THE BLACK PATH

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 THE BLACK PATH
© Copyright by (2015)

First edition 2015

Cover image from Kitab al-Burhun, courtesy of

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THE BLACK PATH

FOREWORD

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The Black Path begins in the desert.

The desert is a strange and terrible place. By day

it’s hotter than any place on earth, but at night it
becomes colder than you would imagine. The sand
doesn’t hold the heat, and so it all rises into the sky.
The foreign military companies that train there
learn very quickly that you need to cover during the
day to ward off the sun and keep your moisture
inside, but you cover at night so that you don’t catch
hyperthermia. The desert is a mystic place, where
strange and unfamiliar things can appear to people,
especially those travel alone. Many times when I
was with the private security forces in Algeria, units
who came back from night patrol would reluctantly
report having seen some very bizarre apparitions,
cauing the officers to grimace and hurry the report
along towards more mundane logistics. My own
military detachment spent most of its time near the
Algerian south, and I cannot claim that I liked the
country very much. Algiers itself isn’t bad as a city,
but the Algerians don’t like foreigners – and they
really hate foreign soldiers. They’re decent people
and I don’t blame them for hating the French,
especially when you read some of the old records
from the colonial period. Horrible stuff – rape,
vandalism, pollution of holy places. People have
their pride, and no one likes having their daughters
turned into whores for the amusement of unwelcome
mercenaries. Of course, it’s a lot better today and the
Algerians are back in charge their own country, but
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those old memories are not going away anytime
soon. But whether the Arabs like you or hate you,
at least in Algiers they’re polite to you. They want
your money, and so they smile and speak softly, and
so there’s a general kind of peace. It’s not an
international city, but there’s a few thousand French
expatriates there, and so people are used to the
presence of off-duty soldiers. But south of Algiers
things are more complicated; foreigners are not
normally present except at the oil rigs, and the
people are more cautious, even hostile towards
strangers. Those people have seen too much war, too
much blood, to be trusting or welcoming.
The only people who seemed at home in the
South among the sand dunes where the Taoureg
tribes of the desert, and the ragged clusters of Sufis
who inhabited the ksars and kasbahs found near the
lonely oases. The Taoureg are sometimes called the
“blue men”, as they wander about with no apparent
homes except the tents they carry with them. Some
of the tribes have livestock that they drive from oasis
to oasis seeking grazing space and water; other
tribes are traders, bearing cargo across the Sahara
desert. Many of the tribes were on the verge of
starvation, until a substantial rise in contraband
trafficking after the rise of Al Qaeda and Boko
Haram. So foreign soldiers (like me) were deployed
by the Algerian government to try to apprehend the
shipments of cocaine and firearms, which now
crossed the desert on the swaying backs of camels.
It was an impossible mission, but one that paid well,
and it gave me a chance to see a new part of the
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world. But the Sufis were different from the
Taoureg tribes, and they were genuinely a mystery.
As far as I understood, they were recognized as some
kind of Islamic order, sort of like how Dominicans
and Jesuits are orders of Catholicism. Islam I
always hated – it’s a bitter, angry, patriarchal
religion that is bound and determined to stay in the
dark ages.

But the Sufis seemed to be different than other

Muslims. They had nothing, and they needed
nothing. Their earthen compounds called zaouia are
always open to the weary traveler, even to soliders.
Someone once said that they are a peaceful people,
but that never seemed right to me. Sufis aren’t
peaceful, they’re detached. They don’t care about

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this world or its rules or its struggles, because
they’re living half the time in the spirit world.

