19th Century Moroccan Sufism and the 2011 Syrian Revolution: The Legacy of Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Mas'ūd al-Fāsī

Abstract

Abstract: In the context of the 2011 Syrian Revolution, numerous Syrian Sufi scholars emerged in opposition to the government of Bashar al-Assad. Among the most prominent of these was Shaykh Muḥammad al-Ya'qūbī (b. 1963). In his vocal opposition to the Syrian government, Shaykh al-Ya'qūbī framed the ongoing conflict in eschatological terms, and in doing so drew upon a long tradition of North African Shādhilī Sufi terminology and vocabularies of spiritual and political vicegerency ( khilāfa ). Specifically, this article argues that Shaykh al-Ya'qūbī drew heavily upon the works of the nineteenth-century Moroccan Sufi Shaykh Muḥammad al-Fāsī (d. 1870), whose thoughts on vicegerency and eschatology informed and animated al-Ya'qūbī's response to the conflict in Syria. To demonstrate al-Fāsī's pivotal role in the formation of the Syrian Revolution's spiritual politics, this article draws upon both intellectual history and original ethnographic fieldwork. It begins with a discussion of migration and mobility, detailing the significance of mobile diasporas in incubating Shādhilī Sufi traditions outside the Maghrib, and offers a corrective to current scholarship on the Shādhilī tradition in the Arab East. From there, it uses eschatology as an entry point into Shaykh Muḥammad al-Ya'qūbī's spiritual politics and those of Muḥammad al-Fāsī, upon which it relies. This article then proceeds to a deeper intellectual history of Shaykh al-Fāsī, specifically his mobilization of extant medieval North African spiritual vocabularies and his development of new ones. The article concludes by connecting these premodern North African spiritual trends to the Syrian Revolution by examining Shaykh Muḥammad al-Ya'qūbī's use of Moroccan Sufi vocabularies in his own engagement with the Syrian Revolution.