," he replied. I said: "He can be nothing but dead, for he has eaten your provisions, and the donkey is your provision." Then he went with me to [the donkey], opened its mouth, and spat into it. It stood up immediately, and no harm had had befallen it. This is indeed a wondrous miracle!"

Evidence of Abu Yaaza's sense of social responsibility includes the reconciliation of newlyweds who were about to divorce, the meditation of tribal conflicts, the suppression of vengeance feuding (tha'r), "good citizenship" expressions of loyalty to the state, and demonstrations of respect for the ulama. His best known act of sala'h, however, was healing the sick. Abu Yaaza's particulate style of healing troubled the ulama because it allowed him to touch the bare breasts of women. When told that the ulama accused him of fondling women and gazing at them in a lecherous manner, he replied:" Do they not allow a doctor to look at the place and touch it out of necessity? Has even one of their doctors become my enemy? I touch only diseased bodies in order to heal them."

Many of Abu Yaaza's miracles were epistemological in nature, since they involved transcendent forms of knowledge, such as minded reading or the perditions of events to come. This type of karama is commonly referred to as firasa (clairvoyance). One of the most striking of such cases in Di'amat al-yaqin involves the saint's uses of serpent as an oracle,

One day, [my father] and his companions went down to the river that ran by his house to wash his clothes. When the Shaykh lay down to sleep in the shade of a tree, a great serpent, with a hood the size of a colt's (muhr) or thereabouts, approached the river, drank from it, and went to were Shaykh Abu Yaaza [was laying]. Everyone was afraid of it. When it reached the Shaykh, it licked his feet and went underneath his clothes until its head emerged from his sleeve. At this [the Shaykh] said: "Do not be afraid! Verily, [the serpent] is a messenger (rasul) who has come to tell me that forty raiders will arrive here tonight. They will be Qaid Abdellah ibn Sanadid and his companions. " then he ordered his companions to look after their women and prepare food.

Al-Azafi's inclusion of such dramatic miracles in Di'amat al-yaqin implies that Abu Yaaza's powers were unique to himself and hence irreproducible by others. Al-Azafi points out, however, that it is not the saint whom people really fear. Instead, it is the power of God, the divine patron and ultimate source of the saint's knowledge and authority, that they sense in the saint's presence. For this reason, say Al-Azafi, miracle workers such as Abu Yaaza are the quintessential Awliya' Allah: "[They] are brought near to Allah through obedience, and Allah reciprocates by giving them miracles. The idea that power and authority are related to one's closeness to God lies behind all of the epistemological miracles of saints in Moroccan hagiographies. Awliya' Allah such as Abu Yaaza acquire knowledge (ma'rifa) directly from God Himself and then broadcast it to others illuminatively, "as if they were pulpits of light." The following account, taken from at-Tadili's at-Tashawwuf, illustrates the didactic nature of this type of miracle:

Sidi Abu Ali ibn Tamagurt said: "I used to carry a load of raisins for Abu Yaaza every year from Nafis to Jabal Iruggan. One year, I went to him with a load of raisins, and gave them to the muezzin, who left them in a room. I sat down to talk with [the muezzin] and he said: "Would that the words of Shaykh Abu Yaaza hide the faults of humankind rather than disclose them! For the man is ignorant and without knowledge. He says to those who come to him, "You have stolen from someone, you-so-and-so! You have done such-and-such, you so-and-so!" And he tells everyone what he has done.' Suddenly, his words were cut off. I examined him and [found that] he had been prevented from speaking. When I addressed him, he did not answer me. I had been with him like this for some time when Abu Yaaza approached, staff in hand. He greeted him and asked about my situation and that of my family. The he went to his muezzin, placed his hand on the [man's throat], rubbed it, and said: 'My son, you have spoken the truth. Indeed, I am ignorant. I have no knowledge other than what my Lord has made known to me.' A drop of blood fell from the [muezzin's] throat so that he spoke, and he started to say: "I seek the forgiveness of God the Exalted! But Abu Yaaza said to him: "Why are you remorseful, my son, since you have spoken the truth? I am ignorant. I know nothing but what my Lord has made known to me ('arrafani mawlaya).'"

The key to the meaning of this account can be found in Abu Yaaza's statement: " I know nothing but what my Lord has made known to me." This is a paraphrase of a divine command to the Prophet Mohammed (peace and blessing be upon him) in the Quran: "Say… I follow naught but what is revealed unto me" (5:15). It is also a similar to as hadith in the Sunan of Ahmed ibn Hanbal (d. 241/826), a source that was well know to a twelfth-century Moroccans: "I am a man who remembers nothing but what God has made known to me (allamani Allah). Statements such as these were made by the Prophet Mohammed (peace and blessing be upon him) in order to show that his path were in agreement with the word of God.

Perhaps because of Abu Yaaza's close identification with the Mohammedian paradigm, the folkloric tradition of Morocco has long associated him with Moulay Abdellqadir Jilani (d. 563/1148), who enjoyed descent from the Prophet Sidna Mohammed (peace and blessing upon him) on both his mother's and his father's side. By the nineteenth century, the legend linking Abu Yaaza to Moulay Abdellqadir was so-established that the biographer Sidi Mohammed ibn Jaafar Kattani (d. 1345/1930) reported in Kitab Salwat al-anfas a tradition in which Shaykh of Baghdad tells his followers: "There is an Abyssinian (habashi) in the Maghrib, whose name is an-Nur wan whose kunya is Abu Yaaza. He occupies a great station, which only few of the First and the Last has attained". Similar traditions have also linked Abu Yaaza's disciple Sidi Abu Madyan (d. 594/1179) with Moulay Abdellqadir Jilani.

 

Tomb of Sidi Abu Yaaza

 © 2008 Dar Sirr