IU News Room, "Book Marks - The Sufi Journey of Baba Rexheb. " - Indiana University - Bloomington, IN, USAThursday, May 21, 2008
Recent books by Indiana University faculty members and alumni as well as titles from the IU Press
Frances Trix's new book, The Sufi Journey of Baba Rexheb (University of Pennsylvania Press), tells the life story of Rexheb, a Muslim mystic from the Balkans who founded the first Bektashi community in America.
Through Bektashi stories, oral histories and ethnographic experience she acquired during her more than 20 years studying with Rexheb, Trix recounts the life and times of this modern Sufi leader and the communities in which he lived: 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.
As a linguistic anthropologist, Trix taped 12 years of their weekly meetings in Turkish, Albanian and Arabic. She draws extensively on Rexheb's words, as well as interactions at the Michigan Bektashi center.
Readers come to know Rexheb's 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 19th and 20th centuries in the Balkans and Egypt and its transposition to America, attesting to the role of Sufi centers in Islamic community life and their interaction with people of other faiths.
Trix is an associate professor of linguistics and anthropology at Indiana University and an ethnographer of Islam in Balkan immigrant communities. Her books include *Spiritual Discourse: Learning with a Muslim Master* and *Muslim Voices and Lives in the Contemporary World*.
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