Shaikh Muḥammad al-Muḥammad al-Kasnazān before entering the shrine of Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Gaylānī in Baghdad (1990s).
O Kasnazānī dervishes! What is incumbent upon you is incumbent upon me; obedience is incumbent upon us, “Obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you” (al-Nisāʾ 5:59). The seeker must obey the Shaikh because the Shaikh obeys Allah (exalted and high is He), obeys the honourable Messenger, and obeys the Shaikhs. From a spiritual standpoint, I and you are connected from Shaikh to Shaikh, to the honourable Messenger, to Allah (exalted and high is He). Dervishhood is not merely taking the pledge then you go away and that’s all. No! Dervishhood is being spiritually connected through Ṭarīqa. You are spiritually connected to your Shaikh’s soul, from Shaikh to Shaikh, to the honourable Messenger, to Allah (exalted and high is He).
Shaikh Muḥammad al-Muḥammad al-Kasnazān (Sermon, 27 September 2012)
The shrines of Imams and Shaikhs are especially sacred to Sufis because they are blessed places visited and inhabited by righteous souls and angels. There are innumerable karāmas, a few of which are mentioned in this book, that confirm the sanctity of these places. Our Shaikh looked after the renovation of holy sites and visited them regularly.
15.1 Renovation of Holy Sites
The efforts of our Master in this field started before he assumed the Shaikhdom. In 1977, Shaikh ʿAbd al-Karīm obtained the Ministry of Endowments’ agreement to help financially with the renovation of the shrines in Karbchna, supervised by the Ministry’s regional office in Kirkuk. He put his Deputy, Shaikh Muḥammad al-Muḥammad, in charge of the project.
Our Shaikh wanted to use stone from Karbchna to build the exterior of the mosque, takya, and shrines. The Ministry engineer argued that this would increase the project’s cost, but the Shaikh assured him that he would be responsible for obtaining the approval for the additional cost. Stone had not been used before in construction in Karbchna. It was brought from a quarry behind Shāh al-Kasnazān’s reservoir. Our Shaikh used the same stone to build his house in Kirkuk. He brought marble from Mount Sagarma and used it to build the flooring of both his house in Kirkuk and, later, the central takya in Baghdad. The use of stone and marble from Karbchna was intended to seek the blessings of the village. One of the Shaikh’s sayings about the virtues of this blessed village states, “The light of the Messenger (PBUH) has shone a thousand times on Karbchna’s shrines, its mountain, and the village in its entirety. Everything in Karbchna is blessed”.
Skilled engravers and carvers from Kirkuk carved the exterior of the building. A few months after starting the renovation of the mosque and the shrines, Shaikh ʿAbd al-Karīm passed away. Our Shaikh completed the reconstruction before the late Shaikh’s forty-day death anniversary. The tombs of Shāh al-Kasnazān and Sultan ʿAbd al-Qādir were originally in one room and the tombs of Sultan Ḥusayn and Sultan ʿAbd al-Karīm were in another, but the four tombs are now housed in one hall topped by a large dome.
Our Shaikh also decided to place a golden crown, two meters high, on each tomb and build a large new door for the entrance of the hall. He sent for caliphs from Sanandaj, Iran, who were skilled in designing with gold, and caliphs from Isfahan, Iran, who were deft engravers. He met them in Karbchna on Shaikh ʿAbd al-Karīm’s forty-day death anniversary. He discussed his design ideas with them, which they would sketch out and present to him, and he would approve or ask for changes to be made to them. The inscriptions and ornamentations he settled on were of the kind known locally as Karbalāʾiyya, which is the style of patterns found in Karbala. After the designs were completed, the craftsmen went back to Iran and began work.
After obtaining land for the central takya in Baghdad, the Shaikh asked for the door of the takya’s mosque to be of the same design as the door to the hall of the shrines in Karbchna. The symbolic meaning of his decision was that the door of the takya’s mosque in Baghdad would be the door to the hall of the shrines of the Shaikhs in Karbchna, as he was their successor as the Master of Ṭarīqa.
