Rifa'iyya order

The Rifa'iyya is the Sufi order ascribed to Shaykh Ahmad al-Rifa'i of the Bata'ih marshes (d. 578); crowds of the poor attached themselves to him and thought well of him — they are the Rifa'i body, also called the Ahmadiyya and the Bata'ihiyya ¹.

In his notice of Ahmad al-Rifa'i, Ibn al-'Imad says he was a Shafi'i jurist, born in Muharram of year 500, trained by his uncle the ascetic shaykh Mansur; and he quotes Ibn Qadi Shuhba that the order's men had strange states — eating snakes alive, descending into lit ovens and furnaces, and riding lions in their own country ¹. He adds, quoting the shaykh himself: "I tried every path that leads, and found none nearer, easier or more wholesome than neediness, humility and brokenness" ¹. And from Sibt ibn al-Jawzi: he attended him on the night of mid-Sha'ban with nearly a hundred thousand people present, and found him humble, clean of heart and stripped of worldly goods ¹.

• Source read: Ibn al-'Imad, Shadharat al-Dhahab, harvested scan (shadharat-dhahab/AAlexandrina-223861), pp.739-740, notice of Ahmad al-Rifa'i under year 578.
• The scan reads "al-Ta'ihiyya," meaning the Bata'ihiyya, after the Bata'ih marshes between Wasit and Basra where al-Rifa'i was from.
• The snake-eating and lion-riding reports are quoted in the source from Ibn Qadi Shuhba, with Ibn al-'Imad's own caution about later "fraud" among the order's men after the Mongol entry into Iraq; the page keeps them attributed to their reporters.