The Sufi Journey of Baba Rexheb
The Sufi Journey of Baba Rexheb

Author: Frances Trix

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-09-05

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1934536547

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Baba Rexheb, a Muslim mystic from the Balkans, founded the first Bektashi community in America. This is his life story and the story of his communities: the traditional Bektashi tekke in Albania where he first served, the displaced persons camps to which he escaped after the war, the centuries-old tekke in Cairo where he waited, and the Bektashi community that he founded in Michigan in 1954 and led until his passing in 1995. Baba Rexheb lived through the twentieth century, its wars, disruptions, and dislocations, but still at a profound level was never displaced. Through Bektashi stories, oral histories, and ethnographic experience, Frances Trix recounts the life and times of this modern Sufi leader. She studied with Baba Rexheb in his community for more than twenty years. As a linguistic anthropologist, she taped twelve years of their weekly meetings in Turkish, Albanian, and Arabic. She draws extensively on Baba's own words, as well as interactions at the Michigan Bektashi center, for a remarkable perspective on our times. You come to know Baba Rexheb and his gentle way of teaching through example and parable, poetry and humor. The book also documents the history of the 700-year-old Bektashi order in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Balkans and Egypt and its transposition to America. It attests to the role of Sufi centers in Islamic community life and their interaction with people of other faiths.

Islamic Mysticism and the Bektashi Path
Islamic Mysticism and the Bektashi Path

Author: Baba Rexheb

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2019-10-28

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 1983153850

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"The Bektashi Way is profoundly simple yet perplexingly complex, striking in its boldness yet gracious in its subtlety; consequently, while shining forth brightly it still is seemingly cloaked in obscurity. There have been attempts to gather its history, characteristic ideas, and observable aspects together and to elucidate its inner wisdom in prose, but few of these attempts have been made by knowledgeable insiders, and even fewer of these have been made in English. This full translation of Baba Rexheb's Islamic Mysticism and the Bektashi Path from its original Albanian is thus a unique addition to the literature on Bektashism in English, and a boon to those who seek to know more about this clearly enigmatic way." --- Vafi Baba

Spiritual Discourse
Spiritual Discourse

Author: Frances Trix

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9780812214390

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Far from Ottoman Turkey and the Balkans, an expanded farmhouse in southern Michigan provides the secure if improbable setting for Baba Rexheb and his Islamic Bektashi community. This is also the setting for Spiritual Discourse, a study of the process by which Baba Rexheb, a ninety-year-old Albanian leader of the Bektashi order, and Frances Trix, an American student who has studied with him for over twenty years, come to share a common universe of experience and attunement. The focus of the study is one lesson with Baba - a lesson that is rich in poetry and parable, narrative and face-saving humor. As Trix seeks to understand how Baba teaches, she contextualizes the lesson internally in terms of episodes and dialogic patterns, and externally in terms of the societal, personal, and ritual histories it presumes. Overall what is being passed on is not facts but a relationship, for the relationship of "seeker" and "master" mirrors that of human and God. Yet on a more immediate level, Baba teaches through a highly personalized, recursive sort of language "play" that engenders current attention while constantly evoking an ever-growing shared past. For scholars of discourse and interaction, the study contributes the central concept of "language attunement"--A form of "linguistic convergence" that operates not at the level of speech community, but rather at the level of dialogic encounter, and that occurs most often among people who have long interacted. For scholars of Islam and religious studies, the study represents a rare application of sociolinguistics to transmission of spiritual knowledge. The importance of oral interaction in such transmission has long been appreciated, but the conceptual framework and methodology for its analysis have been lacking. An ethnography of learning, a sociolinguistics of mysticism, above all Spiritual Discourse illuminates the process of interpersonal encounter. It is a story gracefully and unpretentiously told.

Growing Up on Grosse Ile
Growing Up on Grosse Ile

Author: Frances Trix

Publisher:

Published: 2020-04-20

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9781950843169

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Growing up on Grosse Ile is the story of life on a border island between Michigan and Canada, downriver from Detroit. What was it like to be young in a place surrounded by water and Great Lakes freighters in mid-twentieth century America? We grew up outside, and the island shaped our youth: both its unique provincial qualities-we all missed the same word on the fourth grade spelling bee-and its ties to the mainland-with the many "bridge stories" like the early bridge built to allow horses from the island to pull beer wagons in Detroit. With our ups and downs, we learned the lesson of the fragility of island life, and finally the hardest lesson of all-that those who grow up on the island must leave it.

Living Sufism in North America
Living Sufism in North America

Author: William Rory Dickson

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2015-09-11

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1438457588

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In this book, William Rory Dickson explores Sufism as a developing tradition in North America, one that exists in diverse and beguiling forms. Sufism's broad-minded traditions of philosophy, poetry, and spiritual practice infused Islamic civilization for centuries and drew the attention of interested Westerners. By the early twentieth century, Sufism was being practiced in North America. Today's North American Sufism can appear either explicitly Islamic or seemingly devoid of Islamic religiosity. Dickson provides indispensable background on Sufism's relation to Islamic orthodoxy and to Western esoteric traditions, and its historical development in North America. The book goes on to chart the directions that North American Sufism is currently taking, directions largely chosen by Sufi leaders. The views of ten North American Sufi leaders are explored in depth and their perspectives on Islam, authority, gender, and tradition are put in conversation with one another. A more detailed picture of North American Sufism emerges, challenging previous scholarly classifications of Sufi groups, and highlighting Sufism's fluidity, diversity, and dynamism.

