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The Lives of Sayyid al-Badawi: Between Oral and Written Tradition

The vast majority of Muslim saints have a historical identity. There are those who left an autobiography and those who wrote a great work. Others appear in chronicles, whether simply through mention of their death or in full hagiographies written by contemporary friends or followers who were eyewitnesses. Not only is their historical reality indubitable, but the complex course of their life can be retraced, often thanks to their own writings, before any legend is constructed. For example, thousands of details are known about Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi and Abul Hasan al-Shadhili, two saints of the thirteenth century, sometimes even their personal feelings. On the other hand, there are also completely ahistorical Muslim saints, especially in the countryside, who are connected with a tree or a cave or a spring. Their devotees have never bothered to establish dates or fix any solid biographical milestones: the presence and the name is enough. What does one make of Sheikh Abul Nur (the Father of Light), whose tomb is a lighthouse overlooking the Nile? Or Sheikh Sabr (Sheikh Cactus), the saint of a sacred plant growing next to his domed shrine? Or perhaps his shrine was built next to the plant. These are saints of the natural world that represent man’s mastery of it.

Sitting between these two extremes of certain historicity and pure legend are some of the greatest saints of Egyptian Islam, including Sayyid al-Badawi.¹ Of these we know the period when they were born and when they died, and we know that their spiritual power gave birth to large Sufi brotherhoods, and that is about all. However, they quickly became the cores of a snowballing oral tradition, a malleable legend that the written word would gradually filter, form, and fix. The initial obscurity of Badawi certainly helped his celebrity during the Mamluk and Ottoman eras. His infinite plasticity, evolving with the fears and desires of his devotees, sent the saint into the realms of myth. His mysterious beginnings have also contributed in the present age to making him a favorite target of Islamists who are dead set against the cult of saints. Talking to Egyptians about Badawi can provoke smiles or guarded frowns, but also, after hesitation and cautious conversational gambits, it can release tales of miracles, professions of faith, and expressions of great love. He is the most beloved and reviled saint of Egypt. He stood as a model for whole cohorts of rural saints who filled the religious landscape of the central Delta at the end of the Mamluk period. His legend has inspired other saintly legends from centuries past until the present day. Badawi is an archetypical Muslim saint and the Egyptian saint par excellence. It is not just that he epitomizes all possible saints; he also embodies one of the strongest, most recurrent, and most powerful types. For centuries, Badawi has assumed, borne, and nourished the culture of Egyptian popular Islam.

How to Read a Muslim Hagiography

During Badawi’s lifetime, his renown did not extend beyond the town of Tanta. No contemporary hagiographers or chroniclers mention him. Even the hagiographers and voyagers of the fourteenth century appear not to know of him: neither Ibn Shakir al-Kutubi (d. 1362) in his biographical dictionary, nor Yafi‘i (d. 1366), nor the famous traveler Ibn Battuta, who passed through the Delta in 1326. This silence would indicate that the sanctity of Badawi remained essentially local. The first certain biographical note that mentions Badawi comes from the pen of Ibn al-Mulaqqin (1323–1401), who was born fifty years after the death of the Sayyid. The text is somewhat laconic, given that he is writing of the man who would become the national saint of Egypt: “Sheikh Ahmad al-Badawi, called al-Sutuhi, is of the Bani Birri, an Arab tribe of Sham. He underwent initiation with Sheikh Birri, a student of Sheikh Abu Nu‘aym, one of the sheikhs of Iraq and a companion of Sidi Ahmad al-Rifa‘i.”²

This is the oldest mention. It gives the saint a name and a surname, and notes the Syrian tribe he belonged to and his Iraqi sheikh. From the outset, Badawi is affiliated with the Rifa‘iya, the first organized Sufi brotherhood, which was born in Iraq under the aegis of the great saint Ahmad al-Rifa‘i (1118–82) and which soon gained a reputation for its ecstatic practices. There is no suggestion of a noble or Moroccan origin, as is the case in later popular versions, nor of travels, visions, and miracles. The saint and his cult clearly did not enjoy the widespread influence that came later. A good fifty years after Ibn al-Mulaqqin’s brief reference, two other notes, one attributed to the famous historian al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) and the other to the Islamic sheikh Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani (1372–1449), radically change the profile of the saint. These are, however, most probably apocryphal and are only known through copies that drop the information provided by Ibn al-Mulaqqin and anticipate later hagiographic themes. Although the attribution of these texts is doubtful, the age of the first manuscript effectively places the text in the first half of the fifteenth century. An authentic contemporary note, from the chronicler Abu al-Mahasin (1411–69), sketches a similar portrait of Badawi³ that is picked up by the prolific writer al-Suyuti (1445–1505).⁴ It is in the fifteenth century that Badawi, and probably also his mulid, gain prominence.

