Cheikh Sidiyya al-Kabir

Cheikh Sidiyya al-Kabir, 'Sidiyya the Great,' was the founding saint of Boutilimit and the most influential Qadiri marabout of southwestern Mauritania in the nineteenth century. Having travelled as a young man to the Kunta of the Timbuktu region to study and to receive the blessing of Sidi Muhammad al-Kunti and his house, he returned to eastern Trarza in the 1820s and gathered around him a following that made his zawiya a centre of learning, arbitration, and pilgrimage. His baraka was credited with cures, and tradition recalls his healing of a prince during a visit to Marrakech in 1847. From his lineage, the Ahl Sidiyya, descended a dynasty of saint-scholars whose blessing and authority radiated across the tribes of the Bidan; his tomb at Boutilimit remains a place of veneration.

Domains

• sufi sainthood
• healing medicine

Powers

• heals through blessing

Epithets

• سيديا الكبير — Sidiyya the GreatCharles C. Stewart, Islam and Social Order in Mauritania (1973). (secondary)

Relations

• companion: Sidi Muhammad al-KuntiStudied with the Kunta and received their Qadiri blessing.Charles C. Stewart, Islam and Social Order in Mauritania (1973), ch. 2. (secondary)

Sources

• Qadiri saint (c. 1789-1868), founder of Boutilimit and the most influential marabout of southwestern Mauritania, credited with healing miracles and a wide-reaching baraka.: Charles C. Stewart, Islam and Social Order in Mauritania: A Case Study from the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). (secondary); Paul Marty, Etudes sur l'Islam maure: Cheikh Sidia, les Fadelia, les Ida ou Ali (Paris, 1916). (secondary)