Friday is the end of the mulid. The pilgrims have already left, but the town is still solid with people who want to perform midday prayers at the mausoleum of Badawi. A final procession wraps up the mulid, watched over by the inhabitants of Tanta, for whom the entire event, as the expression of their town, inspires a particular pride. The khalifa is on horseback for the last time, his head swathed in the turban of Sayyid al-Badawi. Sometimes the parade is huge and lasts several hours, to the great joy of the inhabitants, but this year, in accordance with the demands of the governorate, it will be limited. A brass band, a few mounted police, some on foot, the khalifa on his horse, and some boys and girls in donkey carts laughing and shouting. This year there are no floats representing the guilds, no parade of the Sufi brotherhoods. After Friday prayers in al-Bahiyy Mosque, the khalifa finishes his ride through the streets and then returns to the mausoleum, to restore the turban of Badawi to its rightful place in the reliquary. The mulid is over.
2
The Lives of Sayyid al-Badawi: Between Oral and Written Tradition
The vast majority of Muslim saints have a historical identity. There are those who left an autobiography and those who wrote a great work. Others appear in chronicles, whether simply through mention of their death or in full hagiographies written by contemporary friends or followers who were eyewitnesses. Not only is their historical reality indubitable, but the complex course of their life can be retraced, often thanks to their own writings, before any legend is constructed. For example, thousands of details are known about Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi and Abul Hasan al-Shadhili, two saints of the thirteenth century, sometimes even their personal feelings. On the other hand, there are also completely ahistorical Muslim saints, especially in the countryside, who are connected with a tree or a cave or a spring. Their devotees have never bothered to establish dates or fix any solid biographical milestones: the presence and the name is enough. What does one make of Sheikh Abul Nur (the Father of Light), whose tomb is a lighthouse overlooking the Nile? Or Sheikh Sabr (Sheikh Cactus), the saint of a sacred plant growing next to his domed shrine? Or perhaps his shrine was built next to the plant. These are saints of the natural world that represent man’s mastery of it.
Sitting between these two extremes of certain historicity and pure legend are some of the greatest saints of Egyptian Islam, including Sayyid al-Badawi.1 Of these we know the period when they were born and when they died, and we know that their spiritual power gave birth to large Sufi brotherhoods, and that is about all. However, they quickly became the cores of a snowballing oral tradition, a malleable legend that the written word would gradually filter, form, and fix. The initial obscurity of Badawi certainly helped his celebrity during the Mamluk and Ottoman eras. His infinite plasticity, evolving with the fears and desires of his devotees, sent the saint into the realms of myth. His mysterious beginnings have also contributed in the present age to making him a favorite target of Islamists who are dead set against the cult of saints. Talking to Egyptians about Badawi can provoke smiles or guarded frowns, but also, after hesitation and cautious conversational gambits, it can release tales of miracles, professions of faith, and expressions of great love. He is the most beloved and reviled saint of Egypt. He stood as a model for whole cohorts of rural saints who filled the religious landscape of the central Delta at the end of the Mamluk period. His legend has inspired other saintly legends from centuries past until the present day. Badawi is an archetypical Muslim saint and the Egyptian saint par excellence. It is not just that he epitomizes all possible saints; he also embodies one of the strongest, most recurrent, and most powerful types. For centuries, Badawi has assumed, borne, and nourished the culture of Egyptian popular Islam.
How to Read a Muslim Hagiography
During Badawi’s lifetime, his renown did not extend beyond the town of Tanta. No contemporary hagiographers or chroniclers mention him. Even the hagiographers and voyagers of the fourteenth century appear not to know of him: neither Ibn Shakir al-Kutubi (d. 1362) in his biographical dictionary, nor Yafi‘i (d. 1366), nor the famous traveler Ibn Battuta, who passed through the Delta in 1326. This silence would indicate that the sanctity of Badawi remained essentially local. The first certain biographical note that mentions Badawi comes from the pen of Ibn al-Mulaqqin (1323–1401), who was born fifty years after the death of the Sayyid. The text is somewhat laconic, given that he is writing of the man who would become the national saint of Egypt: “Sheikh Ahmad al-Badawi, called al-Sutuhi, is of the Bani Birri, an Arab tribe of Sham. He underwent initiation with Sheikh Birri, a student of Sheikh Abu Nu‘aym, one of the sheikhs of Iraq and a companion of Sidi Ahmad al-Rifa‘i.”2
This is the oldest mention. It gives the saint a name and a surname, and notes the Syrian tribe he belonged to and his Iraqi sheikh. From the outset, Badawi is affiliated with the Rifa‘iya, the first organized Sufi brotherhood, which was born in Iraq under the aegis of the great saint Ahmad al-Rifa‘i (1118–82) and which soon gained a reputation for its ecstatic practices. There is no suggestion of a noble or Moroccan origin, as is the case in later popular versions, nor of travels, visions, and miracles. The saint and his cult clearly did not enjoy the widespread influence that came later. A good fifty years after Ibn al-Mulaqqin’s brief reference, two other notes, one attributed to the famous historian al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) and the other to the Islamic sheikh Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani (1372–1449), radically change the profile of the saint. These are, however, most probably apocryphal and are only known through copies that drop the information provided by Ibn al-Mulaqqin and anticipate later hagiographic themes. Although the attribution of these texts is doubtful, the age of the first manuscript effectively places the text in the first half of the fifteenth century. An authentic contemporary note, from the chronicler Abu al-Mahasin (1411–69), sketches a similar portrait of Badawi3 that is picked up by the prolific writer al-Suyuti (1445–1505).4 It is in the fifteenth century that Badawi, and probably also his mulid, gain prominence.
As time passed, the popular version of his life swelled, becoming embroidered with details, embellished, and, most of all, transformed. The three most important hagiographies dedicated to Badawi all date from the Ottoman era: those of Sha‘rani (d. 1565), of ‘Abd al-Samad, which dates to 1619, and of Halabi (d. 1635). Thus, this legendary construction, magnificent and marvelously expansive, is relatively late. Indeed, in the twentieth century several Egyptian historians used the fact that the texts were late creations as a reason to reject them as inauthentic and historically unreliable. However, every text has its truth. While the historical Badawi remains mysterious, the Ottoman hagiographies describe the saint as he was seen by his devotees in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even reach back into the legends of the end of the Mamluk era. When Sha‘rani writes about Badawi, he is in effect building on the legacy of the sheikhs of the Mamluk period, members of the Ahmadiya, especially Muhammad al-Shinnawi (d. 1526).
Sufi hagiography is a coherent world. The Ottoman hagiographies of Badawi, set deep within the rural world of the brotherhoods, give much information about real and everyday life: often nothing is funnier or more moving than accounts of miracles. However, Muslim hagiography is also a world of connections where every episode calls forth another, where the very birth of the saint heralds his death, where voyages of initiation follow one another in a carefully studied order, where visions and apparitions give rhythm to the life of saints and their disciples. Despite the very colorful aspects of the texts, the solidity of mystical thought and the power of religious and mythical references constantly underpin these hagiographies. Hagiology is inseparable from hagiography. Infinite problems of definition, of typology, of relations to a period and insertion into a tradition arise and can only be resolved by turning to hagiological doctrine, particularly that forged by Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi and which was widely adopted and transformed by Egyptian Sufi tradition.5 To take an example,