Sacred Journey: Secrets of Success on the Spiritual Path

Jamal al-Din al-Aydarus
Translation by Khalid Williams

Imam ‘Abd Allah al-Haddad read this book in his teaching gatherings so often that as soon as one reading ended, another would begin. He called it “the distilled essence of tasawwuf,” and said that explaining its title alone would require volumes.

Sacred Journey is the English translation of Idah Asrar ‘Ulum al-Muqarrabin, the only known work of Sayyid Jamal al-Din Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Shaykh al-‘Aydarus Ba ‘Alawi.

The distinction the book turns on
“The heart wills, while the soul wishes; the heart loves, while the soul desires; the heart hopes, while the soul craves; the heart fears, while the soul despairs.”

In the classical tradition the heart and the soul are not the same thing, and learning to tell them apart is the work of a lifetime. The same act of charity, the same tear, the same gentle word can issue from either one, and the consequences are never the same. Al-‘Aydarus works through the difference with the precision of a physician reading symptoms, and he gives the reader tests to run rather than theory to admire. A man with a hard heart can still weep, he notes, and the weeping proves nothing on its own. A man who owes a debt he will not repay and gives to charity instead has done a good thing that came from the wrong place.