Shaikh Muḥammad al-Muḥammad al-Kasnazān in front of the shrine of Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Gaylānī in Baghdad (1990s).
It took four years and three months to manufacture the tombs’ crowns and the two doors because it was precise manual work. The work was completed in mid-1982. Amazingly, as the pieces could not be transported by car because of the closed borders between Iraq and Iran due to the ongoing war between the two countries, dervishes carried and transported them on foot from Isfahan in Iran to Karbchna! The hall’s door was particularly heavy, with each side needing to be carried by several men. The area through which the cargo had to be transported was rugged and mountainous. It was sometimes difficult to walk through even without a load, let alone carrying such a heavy and large load. The transporting required crossing snow-covered mountains. The crossing road of Mount Sūrīn, in particular, was very narrow, in places even for a person walking alone without carrying anything. Also, crossing the border in secret and without approval forced the dervishes to avoid well-known paths. Instead, they took secret, rugged roads to cross over the ten-kilometre-long no man’s land between the two warring countries. They would only travel at night to avoid army troops seeing them. The transporting process took eleven days. Despite these measures, army troops discovered them more than once and opened fire on them. It was through karāmas that the bullets would sometimes hit them but would not harm them. Transporting the tombs’ crowns and the hall’s door, each section of which required several dervishes to carry, was extremely difficult and dangerous.
Our Shaikh refurbished the interior of Karbchna’s hall of shrines. Its flooring was made of precious marble, its ceiling was ornamented with beautiful patterns, dazzling chandeliers were installed, and the walls were decorated with pieces of ceramic with fine inscriptions and a blue stripe with the noble lineage inscribed on it. The hall dome was plated from inside with reflective mirrors that gave the hall a brilliant lustre. It has a door leading to the front yard and another leading to the adjacent mosque.
On the forty-day death anniversary of Shaikh ʿAbd al-Karīm, a walī called Kāka ʿAzīz was sitting with caliph Yāsīn Ṣūfī in the corner of the wall that separates the mosque from the shrines, and behind them was Shāh al-Kasnazān’s tomb. Kāka ʿAzīz suddenly said that he saw Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Kasnazān demolish the wall of the mosque that was in front of them, which was facing the valley, which had just been constructed. Thinking that the demolition would be instructed by our Shaikh, Yāsīn remarked that the construction had taken a long time and great effort to complete, so it was inconceivable that it would be torn down. Kāka ʿAzīz replied that he only said what had been revealed to him, which was that Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Kasnazān would demolish that wall but not the others. When Yāsīn asked just exactly what would happen to the wall, Kāka ʿAzīz answered that it and its roof would suffer damage. During the Iraq-Iran war, which began about two and a half years after this incident, the Iraqi army targeted Karbchna in a campaign that destroyed many villages, including mosques and shrines, in Kurdistan that the government suspected were inhabited by collaborators with anti-government Kurdish fighters. The buildings of the hall of the shrines and the mosque were damaged but the walls and roofs were not affected, except for the wall that Kāka ʿAzīz saw Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir’s hand demolish, which collapsed. The army also blew up the living halls of the dervishes. Later, our Shaikh renovated them completely and installed a dome at the centre of the mosque standing on four concrete columns and used Islamic arabesque to beautify the mosque, inside and out, in addition to refurbishing its furniture.
Shaikh Muḥammad al-Muḥammad al-Kasnazān takes the pledge of allegiance of some people at his residence during his visit to London (2000).
