Tamegroute

Zaouia Naciria, Tamegroute

Tamegroute has been a religious center since the 11th century. The Nasiriyya zawiya was founded in the 17th century as the seat of the religious (Sufi) brotherhood of the Nasiriyya.[1] Tamegroute had a religious school made famous by Abu Hafs Umar b. Ahmed al Ansari in 1575–76. The Nasiriyya order took its name (and its reputation) from founder Sidi Muhammad bin Nasir al-Drawi (1603–1674), who took over teaching at the Tamegroute zawiya in the 1640s. Since that time the leaders of the zawiya have been descendants of bin Nasir without interruption from father to son until the present day. Sidi Muhammad bin Nasir was a theologian, scholar and physician, especially interested in mental disorders. He wrote several works of fikh, some poetry, and hundreds of letters and treatises on Islamic law. He followed and extended the teachings of Shadhili and under his leadership the Nasiriyya became the 'mother zawiya' of Sufi Islam in the Maghreb with several branches in different parts of the country, including the zawiya of Irazan in the Sous valley where 500 students were financed by the brotherhood.[2]

He was succeeded by his son Ahmad (1647–1717) who made six pilgrimages to Mecca and made each of these pilgrimages into a journey of several years. Sidi Ahmad bin Nasir traveled to Ethiopia, Arabia, Egypt, Iraq and Persia. During his travels he took the opportunity of establishing new branches of the Sufi brotherhood. He wrote a voluminous series of memoirs of his journeys called the Rihla (partly translated by A. Berbrugger in 1846) and he brought back numerous works from all parts of the Islamic world. The brotherhood decided, already in the 17th century to found a university of the Quran. That university received, right from the beginning, more than 1,500 students from countries in the Middle-East and West Africa.

When Ahmad bin Nasir died, the library (in Arabic the 'khizana habsia') of Tamegroute, with its thousands of manuscripts was one of the richest of North Africa. Some fine examples of the collection of manuscripts (now 4,200) are still on display in the zawiya today and attract many tourists from Morocco and abroad. Among them are a 14th-century Quran with beautiful calligraphy in Kufic script, writings of Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Ibn Rushd (Averroes), El Khwarizmi, a translation of Pythagoras, treatises on theology, astronomy, geography and pharmacology. Later sheikhs of the Sufi brotherhood of the Nasiriyya also played an important role as religious and cultural leaders and teachers of the Sufi doctrine (Tasawwuf). The 19th sheikh Abu Bekr is well-known, in the Draa valley (zawiya in Mhamid Ghuslan) and in the west through his encounters with the travelers Gerhard Rohlfs[3] and Charles de Foucauld. The graves of eight marabouts attract the visit of patients from all parts of the country, some of which remain in Tamegroute for months and sometimes even for years, hoping for healing and redemption by the baraka of the Nasiriyya. In order to view the books at the library, a permit must be obtained from the Moroccan government, which allows you to handle the books inside the library only. The books collected by Ali Ben include texts on medicine, Qu'ranic learning and astrology, as well as mathematics and the sciences.[4]

The building of the zawiya, as it stands now with its green tiles, dates from 1869, when it was rebuilt after a fire.