Khaled Bentounes is one of the rare living Sufi masters whose voice is widely heard, in Algeria as in Europe. Spiritual guide of the ʿAlāwiyya order (Tarīqa ʿAlāwiyya) — the brotherhood founded at the beginning of the 20th century by Sheikh Aḥmad al-ʿAlawī — he has made of this inherited way a message for the present time: a Sufism turned towards peace, fraternity and living together.
A living lineage
To situate Khaled Bentounes, one must follow a chain — what the Sufis call the silsila, the lineage by which a teaching is transmitted, heart to heart, without interruption. Since its founding, the ʿAlāwiyya way has known four guides:
- Sheikh Aḥmad al-ʿAlawī (1869–1934) — the founder, in Mostaganem. It is he who gives the way its name. He himself received the teaching of Sheikh Muḥammad al-Būzīdī, in the lineage of the Darqāwiyya — a branch of the great Shādhiliyya way. The ʿAlāwiyya is therefore, by its roots, a Shādhilī branch.
- Sheikh ʿAddah Bentounès (died 1952) — the second guide, who gathered the way after the death of al-ʿAlawī.
- Sheikh Muḥammad al-Mahdī Bentounès (died 1975) — the third guide, father of Khaled Bentounes.
- Sheikh Khaled Bentounes — since 1975, the fourth guide of the way.
Khaled Bentounes did not, then, "choose" his charge: he inherited it, at the death of his father, in the continuity of a familial and spiritual transmission. But to inherit, in Sufism, is not enough — one must realise what one receives. It is this inner work, and his openness to the modern world, that give him his own physiognomy.
A life between two shores
Born in 1949 in Mostaganem, on the Algerian coast, Khaled Bentounes grew up at the very heart of the brotherhood, beside his father. But his life also unfolds in France, where he spent long years — which makes of him a man of two shores: rooted in the Algerian land and the Arab tradition, familiar with Europe and its questions.
This double belonging is not a rending: it is the very place of his message. Bentounes speaks to a world in which Islam and the West live side by side, and at times fear one another — and into it he carries the voice of a Sufism that brings peace, that connects, that refuses fear.
A Sufism of peace
The heart of his teaching holds in one conviction: spirituality has meaning only if it transforms the way of being together. The inner way is not a flight out of the world; it is what makes one capable, at last, of inhabiting the world without wounding it.
To live together is not to tolerate the other — it is to recognise him. The spirit of Khaled Bentounes' teaching
It is for this that Khaled Bentounes carried, onto the international stage, the idea of an International Day of Living Together in Peace — adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, and fixed on 16 May. A rare gesture: a Sufi teaching translated into a date shared by all peoples. He was also at the origin, in France, of educational initiatives — among them a movement of Muslim scouting — and of the international ʿAlāwiyya Sufi association, AISA.
His work
Khaled Bentounes has transmitted his teaching through books — often born of interviews, faithful to the living word of the master rather than to the scholarly treatise.
His best-known book, and the finest doorway: Sufism as the inner and living dimension of Islam.
Discover the workThe structure of the human soul read through the Quran — a cartography of the within.
Discover the workThe maladies of the heart and their healing — Sufism as a true inner medicine.
Discover the workTo these three books are added other works, often born of interviews:
Fraternity as an Inheritance
A book in which Bentounes links the experience of the brotherhood — the fraternity lived among disciples — to a question of civilisation: learning to make a common humanity. The Sufi way is read here as a school of the bond.
Living Islam — Sufism Today
A book of interviews in which Bentounes answers, without evasion, the questions of the person of today: what does it mean to be a Muslim, a believer, a spiritual being, in a secularised world? The testimony of a master who refuses to separate faith from reason and from freedom.
Why he matters
In the gallery of masters of this site, Khaled Bentounes holds a singular place: he is the only one whose voice is still speaking. With him, the chain that begins with Aḥmad al-ʿAlawī — and, beyond, with the great Shādhilīs — is not a museum inheritance: it is a living transmission, which continues.
His lesson is that of a Sufism for the present time: not a nostalgia, not a withdrawal, but a way of inhabiting the modern world with a pacified heart — and of making peace among men the visible fruit of a peace won within.