Sufism, the mystical trend in Islam emerged early in Islamic history, as the result of both philosophical and social considerations. A central philosophical question for many Muslims was how to "know" God. Since God is absolutely transcendent he is impossible to understand because human understanding is limited. The problem was summed up by the poet Rumi:

Yet readings of the hadith qudsi - the words of God transmitted by the Prophet as sayings rather than revealed in the Quran - were interpreted as meaning that God wants to be known - one talks of a "hidden treasure who wants to be known" another says "My heaven and my earth do not comprise Me, but the heart of My faithful servant comprises me." In other words God is to be found internally not externally, because the external world is a limitation on God. Another poem:

In short knowledge of God can only be achieved by a journey inwards, away from the world, because the ordinary world is full of evil. The only people who can escape this world, then are those who abandon it for God, sublimated their human nature to the divine and "annihilating" their physical beings in God. Only rigorous education and training of the lower self can achieve this sublimation.
        This ascetic renunciation of the world developed as a direct response to the worldliness of Islamic society as as it expanded very rapidly in the seventh and eighth centuries. In 711, the year Muslim armies crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in the west and the Oxus river in the east, Hasan al-Basri began preaching rejection of a society that was interested in conquest alone, where wealth had become a substitute for faith.
        Yet withdrawal from the world had to be expressed in symbols of that world. Early ascetics adopted blue robes, a tradition that passed into Islamic practice from pre-Islamic asceticism in Persia where blue was the colour of mourning. Blue robes showed that the soul was dedicated to God, free from earthly desires. Another custom was to wear woolen robes. Since Sufi means "woollen" this was the origin of the name.
        The great Sufi teachers collected large numbers of disciples, to whom they taught a specific "way" (tariqa) to reach God: self-negation was accompanied by particular prayers, and the repetition of phrases evoking the names of God, and participation in ecstatic rituals. The knowledge that was passed on to their close followers, allowed them, in their turn, to collect their own disciples and more formal structures grew up, so that the tariqas became institutionalised and over time divided and subdivided in an almost genealogical pattern. Many of these Sufi "brotherhoods" derived their origins from the teaching of the famous 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilali who died in 1166. His two most prominent disciples in Morocco were the two great medieval Sufi teachers, Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili (1175-1278] and `Abd al-Salam ibn Mashish (d 1227/28) who was buried in northern Morocco on the side of a mountain, Jbel `Alam, near Tetouan.
        The Almohad (al-Muwahiddun) dynasty saw a great growth of Sufism in Morocco, encouraged by the Sultans, especially Ya`qub al-Mansur(1184-1199), who brought several of the most important Sufi teachers to Marrakesh including Sidi Abu `Usfur, Sidi Yusuf bin `Ali, Sidi al-Saffaj, and Sidi Abu al-`Abbas.
        Royal favour was born out of religious piety and political need: some tariqas gained considerable power. In the late fifteenth century, the leaders of some of the big tariqas in western Morocco led a general attack on the Spanish and Portuguese fortresses scattered along the Moroccan coasts. A family of sharifs from the Sous on the edge of the Sahara, the Saadis, joined with them and laid the bases for a dynasty that would rule Morocco for the next century, before collapsing into civil war in the early 1600s. Sharifian descent was another important source of charisma and influence in Morocco, and the Saadis and the Alawis that followed them
        In the nineteenth century this meant that the brotherhoods had considerable political power. Most of the big tariqas were based in fairly inaccessible regions, in mountains and on the edges of the desert: the Nasiriya, based at Tamgrout, dominated the Drâa valley; the Sharqawiya, at Boujad near Tadla, held sway in the Middle Atlas; the Wazzaniyya, founded at Ouezzane on the southern edge of Jebala mountains in the mid-seventeenth century, had large estates in the Rharb; the Darqawiyya, with its headquarters at Amjot on the southern edge of the Rif, had adherents in the countryside and among the poor; Only the Tijaniyya, was centred in a city, Fez. Their houses, or zawiyas, provided a range of services to the community: as hostels for travellers, refuges for the sick and centres of learning in particular. Scattered across the countryside and in the cities were smaller zawiyas that had many of the same functions, and equally important local power. A famous example in the countryside was the zawiya of Sidi Ahmed ou Moussa at Iligh near Tazeroualt. Set in a stony semi-desert, it relied on a trade across the Sahara to survive. An urban example was the Zawiya of Sidi Abu al-`Abbas in Marrakesh.
    Not everything was on quite such a large scale. The Moroccan countryside is dotted with numerous tombs, usually a small white-painted structure with a dome, sometimes decked out with flags. Edward Drummond-Hay described one such tomb as that of "of one of their canonised fools or madmen," but this was an absurd remark: Islam knows no canonization. These were the tombs of holy men and women, known in Morocco as marabouts, who possessed the quality known as baraka. Baraka, often translated as "charisma," is a mixture of personal holiness, and inherited worth and manifests itself in the purity of a marabout's life or his good works. It might be derived from the marabout's personal holiness, a popular belief that the could work miracles, or indeed through descent from the prophet. Baraka had some of the features of a commodity, in that it could be inherited and pass from father to son or also from uncle to nephew, or even father to daughter. It could also be invested in the tombs of the marabouts. Alive, marabouts were to an extent neutral in the tribal quarrels that divided their neighbours and so could mediate in disputes; dead their tombs became places of sanctuary from authority, or feuding neighbours. Once inside a marabout's tomb, a fugitive was inviolable. Drummond Hay's party saw a striking example of this in Salé.