Isawiyya (brotherhood)
Ben Issa was initiated into Sufism by three masters of the tariqa Shadhiliyya/Jazuliyya: Abu al-Abbas Ahmad Al-Hariti (Meknes), Abdelaziz al-Tebaa (Marrakesh) and Muhammad as-Saghir as-Sahli (Fès).
Issawa disciples are taught to follow the instruction of their founder by adhering to Sunni Islam and practising additional psalms including the long prayer known as "Glory to the Eternal" (Al-hizb Subhan Al-Da `im).
[citation needed] The basic cell of the religious order in Morocco is the team (ta `ifa), which takes the form of a traditional musical orchestra with twenty to fifty disciples.
There are currently orchestras of the brotherhood across Morocco, but they are especially numerous in the towns of Meknes Fes and Sale, under the authority of the master Haj Azedine Bettahi, who is a well-known Sufi musician.
[citation needed] As the Aissawa are supposed to bring to people blessings ("barakah"), reasons for organizing a ceremony are varied and include celebration of a Muslim festivity, wedding, birth, circumcision, or exorcism, the search for a cure for illness or to make contact with the divine through the extase.
At the symbolic system level, the ceremony represents the initiatory advance of the Sufi on an ascending mystical voyage towards God and the Prophet, then the final return to Earth.
More broadly, the actual trance ritual of the Aissawa brotherhood seems to have been established progressively through the centuries under the three influences of Sufism, pre-Islamic animist beliefs and urban Arab melodic poetry such as the Malhun.
Aissawa Moroccans generally avoid deep intellectual and philosophical speculations about Sufism, preferring to attach greater importance to the technical and aesthetic aspects of their music, litanies, poetry and ritual dances.
Although this phenomenon causes the appearance of new aesthetic standards through more commercial adaptations of mystical psalms, it also leads to the loss of original Sufi doctrines through severe competition between musicians which in turn degrades the social link between the disciples.
These texts, which may be handwritten or printed, provide information on the genealogical and spiritual affiliations of the founder of the order, while at the same time enumerating the numerous wonders he realized for the benefit of his sympathizers.
These endeavour to put in perspective the Sufi order in the cultural and religious tradition of Morocco through the study of the biography of the founder, and his spiritual doctrine alongside poetic and liturgical texts.
The majority of the authors, who were also anthropologists and sociologists, were at that time French and included Pierre-Jacques André, Alfred Bel, René Brunel, Octave Depont and Xavier Coppolani, Emile Dermenghem, Edmond Doutté, George Drague, Roger Tourneau, Louis Rinn (chief of the Central Service of the indigenous Affairs to the Government General in Algeria at the end of the 19th century), Louis Massignon and Edouard Michaux-Bellaire.
Spiritual dimensions of the brotherhood of Aissawa at that time were never examined, other than by Emile Dermenghem in his acclaimed Le culte des saints dans l'Islam Maghrebin (Paris, 1951).
The New Encyclopedia of Islam reports that "the scholar of religions, Mircea Eliade, guided by Van Gennep, wrote the observation that the Aissawa are in fact a Maennerbund, that is, a lycanthropic secret society.
"[2] An 1882 New York Times article, reprinting an account from Blackwood's Magazine, reports lycanthropy and self-injury during an Aissawa ritual in Kairouan: [O]ne of the Tunisian soldiers ... seized a sword and began to lacerate his stomach.
[citation needed] Nabti shows the complex modalities of the inscription of the brotherhood in a Moroccan society led by an authoritative government (which try timidly to be liberalized), endemic unemployment, the development of tourism and the progress of political Islamism.