At the time of deciding the design of the takya’s mosque in Baghdad, the Shaikh thought of replacing the crown on Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Gaylānī’s tomb. He obtained the approval of the authorities. When the crown was completed in 1983, dervishes sent it to Kirkuk, where he was at the time. He asked for it to be transported to the central takya in Baghdad and kept it there for one night to seek its blessings. The following day, it was moved to Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir’s shrine in Baghdad. Surprised that the crown was from Iran, one of the people in charge of the shrine asked our Shaikh how this was possible. The borders between the two countries were closed and monitored on both sides by armies prepared to open fire on anyone who crossed them. He answered, “How did our Master al-Gaylānī throw his wooden shoe from Baghdad to India?”, citing a karāma of al-Ghawth al-Ᾱʿẓam. A disciple from today’s Pakistan was visiting the Shaikh in Baghdad when someone tried to assault his daughter in Pakistan. The Shaikh knew what was about to happen so he threw his wooden shoe from Baghdad, hitting the assaulter and saving the young woman from harm.
One karāma that happened during the transportation of the crown from Iran is that the dervishes who were carrying it did not feel the cold when they had to sleep in rugged snow-covered areas. Instead, they would feel hot to the point of sweating!
The old crown was removed and placed atop Shaikh Junayd al-Baghdādī’s tomb. The following karāma happened at the replacing of the crown. Caliph Yāsīn Ṣūfī, who was one of the dervishes charged with replacing the crown, took a palm-sized piece of silver from the old crown. He wanted to have six or seven ornamental rings made out of it for blessings, keeping one for himself and gifting the others to certain dervishes who possessed ḥāls. After the work was completed, he went back to his family in Erbil and asked his cousin, who was a jeweller, to turn the piece of blessed silver into rings. The cousin did not have a mould for ornamental rings and offered, instead, to make it into plain rings. Yāsīn agreed and emphasized to his relative the importance of using up the entire silver piece and not allowing any to go to waste because of where it came from. The caliph kept the matter a secret and told no one about it.
After he returned to Ramādī, where he lived to preach about Ṭarīqa, a walī named Aḥmad Sūr (may Allah have mercy on him) visited him in the takya. He surprised the caliph by saying:
Last night, Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir informed me of the following, “Yāsīn has taken fifteen rings from my tomb. Tell him to give you one”.
The caliph answered:
O Hajj Aḥmad! I took a piece of silver to make rings from it. It could produce six or seven, but it could not produce as many as fifteen. I intended to give you one of them even before this message had come.
Hajj Aḥmad replied:
O dervish! I am only telling you what Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Gaylānī has told me. Otherwise, was I with you that I should know about this matter? He is the one who said that you had taken fifteen rings from his tomb and instructed me to tell you to give me one.
About a week later, Yāsīn’s nephew visited his uncle and gave him an enclosed package that his mother asked him to deliver to him. When he opened it, he found that it contained the rings. There were fourteen of them, so he told his nephew that one ring was missing. The latter laughed in surprise and said that when his mother found out that the rings were made from a piece of Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir’s tomb, she kept one for herself for the blessing. The total number of rings was indeed fifteen, just as Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir had informed Hajj Aḥmad Sūr.
Later on, those in charge of the shrine replaced the crown that our Shaikh had made with another made out of silver, produced in India. When our Shaikh came to know of this, he commented that he had done his duty in service to the shrine and refurbished its crown. The crown he made was transferred from Baghdad and placed on the tomb of Shaikh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, son of Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Gaylānī, in the city of ʿAqra in Nineveh in northern Iraq. The Shaikh also renovated the patio that surrounds Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir’s shrine, inlaying it with high-quality marble.
He rebuilt Shaikh Ismāʿīl al-Wilyānī’s shrine in ʿAqra and clothed it in a gold shroud. This project took more than five months to complete, during which time the finest calligrapher of Baghdad penned Qur’anic verses, prayers on the Prophet (PBUH), dhikrs, and poetry in the place. Craftsmen from Isfahan created the golden shroud. The noble shrine was erected on the birthday of Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Gaylānī on AH 11 Rabiʿ al-Thānī 1427, 9 May 2006 CE.
Our Shaikh also funded and implemented the project of delivering water and electricity to Prophet Jonah’s mosque in Mosul.
