Living branch · Indian Ocean

Sri Lanka and South India

Around the Indian Ocean the Rifāʿī path travelled with Arab and Tamil-speaking scholars and sayyid families. In Sri Lanka it has its own incorporated association; on the Malabar coast of Kerala it lives on above all in the rātib, a gathering of litany and drum in the Pîr's name.

I. Sri Lanka: the Rifai Thareeq

The Rifai Thareeq Association of Sri Lanka is a body incorporated by act of Parliament. A bill to amend its act came before Parliament in 2017; the record shows it pending second reading, so this site does not say the amendment became law.

Its centre is the Muhiyaddeen Mosque on Rifai Thangal Lane in Colombo 12. There each year the association keeps the feast of “Sulthanul Aarifeen Seyedna Ahamadul Kabeerur Rifai” — the Pîr — with a mawlid recitation, sermons and scholars present. Sri Lanka's state radio has broadcast it live. The press numbered the feast the 138th in 2015 and the 140th in 2017, which would date its first celebration to the late 1870s.

The association's patron in both reports is Rifai Moulana al-Hajj U.P. Seyyed Muhammad Ashique Thangal, named as head of the Rifai Thareeq. The khalīfa Moulavi A.C.A. Ahamed Faleel gave the address. The order also runs the Rifaiya Ladies Arabic College. Thangal is the title of sayyid families on the Malabar and Lankan coasts.

II. Kerala and the rātib

In Malabar the Pîr is remembered in the Rifāʿī rātib, called kuthu rātib, the “piercing litany”. After the night prayer, disciples sit around their teacher by lamplight, take his blessing by handshake, and recite praises of the Prophet and the Fātiḥa. Hymns from the Safīna are sung to the drum, the name of Aḥmad al-Rifāʿī is called again and again, and in ecstasy disciples pierce their bodies with blades and skewers handed to them by the teacher.

This is the burhān of the Rifāʿī tradition in its South Indian form. It is described here as the tradition describes it, with permission from a teacher as its condition. It is not instruction, and this site makes no medical claims about it.