When there was time off, we usually didn’t want to

stay in Algeria if it could be helped. Despite the
availability of amusements in Algiers, we had
collectively shed too much Algerian blood to feel
anything close to relaxtion. Fortunately for us,
Algeria borders Tunisia. Tunisia is also an Arab
state, but it’s officially secular. The capital, Tunis,
is really cosmopolitan, and the Tunisians are very
decent people. More modern somehow, less tied to
the past. They want to develop as a state, and so
they’ve gotten really serious. No terrorism, so
criminal groups, just a small little country trying to
make its way on the edge of the greatest desert in
the world. But as my unit were stationed further
south of Tunis city, we would more often visit the
smaller city of Nafta, which borders on the edge of
the great salt lake, the Chott el Djerid.
Nafta is a strange place; it’s a small town with
just over twenty thousand people, and it’s mostly
small buildings built out of yellow-gray bricks. It’s
a desert city, so it comes alive at night, since by day
Nafta just bakes in the sun. What makes Nafta
unique is the number of small Sufis societies that
make their home there. Now if you visit anywhere
in North Africa, you get a lot of very large Sufi
groups or tariqas, like the Qadiriyya, the
Boutchichiyya, the Tijaniyya, the Shadhiyya, and
other well known names. In Algeria and Morocco,
you also find some really deviant groups who are
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more African and Muslim, like the Aissaoui, the
Gnaoui, and the Hamadcha. But at Nafta, you find
many small diverse zaouias. Some of them are large
urban centers beloinging to the larger and more
orthodox Sufi brotherhoods. But others are just
single-celled huts inhabited by a lone cheikh (saint)
with two or three younger disciples. Never one for
religion, I didn’t care much for visiting mosques, but
these zaouias were very different. The saints who
lived there were like nothing I’d been raised to
expect. When you read of the desert fathers of
Catholic tradition, you learn of these self-loathing
anchorites who fasted and prayed and flagellated to
the point of extreme self-mortification, all in what
seems like some hopeless quest for visions and
dreams of a god who seems to hate all flesh and all
humanity. But here in Nafta, there was a different
type of saint than those self-hating messianics.
These Sufi saints had a certain elegance to them,
reserved, but noble.
Most of them were married and had women,
children, and relations who lived at the zaouia
alongside the disciples. The few saints I met were
not starving madmen, but rather they seemed like
sultans over their own small kingdom. I don’t mean
that the zaouias were especially luxious (in fact it
was the contrary), but rather that each cheikh
seemed to possess an absolute awareness of
themselves and their domain. When you met with
one of these desert saints and looked them in the
eye, you had no illusions that you were speaking to
anything less than a kind of spiritual royalty. Their
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gaze was calm but unwavering, and they had
absolutely no equals except another Sufi master,
and it was rare that one cheikh would visit another.
The atmosphere around them was charged with a
certain energy that one does not feel in a mosque or
church, I can only describe it as otherworldly. In
many ways, it felt more like meeting a witch or
sorcerer from some medieval tale – or maybe closer
to home, a West African bokkor or shaman.

In Nafta, you see “Muslim” practices that are

completely foreign to mainstream Islam. In fact,
those practices likely alien to most forms of
organized religion today. A French tour guide told
me that much of these practices were brought into
Tunisia from West Africa, and that if you spent time
in Senegal or Mali, you’d see very similar rites
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among the traditional African movements, which
later were watered down into Voudou and
Candomble. Most of the zaouias in North Africa
engage in practices that lead to trance states, but in
the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) those
trance states are very ecstatic, even aggressive.
These trance states not infrequently lead to
possession by the local djinn (spirits), or even by the
shayatin (devils) in exceptional cases. When the
Sufis are in this wild ecstasy or possession, they are
capable of remarkable behavior. An extreme yet
memorable example: I personally witnessed a large
group of entranced mystics swallowing broken glass
and razor blades without any apparent injury at an
Aissaoua lodge, and saw those same men the next
day, none the worse for ware. And while most of the
ceremonies are open to visitors, on several occasions
when the trance grew wild, the foreigners are
quickly ushered out of the zaouia by a resident
moqaddeme (lodge master) to ensure that we were
not attacked by frenzied devotees.
Over the four years that my unit was stationed
in Algeria, I made several trips to Tunis, but more
often I found that my heart was drawn to Nafta.
When I couldn’t get to Nafta, then I would
increasingly visit the Sufi zaouias in Algeria, which
were equally enchanting but less open to outsiders.
I never visited any mosques, except sometimes late
at night when they were empty, mainly because the
daylight company of the Muslims remained
distasteful to me. But the zaouias remained
somehow the site of spiritual intrigue. By day, they
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were places of eerie calm; by night, they were places
of hidden spiritual secrets. I’d been coming to Nafta
for two years when Sidi Noureddine, the elderly
owner of my habitual riad (guesthouse), suggested
on the following night my visiting a particular
zaouia just outside the city, near the edge of the
Chott el Djerid salt lake.
I knew that my host was loosely affiliated with
the Aissaoua brotherhood, and he had sent me with
one of his sons to visit several of the local lodges.
The occasion was a special moussem or festival for
Sidi Ben Aissa (the Aissaoua founder), and Sidi
Noureddine promised that there would be an
excellent ceremony with much baraka (spiritual
blessing) for all those who attended. He insisted
strongly, and I was happy to visit a new lodge,
especially if his boy was along to facilitate my
attendance. If I was fortunate, I might even receive
an audience with Cheikh Azzeddine, who was said
to be a wali’allah or genuine living saint. The
prospect of attending a moussem was exciting, and
so I readily agreed.

