The LARGEST SUFI Celebration in Egypt | Sayed El Badawi | Tanta, Egypt

I was told there would be millions of Sufis gathered for the largest celebration of the birthday of Sayed El Badawi, the most famous Egyptian Saint. He actually was born in Morocco, but settled in a farming town known as Tanta, 60 miles north of Cairo, back in the 13th century. This week-long celebration occurs once a year, normally in the middle of October. Sufism, sounds mystical, and it is probably well known in the west through the works of Rumi, the Islamic Sufi poet. Sufism can be described as the spiritual arm of Islam, where people practice the detachment from worldly desires devoting themselves to the love of God. The root of Sufi, ’suf’ in arabic, means wool, a simple cloth representing what sufis wore and symbolic of living simply. Sayed El Badawi was a spiritual practitioner and leader, and gained his saintly status through his godly actions, where he preached to caliphates to rule with love, to be hospitable to the stranger, things very uncommon for the time.