Voyages of Initiation
Now that Badawi has been transformed by the revelation of his sanctity he no longer has any place among his own. Following a vision, he leaves Mecca for Egypt. But this journey will involve a mysterious detour into Iraq. This might be a later addition that allows the saint to be grafted onto the Sufi tradition of that country. Or perhaps it is just that Badawi, as his origins would suggest, came from somewhere in the area of Iraq and Syria. If this second theory is correct, then it is the whole first part of his life, in Hejaz and Morocco, that is made up. Once again, however, the mystical interpretation of the visions and the journey should be emphasized. In the legend, Badawi must travel through Iraq in order to visit the tombs of his two alter egos, the two Sufi Poles, Ahmad al-Rifa‘i (1118–82) and ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (1077–1165), the respective founders of the Rifa‘iya and Qadiriya brotherhoods. This is a way of bringing together the pantheon of Egyptian Muslim saints as it was composed at the end of the Mamluk period. Only Ibrahim al-Disuqi is missing, and since he is reputed to have been younger than Badawi, he will be added by later tradition. It is classic for a Sufi in training to move from master to master in an endless peregrination in order to fully enrich his apprenticeship in the Way. By going to the mausoleums of Jilani at Baghdad and Rifa‘i at Umm ‘Ubayda, Badawi is not visiting tombs but in fact the saints themselves, the founders of the Sufi brotherhoods. This is probably one of the keys to this indispensible Iraqi voyage and the fact that it is firmly set within the legend of the saint. The historical nature of the trip to Iraq might easily be doubtful, but the links that unite Badawi to the Iraqi Rifa‘iya are some of the rare features of his legend that are more or less reliable.
It is in Iraq that the decisive event occurs which, once and for all, will forge the sainthood and supremacy of Badawi. He is confronted by Fatima bint Birri, rich and powerful, of unearthly beauty, who stuns errant saints. Over and over again the oral tradition has embroidered all possible fantasies into this female character, and written tradition, from the sixteenth century, has hardly ignored her either. The hagiographers were fully conscious that the legend of Badawi and Bint Birri epitomized the quintessence of the sainthood of the master of Tanta. Bint Birri is at one and the same time a brigand of the high road who robs the traveler, a female saint who tests by seduction, and a wanton vampire who will “suck blood and marrow” and strip away the light of sanctity. Sent on a mission by the assembled saints, Badawi must tame the beautiful sinner. She tries at first to charm him, boasting of her beauty and dancing the dance of the seven veils. Badawi, unflinching, pretends to be deaf and mute. She tries to threaten him with an arrow or, in another version, seven arrows. The bowels of the earth then open and swallow Bint Birri and her horse. She calls the tribes of Birri and Nu‘aym for help, while Badawi calls upon all of his lineage—the Alids, descendants of the Prophet, the descendants of the imams. Fatima is finally convinced and begs Badawi to forgive her, and she promises never more to rob others of their wealth or to seduce traveling holy men. And then, fully repentant, she proposes marriage, but fails the trial of the mortar, pierced by the spit of the saint.
This extraordinary legend has several meanings: it is perhaps the shadow of a rivalry between budding brotherhoods; it indicates Badawi’s role as a guardian wherein he appears in a number of miracles as the scourge of marauding Bedouin and the protector of peaceful travelers. But the disconcerting reappearance of the names Birri and Nu‘aym demonstrates the ambiguity of the legend. These tribal names, we must remember, are those of Badawi’s very own tribe and sheikh according to Ibn al-Mulaqqin at the end of the fourteenth century. Fatima bint Birri is in the end a facet of Badawi himself. Through his asceticism and valor he conquers the heritage of his Bedouin past and becomes a hero of Islam in the face of a heroine who embodies anti-Islamic ignorance, jahiliya, and its Bedouin values. The Egyptians have long enjoyed this legend. They see in it particularly the confrontation between man and woman, and have willingly pointed out the sexual symbolism of this face-off between Badawi, the man in the pointed hat, and Bint Birri, under whose blouse the saint slips tongues of fire. A fine Egyptian film of the 1940s features the famous belly dancer Tahiya Carioca in the role of Bint Birri.13
The function of the story, whatever the multilayered meanings, is to show Badawi’s superiority over the other saints, including his two predecessors Rifa‘i and Jilani, as the only person capable of converting Fatima. Having vanquished Bint Birri, her passions, and her past, Badawi is now ready to leave for Tanta, where he arrives in 634/1236–37, according to a number of sources.