Shaikh Muḥammad al-Muḥammad al-Kasnazān visiting Karbchna (late 1980s).
15.2 Visiting Holy Sites
Naturally, our Shaikh loved to visit holy sites and shrines. When he was in Baghdad, he would regularly visit Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir’s shrine, as well as other shrines of Shaikhs of Ṭarīqa, such as Maʿrūf al-Karkhī, Sarī al-Saqaṭī, and Junayd al-Baghdādī. In 1995, after a visit to the holy shrines in Karbala and Najaf, the government told him not to visit them again. It feared the development of closer relationships between Ṭarīqa and Shia religious leaders. He would also visit the shrines of Imām Mūsa al-Kāẓim and his grandson, Imām Muḥammad al-Jawād, in Baghdad once a year. At other times, he would frequent the area near the shrines without entering, avoiding problems with the authorities.
There were periods when he could not visit Karbchna due to the military conflict between the government and Kurdish forces in northern Iraq and, later, as a result of the Iran-Iraq war. He would send dervishes who lived in nearby areas to visit the shrines on his behalf. He would also sometimes send someone to visit other holy places in his place.
The Shaikh would have his reasons for visiting certain holy sites at specific times. At times he would disclose those reasons while at other times, he would not. For example, one morning in 1993, before going out for his daily visit to a manuscript library in Baghdad, he informed caliphs in the takya that a dark-skinned man would come. He said that this man was his guest and instructed them to ask the visitor to wait for him until he returned. He also asked caliph Majīd Ḥamīd, who would accompany him on his daily visit to manuscript libraries, to stay in the takya to wait for the man’s arrival.
Later, a Sudanese man with a limp came and sat in the room where dervishes rested and slept. Caliph Majīd saw him when he entered the takya but he did not think that he was the man that our Shaikh referred to. Given his simple and plain clothing and undistinguished condition in general, he did not see anything in him that could interest the Shaikh and make him a special guest among the many visitors to the takya every day. When our Master returned to the takya, before going to his house, he asked about the man. Majīd told him about the arrival of a dark-skinned man but that he wasn’t sure whether he was the man he was waiting for. Instead of our Shaikh sending for him, as was the custom when he wanted to speak with a dervish, he went to see him in the dervishes’ resting room. He started by telling the guest that Shaikh Junayd al-Baghdādī had visited him the night before and told him that he would send him a man who had an affliction and asked him to help him. The Shaikh asked the guest whether he had visited Shaikh Junayd al-Baghdādī’s shrine. Amazed, the man answered that he had indeed visited him the day before. He added that in the morning, he felt a strong desire to visit the Kasnazānī takya. Then our Shaikh asked him about his affliction. He answered that while working, hot tar fell on his foot and severely burned it. Hot tar can penetrate deep into the body and may even cause permanent disability. Our Shaikh reassured the man that he would remain under his care until he was cured. He asked some dervishes to take the guest to a doctor to receive treatment. The visitor stayed in the takya until he was completely cured. When he returned to Sudan, he founded a Kasnazānī takya there. Our Master was delighted with the visit of the man, describing him as “a gift from our Master Junayd al-Baghdādī”. As a result, he went to visit his shrine. His visits to the shrine of Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir were often due to visions that he saw or in response to a call from the Shaikh to visit him.
Our Shaikh would show the utmost veneration in his visits to holy sites. When he visited Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir, he would always kiss the gate’s threshold. He would never turn his back to the noble tomb during the visit. The following incident illustrates the level of reverence and the immense humility that he demonstrated when he visited Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Gaylānī. One morning at the end of the 1990s, he decided to visit the shrine and some dervishes who were in the takya at the time accompanied him. On the way to the shrine, he told Shaikh Sāmān, who was with him, that Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir had summoned him and honoured him that night. He did not elaborate further. When the car arrived on the shrine’s street, he disembarked before it reached the shrine to walk to it—one of his etiquettes in visiting the blessed shrine. The caliphs and dervishes followed him. Instead of crossing the outside patio that separates the street from the building hosting the shrine to enter the courtyard, he headed towards a dog sitting in the shade on the patio. He addressed him gently, asking him to allow him to stand in his place to greet Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir from there! Dervishes who were with him were deeply touched by this scene of tremendous humility. The dog left its place, so our Shaikh stood on that spot. He faced the noble shrine and addressed its owner. The dervishes who were near to him heard him speak to Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir but they did not understand anything he said.
