Saad Bouh

Shaykh Saad Bouh was born in 1285 AH / 1848 CE in the eastern Hawd of Bilad Shinqit (Mauritania), the thirty-first son of Shaykh Muhammad Fadil ibn Mamin, founder of the Fadiliyya, and was formed in fiqh and Sufism by his father and his brothers.¹² At eighteen his father sent him south-west into the Trarza to spread the Fadiliyya; he made his base first at Touizikt, where he built a casbah and a teaching centre, and from 1909 at Nimjat, north of Rosso. He consecrated hundreds of sheikhs licensed to give the order's wird across West Africa — 664 in Talibouya Niang's count — was recognised by 1888 as the Fadiliyya's sole representative in Senegal, and his influence reached Futa, Cayor, Baol, Djolof, the Gambia and Casamance.²³

The traditions divide over his stance toward French colonisation. The Arabic biographical tradition remembers him taking part in jihad campaigns against the Spanish and French beside his elder brother Ma al-'Aynayn.¹ The French scholarship, contemporary and later — from Paul Marty to Rahal Boubrik — documents instead a mediator between the French and local rulers, who rescued the explorer Paul Soleillet and his companions in 1880 and others after them, and who in 1906 addressed to his brother the famous Nasiha, a letter of counsel urging him to renounce the jihad, arguing from the Quran, the Sunna and history, on the maxim that whoever takes up arms departs from virtue.²³

He died at Nimjat on 12 July 1917, the twenty-second day of Ramadan 1335 AH, and was buried there; his tomb draws thousands of pilgrims each year at Ramadan's end.²¹ He left a large body of writing on fiqh and Sufism — ninety-five works in Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh's census — among them Nur al-Sirat al-Mustaqim, a long poem on the Sufi path, and his treatise on tobacco and his commentary on the names of God.²¹