About the prayer and its author

Our main source is al-Kūhin al-Fāsī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shādhiliyya al-kubrā (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya; the 2020 printing), pages as printed. It is a late collection of lives and is itself a devotional source, so each report below is given as the book gives it.

Name and date. His father's name is disputed: Bashīsh, who became known as Mashīsh, or Sulaymān nicknamed Mashīsh. Reports of his death give 622 and 625 (AH), and the first is better known (p. 59, the editor's note, which cites al-Aʿlām). al-Kharrūbī reports that some shaykhs he met said Mashshīsh, with a doubled shīn. Ibn ʿĀbidīn's thabat writes Bashīsh and says it is given with bā' or with mīm (Ibn Kīrān, introduction, p. 6).

His death. Kūhin (p. 26) quotes Abū l-ʿAbbās al-Mursī, with no chain:

ومات الشيخُ عبدُ السلام بن مشيش رضي الله عنه مقتولاً، قتله ابن أبي الطواجن ببلاد المغرب.

That is: he died killed, and Ibn Abī al-Ṭawājin killed him in the lands of the Maghrib. On p. 60 the book says he died a martyr and was buried at his place on Jabal al-Aʿlām at the port of Tétouan, with a maqām, a tomb and a short dome built over him. No motive is given. (The name is printed «الطواجن» here and «الطواجين» in Ibn Kīrān's edition.)

The shrine. Kūhin (p. 60) lists the shrine among the places where prayer is answered and likens its standing in the Maghrib to al-Shāfiʿī's in Egypt, quoting an unnamed poet: ask by the secret of Ibn Mashīsh what you wish and you will get it, though it be far from you. This tells us what visitors believed, which is how we use it.

His pupil on him. Asked once who his shaykh was, al-Shādhilī answered (p. 26) that he used to be affiliated with Shaykh ʿAbd al-Salām ibn Mashīsh, that he was now affiliated with no one, and that he swam in ten seas: Muḥammad, Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, ʿAlī, Jibrīl, Mīkāʾīl, ʿAzrāʾīl, Isrāfīl and the Greatest Spirit. The sentence names Ibn Mashīsh as the affiliation he used to claim and speaks of what lies beyond him. Kūhin gives it with no chain, and we have not found an earlier source for it.

Tradition says. Kūhin (pp. 59 to 60) also reports that at his birth ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī heard a voice telling him to lift his foot from the people of the Maghrib, for their pole had been born that day; that as an infant he refused his mother's breast in Ramadan until the call to sunset prayer; and that he was the teacher of the three poles, al-Dasūqī, al-Badawī and al-Shādhilī. These are devotional claims, and we have no second source for the last of them. In the same entry (p. 60) ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Zayyāt comes to him as a boy of seven, says “I am your shaykh” and “I am your intermediary (wāsiṭa) in every state and station”. The word is the one in line 9 of the prayer; we do not say the prayer refers to this encounter.

On p. 198 al-Kūhin traces a line of transmission from al-Shādhilī back through his shaykh. It runs:

1. Abū l-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī
2. ʿAbd al-Salām ibn Mashīsh
3. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Zayyāt
4. Taqī al-Dīn al-Faqīr
5. Fakhr al-Dīn
6. Nūr al-Dīn
7. Tāj al-Dīn
8. Shams al-Dīn
9. Ibrāhīm al-Baṣrī
10. Abū l-Qāsim Aḥmad b. Marwān

The quoted chain continues past the last name. This chain has no Abū Madyan in it, and Ibn Mashīsh's teacher is al-Zayyāt. Some later accounts of the Shādhilī line add Abū Madyan; we have not traced which, so this page gives al-Kūhin's chain as he gives it. One more difficulty is the book's own: on p. 61 it dates Taqī al-Dīn al-Nahrawandī to 594 and says al-Zayyāt died in the fifth century, and those two statements sit badly together.

In a scholar's record of what he had received. The editor of Ibn Kīrān's commentary prints, in his introduction (pp. 6 to 7), a passage from the thabat of the Ḥanafī jurist Ibn ʿĀbidīn, author of the Ḥāshiya. Ibn ʿĀbidīn lists the prayer with the incipit «اللهم صل على من منه انشقت الأسرار» and says it was set down by Aḥmad al-Nakhlī and his pupil al-Minīnī in their own thabats. The passage then says that al-Nakhlī took it from Aḥmad al-Bābilī and ʿĪsā al-Thaʿālibī, who told him to read it once after the dawn prayer and once after sunset. So the times belong to al-Nakhlī's teachers, and Ibn ʿĀbidīn's thabat carries them. The passage adds that in some marginal notes it is read three times, after dawn, after sunset and after the night prayer. Where the quotation ends is not marked by the editor.

