Travel Notes - Morocco - On the Trail of a Celebrity Shaykh, February 2025

How does Morocco's Shaykh Sa'id al-Kamali get people to care about the ten meanings of "or"?

After my trip to Senegal earlier this month, I moved on to Morocco for about twelve days - tacking forth between Rabat and Tangier. One aim of my trip to Morocco was to attend the lessons of Shaykh Sa’id al-Kamali (b. 1972), one of the most famous Islamic voices in the Arabic-speaking world and beyond. I’ll be presenting a paper on al-Kamali at the conference of the International Society for Islamic Legal Studies this May.

Holding an official “scholarly chair” (kursi ‘ilmi) in Morocco’s state-backed Islamic teaching program, al-Kamali began teaching al-Muwatta’ (The Well-Trodden Path) over a decade ago. Al-Muwatta’ is a compilation of statements/reports attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (these are called hadiths) as well as statements attributed to his Companions and to religious authorities from the second generation of Muslims. The author/compiler of al-Muwatta’ was Imam Malik bin Anas (d. 795), whose following grew into what became the Maliki school, one of four main legal schools/guilds in Sunni Islam. The Maliki school has been widely influential across northwest Africa and currently enjoys considerable backing from states in the region, including Morocco.

Presently, al-Kamali teaches once a week in Rabat and once a week in Tangier - although even during the short time I was in Morocco, some lessons were canceled, as he traveled once to Bahrain and once to Kuwait, in an indication of the growing demand for his lectures. On these international trips and in Morocco, al-Kamali does not just teach al-Muwatta’, but the lessons on that book remain the core of his output. His popularity online is largely due to viral clips from those lessons.

Al-Kamali’s method for teaching al-Muwatta’ is fascinating because it is both so detailed and so entertaining. With each statement/report in the text, al-Kamali typically goes through the following process:

1. Tracing or reviewing the biographies of each person in the isnad, or the chain of transmitters for each report. Muslim scholars widely consider the isnad to be a marker of the report’s degree of authenticity; the best chains are those whose narrators had reputations for accuracy and honesty, and whose narrators knew each other. For each name in al-Muwatta’, al-Kamali introduces the person’s biography and gives the date of their death, which is crucial for determining whether they are plausibly connected to the next person in the chain. Al-Kamali also notes, where relevant, which chains have gaps or (rarely) narrators that the Sunni tradition considers questionable. Some of the narrators are major figures in their own right, and so recounting their biographies can take up considerable time - one lesson I attended was devoted largely to telling the life story of Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (d. 741/742), a key authority among the second generation of Muslims. Al-Kamali’s storytelling abilities are profound, and this is one central reason for his appeal - his capacity for bringing foundational epochs of Islam to life, which in turn has both devotional value and entertainment for the listener. Some of his critics whom I’ve met in Morocco dismiss him, in fact, as a mere “storyteller,” and that’s something I want to revisit in my conference paper.

2. Discussing the positions of Islamic thinkers regarding the legal issue at stake in each report. Al-Kamali lays out the positions of the four main Sunni legal schools (the Malikis, Hanafis, Shafi’is, and Hanbalis) and sometimes includes the positions of other schools or thinkers as well (such as the Zahiri school); he also explains how the different schools and thinkers have debated the meaning and implications of each issue. For example, at one of the lessons I attended in Tangier, the issue concerned the person who has intentionally broken their fast during the daytime in Ramadan - how do they expiate that sin? Does the report in question imply that the person can choose between three options (freeing a slave, fasting two months straight, or feeding sixty poor people), or does it suggest that those are not options but a ranked ordering (meaning that you only fast if you have no slave to free, and you only feed the poor if you can’t do the first two)? In discussing these issues of what is called comparative fiqh (comparative rulings/jurisprudence), al-Kamali also brings in a tremendous amount of additional material, citing copiously from memory. I would conservatively estimate that he has 5,000 pages of text memorized - not just the Qur’an, but also legal manuals, poems, vast numbers of hadith reports, etc. Simply seeing his memory on display is another draw for the audience, I think.

3. Unpacking the meaning of individual words. Again in the same lesson I mentioned from Tangier, al-Kamali paused over the word “or.” He quoted lines of a poem giving ten possible meanings of “or” in Arabic (to express a choice, to express doubt, etc.), and explained each one. He then related this back to the discussion of the legal issue I mentioned above, namely whether the person who needs to expiate the sin of breaking their Ramadan fast is choosing between options or is following a ranked list of priorities. Here is where his lectures can become deeply multi-layered. I rewatched Inception on the plane back home and there is a similar quality to his lessons; tangents break off from tangents but somehow the structure holds and the speaker eventually brings the listener back to the starting point. Maybe it is the ability to embed these technical discussions in a wider narrative that also explains some of his appeal.

Shaykh Sa’id al-Kamali preparing for a lecture in Tangier, February 2025

My paper, I hope, will get into some of the potential tensions at play in all this. Al-Kamali’s lectures unfold in a framework where the state promotes the Maliki school as fundamental to Moroccan identity, yet his lectures subtly call many of the school’s rulings into question - in the lecture in Tangier, for example, he endorsed other schools’ position on the issue under discussion. On the one hand, he clearly values and indeed acts as a bearer of the Maliki tradition; on the other hand, he takes a flexible approach that relativizes the authority of the Maliki school. There’s a lot to think about here concerning the evolution of Islamic authority, and about the relationship of individual scholars to the political climate that surrounds them.