Shaykh Ahmad al-Rifa'i

Shaykh Ahmad ibn 'Ali al-Rifa'i al-Bata'ihi, the ascetic exemplar, named for the Bata'ih — villages amid the waters between Wasit and Basra; of Maghribi origin, born in Muharram 500, trained by his uncle the ascetic Shaykh Mansur, a Shafi'i jurist who transmitted the Tanbih and composed fine verse. Around him gathered a body of the poor — the Rifa'i order, also called the Ahmadiyya and Bata'ihiyya — and he said: "I walked every path that leads and found none nearer, easier or more wholesome than poverty, abasement and brokenness." ²

Humble, clear-hearted and stripped of the world, he never saved anything; on the night of mid-Sha'ban some hundred thousand people attended him; it is related that hearing some verses he entered an ecstasy that caused the illness of which he died — in Jumada al-Ula 578, leaving no offspring. ²