In prayer books. The editor (p. 7) says some great Shādhilī shaykhs added «زيادات» to it and made it a daily litany. In a 1996 talk by Vincent Cornell (we have only its automatic captions, not yet checked by ear), the closing invocations of copies of al-Jazūlī's Dalāʾil al-khayrāt, this prayer among them, were added by later Shādhilī and Qādirī shaykhs.

Sung. We found settings in Morocco (an Āla recording by al-Muntaṣir al-ʿImrānī), in Malaysia and Indonesia (the Dewan Selawat groups; Ustaz Neezam al-Banjari) and in Turkey, where the title is Beşiş salâtı, matching Ibn ʿĀbidīn's spelling Bashīsh. They differ in what they add and leave out; the textual notes list how, and the recordings are linked under Companions below. Their words come from machine transcripts.

We looked for named critics of the prayer's wording and found two sources. Neither discusses a specific line. One is a footnote and the other a short fatwa, and both object to the prayer as a whole. We found nothing by a critic on the lines about the intermediary or the greatest veil. The objections below sit beside Ibn Kīrān's comment on the line the critics' worry comes nearest to, «أوحال التوحيد» (line 21), because both sides then speak of the same words. That does not make it an exchange: no critic here answers Ibn Kīrān, and he wrote two centuries before them.

A doctoral thesis on Ibn ʿAjība, Ārāʾ Ibn ʿAjība al-ʿaqadiyya, ʿarḍan wa-naqdan (Riyadh, Imam Muhammad b. Saud Islamic University; 1st ed. 2019 CE). On p. 803, note 3, in the section on Ibn ʿAjība's attitude to the Sufi greats, he comments on Ibn ʿAjība's praise of Ibn Mashīsh and quotes the opening and the pair «وزج بي في بحار الأحدية وانشلني من أوحال التوحيد». The charge is general:

وهي صلاة بدعية مليئة بعقائد الصوفية من وحدة الوجود، والغلو في الرسول صلى الله عليه وسلم

He calls it an innovation full of Sufi doctrines of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd) and of exaggeration about the Messenger, and says the Sufis ascribe merits to it to keep people reciting it, quoting the promised merits: a reader is “expanded of breast” and helped against all enemies. He gives the page on Shamela. He asserts the charge and does not argue it, ties it to no single line, and his target is Ibn ʿAjība's commentary tradition as much as the prayer. He does not refute Ibn Kīrān.

An unsigned answer from the Islamweb fatwa centre, dated 25 Rabīʿ al-Awwal 1426 (3 May 2005), titled «الصلاة المشيشية وصيغ الصلاة». A reader asked about prayers on the Prophet ascribed to named people, such as this one, with great promised rewards and no hadith behind them. The fatwa says:

ولعله قد اطلع على ألفاظها وما تضمنته كلماتها مما هو منكر إلا أن يتمحل له بضروب التأويل

فهذه أشياء مبتدعة يجب الحذر منها والابتعاد عنها

The first sentence is hedged (“perhaps he has seen its wording and what its words contain, which is objectionable unless forced into some interpretation”) and is addressed to the questioner. The second calls such things innovations to be avoided, because a fixed reward for a fixed act needs sound proof. The fatwa then says that prayers on the Prophet are a wide field if they carry nothing against the law and the reciter does not believe in a fixed reward. It quotes no line of the prayer and analyses none. The first sentence allows that the wording might be read through taʾwīl, though it calls that forced. It is a plain statement of the objection from a mainstream fatwa site, and it makes no claim to a scholarly refutation.

Ibn Kīrān (printed pp. 198 to 201, read from the page images) takes the request in three ways, which the notes on line 21 also give.

• On p. 198, under the heading «وانشلني من أوحال التوحيد»: it is courtesy in asking to enter the seas of Oneness, and a guard («واحتراز») against the bad beliefs that overtook those without divine support:من الناس من لبس عليه الأمر فقال بالحلول والاتحاد, that is, some were confused and spoke of indwelling and union.
• On p. 199: «زج بي في بحار الأحدية» asks for the state of the enraptured, who argue from God to things; «انشلني من أوحال التوحيد» asks release from the doubts that befall travellers who argue from things to God.
• On p. 201: release from witnessing tawḥīd as coming from oneself, since one who does so is still separate, aware of one who unifies and one who is unified.

The worry of al-ʿUmarī, unity of being, is close to the one Ibn Kīrān's first reading guards against, indwelling and union. That is a closeness of topic, and Ibn Kīrān does not use al-ʿUmarī's term. A defender writing today, Aḥmad al-Ṭalḥī (Youm7, 24 July 2025), is reported to read the phrase as a pointer to deviations that hide under the name of tawḥīd; we have the report from a search summary and have not read the article.

The line about the intermediary, «لولا الواسطة» (line 9), has no critic on the page. Its defenders are Ibn Kīrān and al-Timsamānī, whose glosses are in the notes on that line.