Acts of Devotion

Sidi Idris al-ʿIraqi,  Talut Dawood (tr.)

Paperback

9780998438016

A summary of Irshad al-Khass wal ‘Amm li Bayan Fadl Ba’d al-Ayyam wa al-Layali wa al-Shuhur wa al-A’wam [Guiding the Elect and Ordinary Folk Through Clarifying the Benefit of Some Days, Nights, Months, and Years]. 

Sidi Idris al-ʿIraqi’s Ikhtisar al-irshad li-khass wa l-ʿam, translated here as Acts of Devotion, has long been considered a useful summary of supererogatory worship according to notable annual dates on the Islamic lunar calendar. Al-ʿIraqi was the Imam of the Zawiya Tijaniyya in Fez, Morroco, during the mid-twentieth century. 

This work is noteworthy in its concise exposition of the relevant chapter on the sixteenth-century Indian scholar Muḥammad al-Ghawth’s al-Jawahir al-khams (“Book of Five Jewels”). Al-ʿIraqi supplements this material with various subsequent commentaries on the text, and includes the orally and textually transmitted variations of Shaykh Ahmad al-Tijani as taught to his companions.