So the following night I was driven to a moderate

sized kasbah, and as we had departed the hotel
somewhat late, we found the moussem already
under way. The air was thick with the strong smell
of incense, smoke and sweat, so much so that it
stung my eyes. Following my guide, I made my way
into the structure, a low two-floored building made
of the same local earthen bricks. The main structure
was wide and spacious, with an upper gallery
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looking inward. As was tradition in most of the local
zaouias, the men occupied the ground floor, and the
women looked on from the balconies and windows on
the upper floor. The room was packed full of Sufis,
and at the far end of the room, I could see the cheikh
sitting cross-legged at the far end of the lodge, his
closest disciples crouching around him in a tight
circle, with other less favored devotees trying to get
close enough to reach the cheikh or be blessed by
him. My guide and I managed to find a space to sit
down along one of the earthen walls of the courtyard,
in tight quarters but comfortable enough. The room
was filled with the banging of leather-hide drums
and the occasional ear-shattering blasts of brass
horns. Women and girls wailed from the balconies
overheard, and the men on the ground floor all
swayed back and forth in time while they chanted in
unison. Several of the male murids (devotees) had
worked themselves into a deep trance, and had
staggered to their feet, and were beginning to flail
about while snarling and growling, indicating that
they were being “ridden” by some of the djinn spirits
who were being called on to attend the ceremony.At
the time I knew barely any Arabic, so my guide had
to translate the liturgy for me into French (which he
spoke well), and this was complicated as the room
was so loud that he had to literally shout into my ear
to be heard.
My memory of the event is hazy due to the sheer
sensory overload, but when I can recall from the
ceremony is that at a certain point, a large black ram
was brought into the hall, and a large black tarp was
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rolled out to cover the floor mats. The ram was
struggling to get free, obviously in distress at the
noise and the smells of the festival. Three of the
murids flipped the thing onto its back, and a hush
fell over the crowd. The cheikh rose from his seat,
and moved to the animal. A long curved knife was
passed to him, and he knelt over the animal,
brandishing the blade over the throat of the ram.

He carefully laid a hand on the head of the beast to

steady it, and began to intone a loud invocation in
Arabic. Then the knife flashed, and a spurt of red
splashed down on the tarp as the ram’s head jerked
and the legs kicked in the air. A hundred throats it
the room began to groan, almost a growl, and there
was a sense of something stirring on a very primal
level.
My head began to spin, as if with motion
sickness. Then before I could blink, those murids
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who had been worked into a frenzy fell upon the ram,
grabbing its legs and pulling, pulling hard. A
woman began to ululate on the upper floor, and the
chanting resumed on the ground level. The frenzied
murids started screaming and roaring, like apes or
babooons, and then the ram was torn apart before
my eyes.

