Memories of the Mihrab Gallery
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Daud Dede asked me to write something about the early days I visited him in his beautiful oriental carpet shop in Edinburgh. Here is a first attempt... Memories of the Mihrab Gallery It was January 1999. I had just returned to Glasgow University in September, after an earlier false start and a three-year incursion into Buddhism, including highland retreats, life in communal houses and theatrical exploits. Looking for books in the university library on Sufism, which I had begun to explore the previous year, I found Shems Friedlander’s The Whirling Dervishes with its darkly evocative pictures of dervishes in white against black backgrounds, and I found a website – searching the internet was still quite a novel experience back then! - for the Threshold Society in the USA, a sufi organisation connected to the Persian mystic and poet Jelaluddin Rumi. They offered a distance learning introduction to sufi thought and practice called the 99 Day Program, which I wrote off to join, and in...