Historical Dictionary of Sufism
Historical Dictionary of Sufism

Author: John Renard

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 583

ISBN-13: 0810879743

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The most broadly accepted explanation of Sufism is the etymological derivation of the term from the Arabic for “wool,” ṣūf, associating practitioners with a preference for poor, rough clothing. This explanation clearly identifies Sufism with ascetical practice and the importance of manifesting spiritual poverty through material poverty. In fact, some of the earliest “Western” descriptions of individuals now widely associated with the larger phenomenon of Sufism identified them with the Arabic term faqīr, mendicant, or its most common Persian equivalent, darwīsh. Sufism, as presented here embraces a host of features including the ritual, institutional, psychological, hermeneutical, artistic, literary, ethical, and epistemological. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Sufism contains a chronology, an introduction, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,000 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, major historical figures and movements, practices, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Sufism.

Sufism in America
Sufism in America

Author: Julianne Hazen

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2016-12-13

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1498533876

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Sufism in America sheds light on spiritual, mystical Islam in America. The Sufi path focuses on developing a personal relationship with God, doing what is beautiful in the sight of God, and struggling against the lower self to reach loving submission. Up to this point, very little has been written about the Sufi orders in America and those who participate in them. This study focuses on the Alami Tariqa in Waterport, New York, which was started in the 1970s by a shaykh from the Balkans. The Alami Tariqa strives to uphold sharia while adapting to the Western setting. Its membership is diverse, consisting mostly of American-born participants from Christian and Jewish backgrounds, in addition to a few Muslim immigrants from South Asia. This study explores how this order has acculturated to the American setting, why individuals choose to join the tariqa, and what it means to pursue spiritual goals in a modern, Western society. Conclusions are drawn from interviews, a survey, and observations of teachings, plus the author’s experience working with this community for over ten years. The book interweaves personal stories and insider views with academic insight to provide a compelling and detailed picture of Sufism as a living and dynamic tradition in America.

Love in the Time of Ethnography
Love in the Time of Ethnography

Author: Lucinda Carspecken

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1498543189

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Love in the Time of Ethnography explores love – variously defined – as an important facet of human life and a worthy focus of study. The authors look at love in association with an Alevi and Sunni couple in Turkey, organizers of Mexican American and immigrant youth movements, Christian missionaries in China, an elderly man with dementia, two women “coming home” to queer identity, a White researcher working with Black women in the US, the common ground between Dōgen’s Zen teachings and Habermas's critical theory, an Albanian Sufi community in Michigan and interactions between humans and the natural world. It also includes theoretical writing on the place of love in social analysis, whether this involves relationships between researchers and participants or the nature of human connection itself. The authors argue that social research is an affective process as well as a cognitive one, and that fellow feeling is an essential component of making sense of the world. Along with more traditional scholarly forms, the contributors to this book use auto-ethnography, life stories, archival research and poetry, noting that style itself conveys information and emotion. Writing is always to some extent partisan. While anthropologists and other social researchers have explored this idea over the last few decades, they have more often explored it with an eye to critique than to the ideals underlying that critique. This is a collection of essays about what ethnographers are aiming for as well as the problems they address, and the authors discuss ethical principles like agape, hizmet and cariño as rationales for ethnography and rationales for social change.

Alevi Identity
Alevi Identity

Author: Tord Olsson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-09-30

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 1135797242

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In the rising momentum for new and reformulated cultural identities, the Turkish Alevi have also emerged on the scene, demanding due recognition. In this process a number of dramatic events have served as important milestones: the clashes between Sunni and Alevi in Kahramanmaras in 1979 and Corum in 1980, the incendiarism in Sivas in 1992, and the riots in Istanbul (Gaziosmanpasa) in 1995. Less evocative, but in the long run more significant, has been the rising interest in Alevi folklore and religious practices. Questions have also arisen as to what this branch of Islamic heterodoxy represents in terms of old and new identities. In this book, these questions are addressed by some of the most prominent scholars in the field.

God and Logic in Islam
God and Logic in Islam

Author: John Walbridge

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1139492349

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This book investigates the central role of reason in Islamic intellectual life. Despite widespread characterization of Islam as a system of belief based only on revelation, John Walbridge argues that rational methods, not fundamentalism, have characterized Islamic law, philosophy and education since the medieval period. His research demonstrates that this medieval Islamic rational tradition was opposed by both modernists and fundamentalists, resulting in a general collapse of traditional Islamic intellectual life and its replacement by more modern but far shallower forms of thought. However, the resources of this Islamic scholarly tradition remain an integral part of the Islamic intellectual tradition and will prove vital to its revival. The future of Islam, Walbridge argues, will be marked by a return to rationalism.