The carcass was strung up, and some began to eat

the raw flesh, others began to pull out the organs
and pass these around the throng, as if some bloody
sacrament. Some of the murids started cheering
then, and the cheikh turned to return to his seat,
holding the bloody knife aloft for all to see, as if
evidence of the sacrifice. As he turned, though, my
eyes met his, and I froze against my will. His dark
eyes were quite piercing, and the weight of his eyes
made my skin crawl. The sensation was rather not
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dissimilar to the kind of thrill one gets from
watching a good horror film – one feels scared, but
at the same time, one needs to know the object of
terror. I felt exactly like that: this man had a quality
that was really unnerving. Part of me was saying ‘go,
run, get out of here’, but another part clawed at me
from the inside to reach out to him and to get his
attention. Between the blood, the incense, and the
chanting, I could tell that my stomach was about to
give way. Ingloriously I lurched to my feet and
somehow managed to get outside. To my shame,
even the fresh night air did not help enough, and I
voided the contents of my stomach onto the desert
sands outside the zaouia entryway.
My guide took me home afterwards, concerned
that maybe he’d erred in bringing a nasrani
(Christian foreigner) to such an event. I felt horribly
embarrassed and was sure I’d never be invited back
to any of the local zaouias, and so in the morning I
packed by bags and prepared to return to Algiers.
But when I tried to check out of the riad, my host
(Sidi Noureddine) told me that one of the murids of
Cheikh Azzeddine had called after the dawn prayer,
and had insisted that I retun to the zaouia to meet
the saint. Apparently I was the first foreigner to
have visited the lodge, and Cheikh Azzeddine
wanted very much to receive me for tea and show
propert hospitality, for which the Arabs are duly
famous. I was embarrassed to return, but more
afraid of giving offence to the Cheikh or to the kind
owner of the riad, and so once more I made the trip
by car to the lonely little Kasbah near the salt lake.
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When we arrived, I was ushered into the same
large room in which we’d been the night before. The
black tarp and been rolled away, and the fog of
incense and smoke had largely disapated. I found
Cheikh Azzeddine seated in the same spot as before,
which I could see now was on a large flat cushion
that rested atop the many rugs that covered the floor
of the room. He was alone except for two of his
murids, and appeared to be deep in conversation
with them. As we entered the room, the Cheikh rose
to his feet and came to greet us. He extended his
hand as if to shake, and my host took the hand of the
Cheikh and pressed his lips to it repeatedly. I had
seen this custom before in Algeria, as a gesture of
profound respect. Then the Cheikh turned to me
and took my hand, and shook it in the manner of the
Europeans. I had expected him to be ancient, but on
inspection he cannot have been more than fifty, and
he had a tanned but handsome face.
He wore a dark grey jellaba robe that one sees in
most North African countries, with the hood down.
His head was tied in a dark turban, tightly wound,
so I could not tell the color of his hair (and I learned
later that his head was shaved). The Cheikh had
dark brown eyes, which reflected the light. He spoke
in very slow French, in a rich and mellow voice, and
he gave me the impression that he had studied
French in the past, but did not use it much. He bid
me to sit with him and take some tea (I did), and he
was entirely curious about my career in the military,
and my impressions of Algeria and Tunisia. He was
extremely polite, and stared at me in a manner not
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unsimilar to how a lion stares at its prey. I had the
very distinct impression that I was face to face with
a great predator, but also a very holy man. It was
entirely unnerving, and I found myself almost
paralyzed while in his company.

Soon the conversation turned to religion, and this

was no great surprise. The Cheikh asked if I was
Christian, and I replied that I did not consider
myself such. He asked if I was Muslim, and I
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answered (with some embarrassment) that I’d seen
very little in my travels that made me want to be a
follower of Islam. He smiled a little at my answer,
and then asked what I thought of Sufism. Carefully
(as I felt it very important to make a good impression
on him), I told him how I’d spent the last two years
in Algeria and Tunisia visiting different zaouia, and
that I felt very much at peace when I visited such
lodges. He nodded, then he asked me how I felt
about the ritual I had observed the night before.
Knowing that he must have known that I’d had to
leave suddenly, I told him as plainly as I could that
I’d found the rite incredibly exciting and moving on
some primitive level, but that fatigue and illness had
gotten the better of me. This answer did not seem to
especially please him or displease him, and rather
than reply, he proceeded to simply stare at me as if
expecting more. Cheikh Azzeddine waited patiently
while I tried to think of something intelligent or
clever to say, but with him staring at me, I felt
helpless to carry on anything like the ususal polite
conversation. Finally, sensing that his patience
would soon wane, I blurted out that I needed his
help. He seemed to expect the question, and said he
could help me, by showing me what I had been
searching for: the Black Path.
My knowledge of religion was minimal, so I had
never heard of such a thing. I asked him what the
Black Path was, and he smiled. He said that to
answer that, he would tell me a story.

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Years ago, Azzeddine had come into contact with