As time passed, the popular version of his life swelled, becoming embroidered with details, embellished, and, most of all, transformed. The three most important hagiographies dedicated to Badawi all date from the Ottoman era: those of Sha‘rani (d. 1565), of ‘Abd al-Samad, which dates to 1619, and of Halabi (d. 1635). Thus, this legendary construction, magnificent and marvelously expansive, is relatively late. Indeed, in the twentieth century several Egyptian historians used the fact that the texts were late creations as a reason to reject them as inauthentic and historically unreliable. However, every text has its truth. While the historical Badawi remains mysterious, the Ottoman hagiographies describe the saint as he was seen by his devotees in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even reach back into the legends of the end of the Mamluk era. When Sha‘rani writes about Badawi, he is in effect building on the legacy of the sheikhs of the Mamluk period, members of the Ahmadiya, especially Muhammad al-Shinnawi (d. 1526).

Sufi hagiography is a coherent world. The Ottoman hagiographies of Badawi, set deep within the rural world of the brotherhoods, give much information about real and everyday life: often nothing is funnier or more moving than accounts of miracles. However, Muslim hagiography is also a world of connections where every episode calls forth another, where the very birth of the saint heralds his death, where voyages of initiation follow one another in a carefully studied order, where visions and apparitions give rhythm to the life of saints and their disciples. Despite the very colorful aspects of the texts, the solidity of mystical thought and the power of religious and mythical references constantly underpin these hagiographies. Hagiology is inseparable from hagiography. Infinite problems of definition, of typology, of relations to a period and insertion into a tradition arise and can only be resolved by turning to hagiological doctrine, particularly that forged by Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi and which was widely adopted and transformed by Egyptian Sufi tradition.⁵ To take an example, the notion of the pole (qutb), the saint who dominates the mystical hierarchy, has been enthusiastically picked up by popular Egyptian Sufism, which has bestowed this title upon its four favorite saints: two Iraqis, Ahmad al-Rifa‘i (1118–82) and ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (1076–1165), and two Egyptians, Sayyid al-Badawi (1200–76) and Ibrahim al-Disuqi (1236–77). The creation of this ensemble of Four Poles, most probably in the fifteenth century at the end of the Mamluk era, is a shifting of the older hagiological notion of four awtad (from the singular watad, meaning literally a ‘stake’ that one plants in the earth). The awtad are living saints who fit on the third rank of the mystical hierarchy behind the one and only Pole, Muhammad, and the two imams. Each watad guards one of the cardinal points, or in other words one of the poles. Egyptian hagiography delights in describing the division of the world among the four ever-present saints, who preside over the council of saints, an unseen celestial government, as they do over the fate of the world.

The Lives of Badawi are therefore very complicated texts, which refer to thousands of things that are transparent to the readers or audience for which they were designed but which the specialist of today must decipher. Sha‘rani (d. 1565) is an inexhaustible source for the historian.⁶ He gives us the keys, the flavor, the odors of life in the zawiyas of his time, talks widely about his contemporaries, and draws on oral history. He is a witness as much as he is a hagiographer since he gathers and transmits the whole heritage of Sufism at the end of the Mamluk era.

The task is not just one of reading the hagiographies, but also of knowing with which sources they should be cross-referenced. This is a basic question. The Mamluk and Ottoman hagiographies of Badawi are not sufficient: one must also study contemporary pamphlets and vernacular tales (qisas), which perpetuate the oral tradition in the nineteenth century and gather current oral tradition. A new facet of the saint appears at every turn. There is no question of discarding the marvelous or miraculous, of filtering between the more or less reliable sources or those that are more or less ‘contaminated’ by propaganda of the Sufi brotherhoods. This propaganda is in itself fascinating because it gives us precisely the point of view of the Sufis.

