When young, Mahmud Qabadu left Tunisia to study at a sufi center in Tripolitania, that of the Madaniyya tarika, a branch of the Darqawa.[2] Eventually he traveled to Istanbul. There he became associated with the leading jurist 'Arif Bey, who was the shaykh al-Islam (Turkish: seyhul-islam), and who was also a partisan of the Tanzimat reforms then at issue in the Ottoman Empire.[3]