Poetry
Paths to Paradise
مسالك الجنان
Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba · 1886
Synopsis
A long didactic poem in Arabic, of more than seven hundred verses, which puts into verse al-Yadālī's prose treatise The Seal of Sufism, adding other references. After an introduction, it deals with knowledge, outward and inward, with fasting, with litanies and the role of the master, with the remembrance of God and meditation, with charity, with the reading of the Qur'an, and then with the enemies of spiritual ascent: passion, Satan, the carnal soul and the world.
Context
Begun shortly after 1880 and completed, according to Rudolph Ware, around 1886, when the author was about thirty, the poem precedes the founding of Touba and the exile in Gabon. Mouride disciples still study it. Serigne Same Mbaye translated it into French as Les Itinéraires du paradis in 1984, and Abdallah Penot as Les Chemins du paradis in 2020, in a bilingual edition; Rudolph Ware has translated extracts into English.
Who it is for
To discover Mouride spirituality from within, through the text that grounds the disciple's education.
Prizes and reception
The daily Le Soleil ranks it among its author's major works, a reference in the teaching of Islamic spirituality.