Once this genealogical affirmation, which begins the majority of hagiographies, has been laid down, the narrative moves on to the travels of the saint. According to the popular version, Badawi’s family came from the Hejaz to Morocco, where the saint was born in 1200 at Fez. A few years later, the family departed for Mecca. His sanctity was predestined. “I was already a saint in the seed of my fathers,” proclaims the saint in a poem attributed to him from the beginning of the seventeenth century. He is the fruit of the Light of Muhammad itself, and thus his mother’s pregnancy and his birth were accompanied by marvelous omens and eschatological signs that proclaimed the coming of the intercessor. This is a constant in Muslim hagiography: like the Prophet, a saint does not become a saint, he is one for all eternity, and his entire life is simply a gradual unveiling of his identity, which is sometimes initially hidden.
The oral tradition, as it was collected at the beginning of the twentieth century by Enno Littmann, particularly developed this part of the legend, making the saint out to be a sort of monstrous infant.8
The night when Ahmad al-Badawi was born, he started to talk, and his teeth began to grow, he started to talk, and his teeth were grown, the night he was born, he gobbled up a chicken, he emptied all the plates at one time. [His mother] said: Accursed birth, my Lord is testing us with the man with the big belly.9
While in his crib he swallowed the two geese and the two plates of soup prepared for the midwives, and he devoured all the bread that his mother had labored over. The villagers were panic-stricken and terrified of being eaten alive. His father, returning from pilgrimage, feared that his son was a demon. But the gluttonous baby performed his ablutions and on the very next day began the Ramadan fast, thus displaying his sainthood.
In oral tradition especially, Badawi remains a big eater, Abul Kirsh—‘the Man with the Belly’—and at the same time he is an ascetic (al-zahid), who is later capable of fasting completely for forty days and forty nights. It is his very gluttony that, by contrast, emphasizes his asceticism. The very precise physical description of Badawi given by several biographers equips this mythical colossus with all the necessary qualities of a saint. He has the strong arms and wide shoulders required to carry the burdens of humanity; his legs are thick so that with one step he can cross the universe; his eyes are the color of kohl just like those of the Prophet. His face is marked by beauty spots as a sign of predestination. If his belly is big it is because he has filled himself with God, just like the Prophet; it is because he is bringing abundance to the famished; it is indeed, as written in a nineteenth-century hagiography, because on the Day of Judgement he will carry his disciples in his stomach so that they can pass unhindered into Paradise.
Another characteristic feature of Badawi has to do with his dress. He wore two veils, hence his old nicknames “The Veiled” (al-Mulatham) and “The Man with Two Veils” (Abul Lithamayn). There are many interpretations of these veils: he wore two veils because he enjoyed secrecy or because his face had been scarred by smallpox. One of the more convincing explanations simply recalls that he was probably of Bedouin origin, as suggested by his name (Badawi). Or perhaps he was nicknamed “The Bedouin” because he wore the veils. The hagiographer Sha‘rani, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, suggests this second theory. In Egypt, the nickname ‘Badawi’ tends to be given to any grubby stranger. However, just as for the big gut of oral tradition, a mystical or spiritual explanation should also be sought, as this is what the disciples and hagiographers preferred. The Sayyid wore two veils to cover the blinding glare of his look, a face that radiated divine light. His disciple ‘Abd al-Majid is said to have been struck down by a single glimpse of the unveiled saint.10
He longed one day to see the face of Sidi Ahmad al-Badawi, because Sidi Ahmad was always covered by two veils and people only saw his eyes. ‘Abd al-Majid said to him, “Oh Sidi, show me your face so that I may see you.” He replied, “Oh ‘Abd al-Majid, each look costs a man.” “Oh Sidi, I accept.” Sidi Ahmad removed one of the two veils, [‘Abd al-Majid] saw him and fell dead.11
In the oral tradition the saint presents himself as the protecting son of his threatened mother. The double act of the human mother and the superhuman son prefigures the relationship between the humble devotee and the gigantic saint. The father, who was absent during the birth, is worried by this talkative offspring, and it is his elder brother Hasan, indispensable sidekick and stooge in the legend, who will be both the master and the first disciple of Badawi. He himself does not appear to have gone too far in his studies, even if the biographers mention in general that he learned the Qur’an. Badawi, the saint, who neither wrote nor taught, was not destined to be of the ulema; his sainthood was founded on other virtues. When he is in Mecca, before becoming a saint, he is a knight and a skillful warrior. He is nicknamed Abul Fityan, the ‘Father of Young Braves,’ as a way of recognizing his patronage of virile youths. Such stories brought out another well-known characteristic of the saint of Tanta: his violence. His adversaries are flattened by hideous punishments blithely recounted in his miraculous tales.
Badawi remains willingly and stubbornly celibate throughout all. This is not a necessary condition of Muslim sainthood, which on the contrary usually promotes marriage and fatherhood, following the model set by the Sunna of the Prophet himself. The celibacy of Badawi in fact underlines the particular and exceptional sort of saint he is, whose virility is such that no marriage would be able to contain it. This is the meaning behind his encounter with the troubling Fatima bint Birri, his impossible consort, as recounted in the famous legend from the end of the nineteenth century. Unable to handle his sputum, how could Fatima bear his semen?
She said, “By God, friend, take me as your lawful wife, marry me, Liberator of Captives.” Badawi simply replied, “Girl, you have a round mortar at home. . . . I will take that mortar and put it in your hand, and I shall hawk into it a small spit. If you can hold my spit, I will take you as my lawful wife and you will have great and powerful honors.” He placed the mortar on the palm of Bint Birri, spat into the mortar, and the sputum pierced the mortar and her hand and went down until the seventh earth. “Girl, you could not hold a spit, how could you become the wife of the Prince?”12
Badawi’s celibacy and chastity in the legend represent a mutilation that qualifies him to be the ideal saint for girls seeking marriage, barren women hoping for children, women suffering pain in childbirth, and impotent men looking for a cure. He remains without any carnal descendants but is the true father of all of his disciples, beginning with ‘Abd al-‘Al, who is attached to him from childhood.
His refusal to marry signals Badawi’s entry into sainthood. He then suffers a mystical crisis, a hal, which leads him to distance himself from people and to keep silent, speaking only through gestures. This state of distraction, of removal toward God (jadhb), is common for Muslim saints: they experience a union with God, who absorbs them. It usually involves a phase of extreme rapture, from which the saint will thereafter “come down,” illuminated by divine revelations, in order to instruct his disciples. There are, however, many such mystics who remain in this enraptured state as saints of jadhb, the majdhubs. This term is pronounced in the Maghribi dialects as mejdub and in Egyptian as magzub. Badawi belongs fully to this category of feisty saints who are often represented as naked and hairy, passing for madmen. The majdhubs have held an important place in Egyptian sainthood, especially at the end of the Mamluk era. Even today there are saints of this kind, who continue to fill the Egyptian pantheon. One of Egypt’s greatest contemporary