While the hagiographies are exceedingly rich in solid information, one should not at all costs attempt to reveal the realia by rejecting any ahistorical accounts. For the friends of the saints the supernatural or tales of visions are no less real than concrete stories. In this lowly world ruled by the hidden government of the saints, how can one accept mere appearances? As for the rest, it is impossible to decide between the legend and history, supernatural and real, without major amputation. Later narratives, even if repetitive, are no less interesting than older accounts. They all belong to the same culture and its evolution, that of the saints. This homogeneous hagiographic culture should be studied exactly for what it is: an ensemble of texts written to convince by the convinced; a literature of struggle.

When diving into Sufi hagiographies, it is necessary to employ literary methods of textual study. The very composition of the book and the plan followed by the hagiographer provide the first clues. What place do miracles occupy in the hagiography, and has the writer separated them into miracles in vita and post mortem? At what date did such and such a miracle or event occur? An examination of the hagiographer’s sources and the way in which he manipulates them is particularly interesting. Sha‘rani works primarily with oral tradition passed on by his sheikhs; ‘Abd al-Samad is the most familiar with the poetic tradition and the life of the tomb; while Halabi, who does not always cite his sources, compares several and employs a critical analysis. As for the later hagiographies and texts, they are most probably pure compilations; however, the way in which the repetitions, variants, and omissions appear make these sources fertile ground.

In every case, oral history is essential for a written hagiography. After all, the devotees and disciples of the saint began by speaking his history before writing it down. The accounts of miracles recorded in the hagiographies were first passed from sheikh to disciple, from father to son, between neighbors and villagers during Sufi séances or on the pilgrim’s route to the tombs of the saints. Oral tradition is an underground current that suddenly bursts to the surface, and it would be very difficult for a historian to construct any archaeology based upon it. For example, the hagiography written in the sixteenth century contains the marvelous story of Fatima bint Birri, a sinful saint who confronts Badawi, and there is no way of telling if this is a recent invention, a late addition, or simply the transcription of a very ancient folk tale. The story of Khadra al-Sharifa, the beautiful prisoner held by the Franks and freed by Badawi, has always remained limited to the oral sphere and is only known to us from the nineteenth-century edition of a colloquial text. Nevertheless, a close study of the tale shows that it is old (it dates at least to the Mamluk period) and it contains Biblical motifs.⁷ Thus, the latest hagiographies of Badawi do not necessarily reveal the most recent traditions, but rather the different faces of the saint of Tanta.

Oral tradition, of course, does not run on unchanged alongside the written. It remains constantly vital and the circulation of manuscripts and published hagiographies feeds into the narratives of the sheikhs. Hagiographers are inspired by a vita to compose yet another. The writing of hagiographies would appear to have influenced the tales that circulated among the illiterate peasantry. From the end of the nineteenth century, the storytellers themselves drew the substance of their poems and songs from printed collections. Printing, which became extremely widespread after 1860, effectively changed the game by imposing the standard popular versions and unifying the oral tradition.

Should the life of a saint be told in the vernacular or in literary Arabic? There are quite clearly certain miracles that exist in oral tradition but not in the written: tales of drowned cows and resurrected chickens, verbal fights and assaults where Badawi generally shows himself to be more rough and hearty than in the written hagiography. The difference between oral and written culture is often more a question of style and manner, of tone, than of content. The vocabulary and certain themes may change, with a clear and conscious division of roles. The oral tradition features more animals than the written, and the oral Badawi is a rather truculent, flatulent, and irascible saint. However, the hagiographic texts feed off these legends too, and certain writings do not shy away from recording how Badawi urinated from his roof onto his opponents below. Despite infinite variations, the two traditions are in reality not separable. It is clear that ‘late’ additions are not in our eyes any less authentic than the few biographical details of ancient provenance. All, or almost all, of them come from the oral tradition that is capable of evolving over the centuries, building up a formidable corpus in a society where all transmission of knowledge was, in the first place, oral.

The hagiographer’s style, words, and phrasing are the essence of the work. He is never naive. He knows exactly why he is writing and his codes are immediately understandable by those who share his culture. Lions, for example, do not wander through a tale at random, since the anecdotes and tales that the hagiographer employs are all given a symbolic significance. Taming a wild beast and successfully petitioning a brutal emir are in the end the same miracle. The tales are not short of metaphors, and depending on the audience some will take them literally, others figuratively, but for all, the sense of the esoteric is never absent.

