He authorized a number of sheikhs to give instruction in the path. It is related that he wrote out such an ijaza or authorization and carried it to one of the cities of the north to give to a sheikh there, but when he discussed Ibn al-‘Arabi with him, realized that he was not of the same opinion about him as himself, and because he felt this was important, returned to Damascus without giving it to him. He likewise gave an authorization that he later revoked because he found the recipient’s character wanting. When asked about the reality of the ijaza, he once said, “It is a means for its possessor to defeat his devil.” And when asked why sometimes even an authorized sheikh may go bad, he said, “It happens to someone who did not keep the company of his sheikh long enough to absorb his state.” In short, he considered the ijaza a necessary condition to be a sheikh, but not a sufficient one.
For these reasons he was very conservative about authorizing sheikhs in the tariqa — saying that whoever asked for it would be plagued by Allah with it — until after a series of strokes and a coma of fifty-five days in January and February of 1999. He returned to consciousness extremely weakened, and afterwards was much less stringent, perhaps because he considered Sufism to be the third great pillar of the din, and wanted as many people as possible to teach it in whatever capacity they could. Only a few of those he authorized originally took him as their sheikh, kept his company in his active years, entered his khalwa, and attended his readings to the brethren before he stopped for health reasons in 1996; while most were previously trained or authorized by other sheikhs or only kept his company in his final years after his illness. Sheikh ‘Abd al-Rahman used to caution in his lifetime, “The path is rare,” and Allah knows best the sheikh’s true inheritors, in path, in godfearingness, and in absorption in the Divine; though Sheikh al-‘Alawi has written in the first of his diwan: “After the sheikh’s death there appears another like him; That is the way of Allah which never changes.”
On Friday 11 June 2004 the Damascus brethren of Sheikh ‘Abd al-Rahman put their hands in the hand of Sheikh Mustafa al-Turkmani at the Nuriyya Mosque as their head. The sheikh’s main legacy however does not lie in the polity he left behind, but in his reviving the spirit of the tariqa with the Qur’an and sunna and pure experiential knowledge of the Divine. A spokesman for the Syrian Ministry of Religious Endowments said at his funeral that “he was the renewer of the Sufi tariqas in the Levant and an inspiration to those of the larger Islamic World, renewing the tariqas according to the exacting standards of the Qur’an and sunna.” The thousands who followed and benefited from the sheikh certainly concurred with this, for he had filled their lives with din and hearts with yaqin. May Allah bless the Umma with the knowledge he taught, and be well pleased with His servant Sheikh ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Shaghouri. And praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds.
MMIV © N. Keller