On the Roofs of Tanta
Tanta, then called Tandata, a name of Coptic origin, is an ancient city sitting almost exactly in the center of the Delta. When Badawi arrived in the mid-thirteenth century the Ayyubids were still in power, though soon to be replaced in 1250 by the Mamluks. Tanta was then a small town of little importance. It is unclear whether the town existed in the pharaonic era, but the fact that it is built upon a kom, an ancient hill, that was still being excavated into the 1920s in search of fertilizer, would argue for its antiquity. The Egyptologist Georges Daressy suggested that it could be the site of ancient Tawa.14 In any case, the town is well attested in the Coptic period, when it was the seat of a bishop and bore the name Tantatho.15 After the Arab conquest, under the name of Tandata, it was visited in 955 by the geographer Ibn Hawqal, who gave a flattering description of the town in his work The Shape of the Earth. He noted two features that have persisted until the present day: its role as an agricultural center and its position as a trade hub. “It is an important and beautiful agricultural center, well populated, where there is a mosque-cathedral, baths; many estates ensure prosperity; it is the residence of the governor, with foot soldiers and cavalry; there are markets, a small mosque-cathedral, and a fair (maw‘id li-l-suq) held every Thursday.”16
Another traveler, Ibn Jubayr, who passed through the Delta in 1183, describes Tandata as “a huge and populous village,” and he praised the mosque and the sermon of the preacher.17 Thus, the existence of a sizable, active, and prosperous Muslim community before Badawi’s arrival is well attested. When he got there in the mid-thirteenth century, the town already held a mosque and very probably tombs of Rifa‘i saints into whose lineage the new saint would fit. While the Copts remained numerous, and there is still a community to this day, the Muslims were already clearly in the majority. Nonetheless, the ever-forgetful inhabitants of the Delta have almost completely erased the notion of a Muslim Tanta before Badawi. Everything begins with him: he led mass conversions of Christians, he resisted invading Tatars and Mongols, and he created Tanta.
But why choose Tanta? Within the historicist approach applied to Egyptian hagiographies at the end of the twentieth century, rather clumsy justifications were produced: Tanta would have been close to the theaters of battle against the Crusaders who would have fought against Badawi. In reality, there is absolutely nothing in the legend to support such a contention. It is not a rational saint, resolutely prepared to combat the infidel, who arrives in Tanta, but rather a poor hirsute vagabond, wearing a double veil, covered in dust and described by witnesses as a madman (majnun). He was most probably a Bedouin, as his name would suggest, but from where? The legend has him as a Moroccan coming from Mecca by way of Iraq, though he was more likely an Iraqi or Syrian as his earliest biography states. Perhaps he was quite simply Egyptian. Whatever the case, he chose to settle in the deepest heart of Egypt’s rich-soiled hinterland.
A merchant of the town recognized him as a saint and invited Badawi to stay on the roof of his house. Depending on the source, he lived there for the next ten to forty years, that is, the rest of his life. The earliest attested biography of Sayyid al-Badawi, the note by Ibn al-Mulaqqin, already gives him the epithet al-Sutuhi—‘Of the Roof’—a nickname that would be passed on to his disciples. On this roof he gave himself over to asceticism, fasting to extremes and crying aloud in his raptures. Disciples in hope of initiation and the sick searching for cures would climb up to this roof to be received by his long slow stare filled with grace (madad). He also dedicated himself to contemplating the sun, which transformed his two eyes into burning coals. Quite a few commentators, especially Westerners, have been quick to see traces of pre-Islamic sun worship in this practice.18 However, staring into the sky and at the sun actually has a metaphorical meaning: he who regards the sun directly has seen God. The burnt eyes of the Sayyid express the desire to be blind to the world and are a sign