The Sufi Journey Of Baba Rexheb

Book Summary

The Bektashi are a 700-year-old Sufi or Muslim mystic order that spread from Anatolia to the Balkans in the fifteenth century. In the twentieth century, Baba Rexheb founded the first community of Bektashi in America. From this "tekke," or lodge, on an eighteen-acre farm in southeast Michigan, he led the American Bektashi community for more than 40 years until his death in 1995. Rexheb lived through the twentieth century's wars, disruptions, and dislocations, from Albania to America, but continued his life as a dervish, sustained by a lifelong bond with his spiritual master. Frances Trix's ethnographic biography "The Sufi Journey of Baba Rexheb" recounts the dervish's life through lived example and through stories, just as Rexheb and the Bektashi taught. As a linguistic anthropologist, Trix studied in their community for more than twenty years. For twelve of these years, she taped her weekly lessons in Turkish, Albanian, and Arabic, and this book draws extensively from transcriptions and translations. Besides reconstructing the life story of a modern Sufi leader in his communities, this study also documents the Bektashi order in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Balkans, Egypt, and America, through oral histories and lived accounts, supplemented with archival sources, traditional Bektashi literature, and published sources in Turkish, Albanian, and other European languages.

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