Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to understand the role of reflexivity associated with mystical experience in Moroccan Sufism. The transformations of the selves over the members of Hamdouchiya's brotherhood are produced, experienced, and negotiated based on the religious state acquired in ritual sessions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to understand the role of reflexivity associated with mystical experience in contemporary Moroccan Sufism. The transformations of the selves over the members of Hamdouchiya's brotherhood are produced, experienced, and negotiated based on the religious state (hal) acquired in ritual sessions (hadra). Based on ethnographic research (2016-2017), the way pedagogical knowledge is used in decision-making, how it is learned, and how it is developed into expertise from mystical experiences are highlighted. In such cases, the interlocutors' daily experience connected with other spheres of social life (work, family, and leisure) are described and analyzed. Acquiring the religious state was related to an apprenticeship through the esoteric dimension (batini). According to the metaphysical and theological tradition informed by the ethnographic context, the disciples (murid) interpreted those experiences as closer to the divine reality/truth (haqiqa / haqq) and not just reduced to an exoteric perspective (zahiri), conceived as a derivation of the sensory perception of the material world. To achieve this, the local disciples needed to recognize two distinctly experienced movements among the places of worship (Sufi lodges or the tombs of the saints) to manifest the religious state: the perception that the acquisition of knowledge ('ilm) is distinct from its practice (amal al-'ilm). The comparison of three ritual centers (zawiya) in Morocco (Safi, Essaouira, and Fez) indicates the scope of the transformation of the subjects for conducting a personal narrative guided by ethical principles shared in the community.