Ahsan al-Baqili

Al-Hajj al-Ahsan ibn Muhammad al-Ba'qili (1883 – 1949) was a Moroccan jurist and Tijani Sufi scholar from Baqila in the Souss. After studies that took him to Fez and a long life of travel and teaching, he settled in Casablanca in 1929 and remained there until his death, founding about a hundred Tijani lodges across Morocco and an Arabic printing press, and writing a shelf of books on Qur'an commentary, law, grammar and the Sufi path.¹

He was born in 1301 AH at Ikd, in the tribal country of Baqila among the Ida Oultit of the Souss, and memorised the Qur'an at the Ikdi school in his home district. He went on to study Arabic under a number of teachers, among them al-Hajj Mas'ud al-Wafqawi at the Bwabud school, before travelling to Fez in 1318/1900, where he spent a short time at the Saffarin school. His subsequent travels took him through Oulad Kannoun, Ksar el-Kebir, Khzazra and Settat, marrying and acquiring property along the way, until in 1348/1929 he settled finally in Casablanca, where he stayed for the remaining twenty years of his life.¹

Alongside his scholarship, al-Ba'qili received the Sufi path early: his teacher al-Hajj al-Husayn al-Ifrani, founder of the Tijani lodge at Tiznit, authorised him in the Ahmadiyya-Tijaniyya, and the terms of that authorisation, preserved in al-Mukhtar al-Susi's biographical dictionary al-Ma'sul, include detailed instruction in the order's litanies and in the transmission of the Greatest Name to disciples. He also took Sufism from al-Hajj Abd Allah al-Ghashani and received authorisations from further teachers, among them Sidi Ali al-Iskli, al-Tayyib ibn Ahmad al-Sufyani and a descendant of the order's founder. His lodge in the Darb Ghallaf quarter of Casablanca combined teaching, printing and spiritual training, and he is credited with founding about a hundred Tijani lodges across the country; the Casablanca lodge continues under his descendants. His daughter Zaynab, in a biographical note published with his life, describes him in her own words as Maliki in legal school, Ash'ari in creed and Tijani in spiritual path; the museum records his Tijani affiliation, which Wikidata independently confirms by describing him as a Sufi jurist, and preserves her fuller description in the data record.¹²

To publish his own books al-Ba'qili founded the Arab Press in Casablanca. His printed works, most of them issued there in the 1930s, include a two-volume commentary on Surat al-Baqara, Maqasid al-Asrar wa-l-Khafa (1935); Tabyin al-Ashraf (1939); a children's grammar, Tuhfat al-Atfal (1935); Raf' al-Khilaf wa-l-Ghumma (1934); Tahqiq al-Haqa'iq (1937); al-Zalal al-Asfa (1934); and Idah al-Adilla bi-Anwar al-A'imma (1934), alongside further treatises on doctrine, hadith and the spiritual life, and a genealogy of the sharifs of the Souss.¹

He died at Casablanca on the night of 10 Shawwal 1368 AH, which converts to 5 August 1949; the biography's narrative elsewhere pairs the Hijri year loosely with 1948, and Wikidata gives 1949, a divergence the data record discloses. He was buried first in the Ben M'sik cemetery in Casablanca, and about half a century later his remains were moved, at his son's request, to the al-Ghufran cemetery.¹²