the Aissaoua brotherhood in Algiers, where he had
been sent to study engineering. His home town in
southern Algeria was a poor village of less than one
hundred inhabitants, and his family were mostly
poor and illiterate. He had himself never been a
great Muslim, and prefer to spend time ‘raising hell’
and carousing with friends rather than at prayers.
But by chance, he’d been invited to visit an Aissoua
zaouia during the holidays, and when the rites of
hadra (ecstasy) had begun, he had made the serious
mistake of mocking the murids and mimicking some
of their ecstatic practices, to the amusement of his
friends. At that point, he was seized by an angry
djinn and underwent a very violent possession.
While others there chanted the names of Allah and
danced wildly, the young engineer went into
seizures and cavorted wildly, laughing and baying
like a d’bah sahrahoui (the desert hyena). When
several murids tried to restrain him, he had thrown
them off and bitten one quite badly. The mokaddeme
of the zaouia had not been able to expel the djinn,
and Azzeddine had to be removed by force. When
the young engineer regained control of his senses, he
was alarmed to learn that he’d bitten one of the
murids and that he’d disrupted the ceremonies. He
was taken home, exhausted, but his spiritual
misfortunes had only just begun.
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For several nights, he struggled with fever and
delirium, and was eventually a doctor was called –
but there was no evidence of disease or sickness.
Eventually his parents were able to obtain a visit
from another Sufi saint, of the somewhat more
orthodox Rahmaniyya lineage.

The saint struggled for several hours with the djinn,

and attempted all the traditional ruqiyyah arts of
Quranic recitation and application of certain oils.
But the djinn was undaunted, and insulted the old
saint, claiming that Azzeddine was its lawful
property, and that he was a wicked sinner besides.
After two days of this spiritual battle, the old cheikh
was growing alarmed – either the djinn was quite
powerful, or else his own spiritual powers were

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failing. Neither would it release the young engineer,
nor would it even give up its own name, so that the
cheikh could command it. In desperation, the cheikh
he trired a different track: was there something the
djinn would accept in order to leave? The evil spirit
replied that it would not be pacified unless
Azzeddine made a pilgrimage to the Kaf el-Jnoun on
the border of Algeria and Libyra, and that the young
man should spend a night on the summit in prayer.
The saint reluctantly agreed to this demand, and
vowed that the journey would be made. The djinn
announced that it would not release Azzeddine until
this was done, but it would cease to torment the
young man for the moment.
The fever receeded and the delirium began to
subside. The Rahmaniyya saint admonished him for
having attended the wild rites of the Aissaoua, and
warned Azzeddine against attend their ceremonies
or houses in the future. The young engineer listened
to him politely, but refused to make the journey to
the place specified by the djinn. The Kaf el-Jnoun
(Cave of the Jinn) was an infamous mountainous
region that was widely known in folklore as one of
the doorways to the underworld, and it was not
visited (let alone climbed) by Arabs – only the
French were considered to be bold or stupid enough
to try. But the saint insisted that he would become
much sicked than before if he reneged on his promise
to the Jinn. So reluctantly, the young engineer
agreed to make the pilgrimage, and the next two
days were spent in hasty preparation for the
journey.
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Cheikh Azzeddine’s did not speak much about
the journey to the mountain. Several of his friends
had gone with him, but they refused entirely to join
him on the climb, and in fact tried to dissuade him
from making the effort. But Azzeddine could feel the
evil spirit coiled inside (he said), and made the climb
alone. He said little to me about the climb, only that
it was bitterly hot, even by Algerian standards, but
that it became extreme cold after dark.
That night, the young engineer expected to be
freed of the evil spirit, but it was not to be. There,
in the absolute emptiness of the desert, and in that
cursed place, the djinn awoke to new fury within
him. The Cheikh admits that he remembers very
little of the ten or so hours that he spent on the
summit, as he was wracked with terrible
convulsions. He bit his own wrists and lapped up his
own blood when it flowed. He howled at the moon
and stars, certainly terrifying his friends below and
any desert travelers that may have been abroad. He
soiled himself repeatedly, which he admitted calmly
and without embarrassment. Finally the seizures
began to subside. Where previously he had felt the
presence of the djinn like a kind of hostile intruder,
now he felt a particular unity of being with the alien
consciousness, as if it had somehow been integrated
within him on some visceral level. The seizures had
left him weakened, yet strangely invigorated. The
taste of blood in his mouth and the bile staining his
clothes should have been repulsive, but he simply
did not care. Then his mind opened, and he saw.