Reading the hagiographies, entertaining though they may be, requires the historian to have somewhat deft interpretative and imaginative skills. An intimate understanding of the text is needed to read the lives of the saints. Some hagiographers are easier to understand than others, as is the case with all writers, and one must spend time in their company to grasp their ellipses and their silences, to listen to their music, and, in the end, to hear the hidden melody.

And so we shall recount the life of a Muslim saint as his disciples gradually molded it between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It was then, in the Ottoman period, that a dominant popular version was arrived at that subsequently endured up to the end of the nineteenth century. In truth, no devotee or adversary of the saint of Tanta knows all the episodes in this protean life, but we shall attempt a narrative of the most famous of them as they are found in the three principal hagiographies of the Ottoman era, those of Sha‘rani, ‘Abd al-Samad, and Halabi. These texts solidified a shifting legend composed at the end of the Mamluk period. The fact that historical reality has little to do with this tale is scarcely important. At the risk of repetition, the tale tells the reality of the saint as his devotees see it.

The Origins and Childhood of the Saint

Badawi, of the Birri tribe, was probably originally from Syria, as is fleetingly indicated by his first biographer, Ibn al-Mulaqqin. The majority of later biographies, however, prefer to accentuate a prophetic genealogy for Badawi that would be at the root of his sanctity. As a descendant of the Prophet through his grandson al-Husayn, he is therefore a sharif and traces his line through ten of the twelve imams recognized by the main branch of Shia Islam, from ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib to ‘Ali al-Hadi. This descent in the eyes of present-day adversaries justifies identifying him as Shi‘i. In reality it shows the deep attachment felt by the Egyptian folk to the People of the House, the Prophet’s family. Indeed, the saint’s parents were named Ali and Fatima, like the son-in-law and daughter of the Prophet. The important point here is not the fraudulent nature of this genealogy but the necessity for a great Muslim saint in the eyes of his fifteenth-century admirers to be a descendant of the Prophet.

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 saints, Ahmad Radwan (d. 1967), was dubbed the “Sultan of Majdhubs.”

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 of the light of the Most High. He is now a seer, who can see through appearances when deep in trance, and this ability must be masked by a double veil.

We know almost nothing of Badawi’s life in Tanta. Of course, the legend gives us anecdotes about his disciples and the sheikhs he met, as well as about his relations with the powerful. Sirat al-Zahir Baybars (The Life of al-Zahir Baybars) makes much of the encounter between Baybars (d. 1277), the Mamluk emir who fought victoriously against the Crusaders, and the saint who was his contemporary. The aim of such tales, which quite frequently involve saints of the thirteenth century, is always to recall where in the end real power is to be found: in the hands of the Pole, the axis of this world. “The true king is he and this earth belongs to him.”¹⁹ The less important Badawi appears, the more he dominates a world that does not notice him.

The only date in Badawi’s life on which all the hagiographies agree is his death in 675/1276. It is, however, an event of little importance in that the death of a Muslim saint is simply an occultation and not a true demise. The saint has become invisible but is ever present, ever active, speaking from his tomb, coming out of it when necessary, and continuing to meet with his peers in the Council of Saints. Badawi leaves behind no book, no pious foundation, not even a building to perpetuate his memory. His mausoleum did not then exist, nor did the mulid that has established his renown. The brotherhood that today bears his name had not yet been founded. As we have seen, at his death none of his contemporaries thought it worthwhile to mention him in any kind of obituary, and the first, very brief biographical notice that features his name is that of Ibn al-Mulaqqin (1323–1401), which dates to roughly a century after his death. Moreover, it has nothing in common with the flood of legend that will soon wash through the first half of the fifteenth century. To put it briefly, in 1276 the reputation of the sheikh scarcely reached beyond the borders of his home territory. All the names of Egyptian places connected to his biography are located within a very limited perimeter around Tanta: Fisha al-Manara, Nifya, Quhafa, and Mahallat Marhum are all villages an hour’s walk away. A strange man, certainly a foreigner, most probably a Bedouin from Syria with Rifa‘i connections, had lived in Tanta for several decades. Nevertheless, this almost unknown tight-lipped ascetic managed to leave behind a sufficiently strong memory of divinely conferred power that his successor ‘Abd al-‘Al could use it like fertile soil in which to plant a brotherhood, a mausoleum, and a mulid. Although these creations were the later fruits of the fifteenth century, the roots were set in the life and miracles of the Sayyid.