The author
Ahmad Dabbagh
Everything on this website is his. The teaching, the structure of the path, the allegory of the aircraft, and every diagram and illustration reproduced here are taken from his book.
The Journey to the Pleasure & Closeness of Allah was written by Ahmad Dabbagh and published by Muhammadiyah Publications in 2013, from the teachings of Shaykh Abdul Aziz ad-Dabbagh. It is a summary — set out in the light of the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the lives of the friends of Allah and the gnostics — of the path to the pleasure of Allah, upon which, in the author’s words, hundreds and thousands of people have travelled in order to attain His presence.
The author is the guide of Tareeqah Muhammadiyah, based at the Muhammadiyah House of Wisdom in Hyde, Cheshire, England.
In his own words
The author’s gratitude
The book opens not with the author’s credentials but with his thanks, and it is worth reproducing because it sets the tone of everything that follows.
He thanks Allah, the Exalted, who has bestowed infinite blessings upon himself and upon all creation — and, amongst those blessings, being able to serve the Deen by conveying His message of salvation to all of humanity. He asks that Allah shower His infinite mercy and salutations upon Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, his family, his companions and the pious until the Day of Judgement and beyond, as it was through them that the message of eternal bliss was received.
He gives special thanks to Sayyidina Abdul Aziz ad-Dabbagh, and to all the scholars and masters of the sciences of Islamic scholarship. Citing the Qur’anic command “Be thankful to Me and your parents” [Qur’an 17:23], he asks Allah to reward and have mercy upon his father, Muhammad Nawaz, and his mother, Umm Ahmad Sughra, in both worlds — and upon his great grandfathers Shaykh Khayruddin Awliyah and Imam Hasan al-Basri, through whose teachings he says he benefitted immensely.
He then thanks his wife and children, and the brothers and sisters of Tareeqah Muhammadiyah — naming brothers Yasir, Shihab, Farooq and Waqqas, who he says did almost all of the compilation work. And he adds this:
In reality, I have not contributed to this book except for guiding and supervising them.
He closes by asking Allah to accept all of their efforts, to make it a means towards achieving His pleasure, and to forgive their shortcomings in intention and in deed.
The edition this site is drawn from
The book
Title
The Journey to the Pleasure & Closeness of Allah ﷻ
Author
Ahmad Dabbagh
Publisher
Muhammadiyah Publications
Edition
30 May 2013 AD / 20 Rajab 1434 AH
The book states its own purpose in its opening pages: that Allah created man to worship Him so that through this he can attain His pleasure; that Allah sent the Prophet ﷺ to teach mankind how to spend their life in that worship; and that in order to please Allah, a person must develop four qualities — giving preference to Allah, giving preference to the way of the Messenger ﷺ, compassion upon creation, and constant awareness of Allah.
And it states plainly where a reader should begin: by firstly learning about the path to Allah, and thereafter remaining under the supervision of a teacher or guide who is following the commands of Allah and the noble ways of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, who has knowledge of this path, and who is aware of all its pitfalls and difficulties.
Sanad · Shajrah
The chain this teaching arrives through
The book closes with its sanad — the chain of transmission of Tareeqah Muhammadiyah, gathering four paths: the Qadiriyah, the Suhrwardiyah, the Shadhiliyah and the Dabbaghiyah.
It begins at the top with Sayyid al-wujud Sayyidina Muhammad bin ‘Abdullah ﷺ, and branches through Sayyidina ‘Ali bin Abi Talib, Sayyidina Anas bin Malik, Sayyidina Salman al-Farsi and Sayyidina Abu Bakr as-Sadiq — running down through Hasan al-Basri, Ja’far as-Sadiq, Abul Qasim al-Junayd, ‘Abdul Qadir al-Jilani, Abul Hasan ‘Ali al-Shadhili, Shihab ad-Din as-Suhrawardi, ‘Abdul Wahab ash-Sha’rani and ‘Abdul ‘Aziz al-Dabbagh, and onwards to the present.
Three pages, reproduced here in full. They are dense — best enlarged.
About this website
What this site is, and what it is not
This website is a presentation of Ahmad Dabbagh’s book for reading on a screen. Every teaching, every list of rules, every level, every diagram and every illustration on it is taken from the book. Nothing has been added to the teaching, and nothing has been interpreted beyond it.
Two editorial decisions are worth stating openly.
The artwork is the book’s own. Every plate here is derived directly from the printed pages. Where a diagram carries its meaning in printed labels — the map of the path, the twelve states of the heart, the bridge, the chain of transmission — the page is reproduced whole, and can be enlarged to read. Where the book laid a caption box over a photograph, the original photograph has been used and the words reset as live text, because a caption baked into an image at the size of a phone screen cannot be read at all.
The prose has been edited for the screen, not rewritten. Sentences have been repunctuated and paragraphs reflowed for reading on a phone. The rules, the levels, the numbered lists, the supplications, the narrations and the verses are given as the book gives them, and the book’s own page numbers are printed beside every plate so that any passage can be checked against the original.
Whomsoever has achieved the pleasure of Allah has obtained everything.
For the book itself, for the gatherings, and for contact with the Tareeqah, see zawiyah.org and prophetic-path.com.