Like Grapes

PN Culture Desk, "Sufi Poet Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh: 12/10/1926 – 10/10/2008" - Payvand News - Iran
Saturday, October 11, 2008

Like grapes, we have always accompanied the vat.
From the view of the world, we have disappeared.
For years, we boiled from the fire of love
Until we became that wine which intoxicated the world.
Sufi poet Dr. Nurbakhsh

Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, Master of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order, passed away in Banbury Oxfordshire at the age of 82.

In Iran alone there are over two million Sufis of various Orders and creeds. The Nimatullahi Sufi Order is the most wide spread Sufi Order in Iran which also has branches in Europe, Africa, U.S.A. and Australia.

Soon after the Islamic revolution in Iran, Dr. Nurbakhsh went into exile and eventually settled in the U.K. where the Order maintains two Sufi Centers in London and Manchester and a Sufi Retreat in Banbury, Oxfordshire. He had been the master of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order for fifty-five years.

Dr. Nurbakhsh was born in Kerman, Iran in 1926. He attended medical school at the University of Tehran, receiving his psychiatric doctorate in 1952. In 1974, Dr. Nurbakhsh was elected president of the Society of Iranian Psychiatrists and published numerous works of psychiatry in both Iranian and Western journals. Dr. Nurbakhsh was named Head of the Department of Psychiatry in Tehran University and Director of the Ruzbeh hospital in 1977. Under the supervision of Dr. Nurbakhsh, Iran hosted the World Congress of Psychiatry for the first time.

Parallel to his academic career, Dr. Nurbakhsh was committed to spiritual activity. At the age of sixteen, he was initiated into the Nimatullahi Sufi path. At the age of twenty, he was appointed by his master, Munis 'Ali Shah, to the position of Shaikh (spiritual director). Upon the death of Munis in 1953, Dr. Nurbakhsh was named in succession as Master of the Nimatullahi Order.

Dr. Nurbakhsh was an accomplished Sufi poet and spent more than 50 years writing, editing and publishing definitive and comprehensive works on the Sufi spiritual path.

A number of Americans and Europeans came to Iran and were initiated into the Nimatullahi Order. Subsequently, the first spiritual center outside Iran was founded in San Francisco in 1975. Dr. Nurbakhsh eventually established more than one hundred Sufi centers and numerous libraries and museums throughout Iran and the world.

Dr. Nurbakhsh promoted the creed of fraternity and equality of all human beings, regardless of gender, race, nationality and religion. He also advocated love and service to all humanity. He is succeeded by his son, Alireza Nurbakhsh.

[Visit the Nimatullahi Sufi Order website http://www.nimatullahi.org/us].