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Our own universe dissolved into to
insignificance, breaking down into its subtle parts.
Beyond this world, he saw a vision of two paths. One
path was bright, leading to a white tree in the
middle of a great city of shining gold. The other path
was dark, and it lead to a black tree in the middle of
a great black city. At the intersection of the two
paths was a towering figure, wreathed in flames.
Intuitively, Azzeddine understood that this was the
evil spirit which possessed him. Then the entity
spoke to him in a clear voice for the first time, and
told Azzeddine that he had been chosen, chosen to
reveal a great teaching that would impact many
lives. It revealed itself to him as Azazel. This was
unnerving for the young engineer, as Azazel is the
true name of the devil in Islamic tradition. The
spirit told him that he must choose between two
paths: one leading to the Light, and the other to the
Darkness. It spoke blasphemous words of an
ancient war before time, a struggle between the
primordial darkness and usurping light, of stolen
origins and humanity cheated and trapped even
before its creation. The spirit cursed Allah and His
angels, and promised a terrible vengenance against
the prophets who had denied the truth, leading their
people instead into spiritual slavery to a god who
hates them. And it spoke of a coming savior, the
Dajjal, who would cleanse the earth of Islam and
other false religions, and return humanity to the
worship of Dark One. Azzeddine was meant to
prepare the way, as a crier in the desert. He would
return to Algeria and begin to teach others the truth.
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But he must choose the the black path, and forever
forsake any hope of Ferdous (Paradise). He would
go down to the Black City and eat of the forbidden
Zaqqum tree. But first, he must put his trust in
Azazel, and then he would be shown things that
were known to only saints.
Cheikh Azzeddine had been torn – such things
are warned against in Islam. Evil spirits are known
to tempt and deceive, but the words of this spirit
burned into his mind. Steeling himself, he had
pledged himself to Azazel and asked to be shown the
black path. The burning spirit seized him and
pressed its flaming mouth to his. Then spirit
breathed into him and his lungs were scorched and
burned with fire, s the spirit communicated to him
the Secret – the terrible, unspeakable truth. The
Secret changed him into a saint, and he had
returned from the mountain as a man transformed.
He left the school of engineering and took up
residence in a zaouia in southern Algeria, and
eventually been invited by his small group of
followers to move to Nafta. His community was
small, but the Dajjal did not require many disciples,
only a dedicated few.

The Cheikh did not speak at length about the

Secret. He said that he could not explain it to me or
describe it to me in any human words. But if I too
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wanted to know the Truth about this world, and the
hidden war that is being waged daily, he was willing
to share the Secret. If I was willing to leave behind
the world and its false gods of materialism and
secularism, and to pledge myself to his teachings, he
would welcome me into the fraternity. I asked him
about the black path, and he said it is lit with
hellfire, which burns away the weakness and false
ego of humanity, transmuting the human from clay
into smokeless fire.1 Looking into the eyes of Cheikh
Azzeddine, I could see those flames burning. This
holy man seemed more a terrible angel given flesh
than a mere human, and no one had ever terrified
me or fascinated me as he did.
I have never liked religion. I hate the hypocriscy
and morality, and lies and ethical codes that change
every year to line up with whatever form of social
justice is in vogue. Most religious leaders are
obvious frauds with no real answers, and they are
often as vicious and political as normal human
politicians. I hate the idea of a deity that gives
people instincts to fuck and fight, and then chortles
while threatening to put them into an eternal
crematorium for not respecting him. But that was
not what this cheikh seemed to be offering me. I had
the very keen feeling that to accept this man as my
teacher would be to accept a new spirit, a real
baptism by fire that would transform me into
something more than human.

1
In Islamic tradition, hellfire is said to be black as pitch, and
thick like tar.
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 THE BLACK PATH
Of course, I accepted. And over the next three
years, I spent increasing amounts of time in Nafta.

When Cheikh Azzeddine decided to relocate back to

southern Algeria, he asked me in turn to begin to
collect his teachings and prepare them for
publishable form. This books is my humble effort to
collate his practices and beliefs into a single
coherent narrative. This is important firstly,
because while my spiritual master still identifies as
a member of the Aissaoua tradition, his
understanding of the tradition is unique to him.
Secondly, there is very little of the Aissaoua tariqa
in modern English, though there is more in French
if you can read it. Finally, Cheikh Azzeddine hopes
that through the publication of this text, people
outside of North Africa will become better aware of
the rich spiritual practices of the dark continent.
Much of what is written here will be offensive to
many of the People of the Book (Jews, Christians,
Muslims), but Cheikh Azzeddine says that in this
day, spiritual warfare is sometimes fought with the
pen. If even five or six people read this work and
decide that the Black Path is for them, then it will
be enough.
I wish you all success in your own spiritual
journey. May the blessings of my cheikh and his own
spiritual masters be with you as you read this book.

Sincerely,
Marcel St-Simone,
Zaouia Az-Zaqqum, Algiers
26