ABSTRACT

Education: how to guide disciples? analyses three of these handbooks in order to establish what they can teach us about Sufi rules and practices during this period, and about the manner in which masters guided their disciples at a time when the Sufi paths, especially the Khalwatiyya, were undergoing a renewed expansion in Egypt. These three texts were read, transmitted and copied by generations of Sufis. They circulated in manuscript form and were then among the first texts to benefit from the dawn of printing in Arabic; all three of them have recently been re-issued in Egypt and Lebanon.