Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties

178 Pages·2012·2.82 MB·English

by  Robert Irwin

Memoirs of a Dervish
Also by Robert Irwin
NON-FICTION
The Middle East in the Middle Ages:
The Early Mamluk Sultanate 1250–1382
The Arabian Nights: A Companion
Islamic Art
Night and Horses and the Desert:
An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature
The Alhambra
For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies
Camel
Mamluks and Crusaders
Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights
The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 4 Islamic
Cultures and Societies to the End of the Eighteenth
Century (editor)
FICTION
The Arabian Nightmare
The Limits of Vision
The Mysteries of Algiers
Exquisite Corpse
Prayer Cushions of the Flesh
Satan Wants Me
Memoirs of a Dervish

ROBERT IRWIN
First published in Great britain in 2011 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
Exmouth Market
London ECIR OJH
www.profilebooks.com
Copyright © Robert Irwin, 2011
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above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 86197 991 9
eISBN 978 1 84765 404 5
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Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds
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To Helen, who rescued me from myself
The default setting of a memoir is yearning. Biography and
autobiography tell the story of a life, but a memoir conjures a ghost image:
the adventure missed, the love refused, the road not travelled, the might-
have-beens. Perhaps memoir writing is itself a kind of adventure: a process
as much of forming as describing.
Jane Shilling reviewing Luke Jennings’s memoir Blood Knots
in the Daily Telegraph, 24 April 2010
CONTENTS

Preface

1 Oxford
2 Odd People
3 Algeria
4 Sacred and Profane Love
5 The Summer of 1967
6 Shadows
7 Aftermath
Last things

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
PREFACE

WHY DID I WRITE THIS BOOK? The causes are multiple. First, I badly
wanted to create a work of literary art and perhaps also to give my youth a
retrospective artistic shape. Then I wanted to know where I stood, both in
relation to the mystical states I experienced as a young man and in relation to my
eventual death and judgement. But I also wanted to give an account of Sufism
from the inside, as well as instructing readers in the basic elements of Islam and
the difficulties a Western convert is likely to face. At the same time I wanted to
give an impression of how it felt to be young in the hippy sixties from the
perspective of someone who was not part of the underground countercultural
elite. In particular, I wanted to shed some light on the occult and mystical aspects
of the counterculture, as well as some of the ludicrous and half-witted aspects of
the hippy sixties. Additionally this is the story of someone who sat at the feet of
a series of remarkable teachers. It is a book about teacher–student relations and,
if Lynn Barber had not already taken the title for her excellent memoir, I might
have called my book An Education.
There is a lot about dreams in this book, and it is – as Sigmund Freud might
have put it – overdetermined. In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, a dream
is said to be overdetermined if its plot and its various images are based on
multiple causes. So in a dream the rocking horse in the corner of the attic may
draw upon a glimpse of a rocking horse in a toyshop in the course of the
previous day, but at the same time it may also allude to a deeply repressed
childhood trauma, conceivably something as serious as sexual molestation. A
dream is compounded of many elements coming from different levels of the
psyche and a successful interpretation requires understanding of the dream’s
images at several levels.
Over the decades my memories – my dreams – of the sixties coalesced into a
kind of demon that lurked inside me. But I have found the writing of Memoirs of
a Dervish to be a kind of exorcism. Something has been set free. I am not yet
sure what.