Shaikh Muḥammad al-Muḥammad al-Kasnazān in the courtyard of the Baghdad takya (1990s).
The way our Master treated the dog on this occasion was not unprecedented. In another visit to the shrine of Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir, he was only accompanied by Shaikh Sāmān and his chauffeur. When they arrived at the patio in front of the shrine building, he turned towards his companion and told him that he would stand a little with a friend of his. Shaikh Sāmān did not understand what he meant given that the place was empty, as it was about two o’clock in the afternoon on a very hot summer day. The Shaikh walked towards a reddish dog that was taking shade near a wall. He stood next to it and lifted one of his feet a little above the ground and started to move it, balancing himself on his other foot and his staff. He would make this symbolic gesture to humble himself in the presence of great Shaikhs, including when Shaikhs’ souls attended the dhikr circle. He remained standing there for a short while then headed to visit the honourable shrine. This dog was the friend our Master had referred to!
That night at the takya, our Shaikh told Shaikh Sāmān to ask some dervishes to wash the takya’s yard and the front patio all the way to the street, the next morning, before he left his house for the takya. In the morning, after the dervishes finished cleaning, he left for the takya. Not long after, the dog that was outside the shrine of Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir the day before came from the street and headed towards the takya’s door, crying with visible tears and an audible voice. When the Shaikh saw the dog, he asked a caliph to tell the dervishes in the takya that this dog was not impure, so that they would not stop him from entering. The dog went to the kitchen and sat under a table where he could still be heard weeping. After a while, a dervish gently picked him up and left him outside the takya. Evidently, this was not normal behaviour for a dog. Allah knows the reality of that creature.
Our Master’s behaviour on his visit to the shrine was meant to stress his humility and avoid any sense of pride because of the blessings he received from Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir and the Ṭarīqa’s Shaikhs. This action is reminiscent of words that he often reiterated that a true dervish is in his loyalty and obedience to his Master like a dog to his owner.
The following is an instructive lesson of our Master’s to dervishes regarding imitating a dog in its loyalty. He saw a child outside the main takya in Basra throwing stones at a dog that was following him. The dog would dodge the stones and continue to accompany the child. He asked those in attendance to call the child to him. When he came, the Shaikh asked him why he was throwing stones at the dog. The child said that he wanted to stop it from walking behind him, but to no avail. Our Master then asked him why the dog was following after him, and the child replied that the dog loved him. The Shaikh nodded his head in agreement and said to the present dervishes something along the lines of, “This is how a seeker must be with his Shaikh. He must not get angry with his Shaikh and must come to him as soon as he beckons to him”. Shaikh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Gaylānī had the following to say:
O young man, when the servant knows the True One (mighty and glorified is He), He draws his heart completely near, rewards him with everything, confers on him the ultimate intimacy, and bestows on him the ultimate honour. Once he gets used to these, He takes them away from him, leaves him empty-handed, sends him back to his lower self, and establishes a veil between Himself and him in order to test him and see how he will respond. Will he escape? Will he deviate or remain steadfast? If he stands firm, He removes the veil from him and returns him to his previous situation. Have you not seen how the father puts his son to the test? He sends him out of his house, locks the door in his face, and waits to see what he does. If he finds that his son remains on the doorstep, does not go to his neighbour, does not complain about him, and does not abandon polite behaviour, he reopens the door, allows him in, embraces him, and honours him more than before.[1]
[1] Al-Gaylānī, Purification of the Mind, 86.
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