Shaykh Mohamed Faouzi al-Karkari, guest of the Regional University of Blumenau, Brazil

The Regional University of Blumenau (in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil) invited Shaykh Sidi Mohamed Faouzi al-Karkari (may Allah sanctify his secret) to speak on 9 October 2025, in a joint session with several university professors in the social and human sciences as well as doctors in religious studies.

It was as president of the al-Karkari Institute (Institute for Sufi Studies) that the spiritual master took part in this meeting, centred on Sufism and its symbolic and esoteric reading of the prophets and earlier religions.

During the conference, the Shaykh highlighted a frightening observation about modern times: an exponential increase in wealth which, paradoxically, goes hand in hand with an unprecedented growth in psychological worries, psychiatric and depressive disorders and every form of illness affecting human mental health.

The Shaykh stressed that this by no means means giving up the pursuit of an improvement in one’s living conditions (through work in particular), but rather the need to redefine one’s priorities, with a change that begins with oneself and within oneself, and not from an external factor.

It is in this that Sufism offers a model and a discipline that has proven itself throughout the ages.