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.