A translation of selections from the letters of Shaikh ad-Darqawi, founder of a major branch of the Shadhiliyyah Sufi order in North Africa in the nineteenth century. Each letter is a gem of wisdom. Almost all of the letters concern the method and aspects of the Way based on the central techniques of invocation or dhikr, not usually discussed openly by Sufi masters. They must be considered among the most direct instructions given on the Sufi method to be found in all Sufi literature.

The letters were compiled by al-`ArabÏ ad-Darqawi himself, copied by his disciples and printed many times in Fez, in lithographed script.

Titus Burkhardt has made this translation on the basis of two nineteenth-century manuscripts as well as the lithographed edition. They belong to a body of teaching which usually remains oral and which might be called ‘practical Sufism’.