Edinburgh Mevlevi Tekke

  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...

  Here is a memory of an evening of spiritual conversation, called "sohbet" in Turkish, with Daud Bellak over twenty years ago in his home in the New Town of Edinburgh. It expresses something of his teaching, and a story from his own teacher, Suleyman Hayati Dede... The Conversation It was a pleasant weekend in late Summer 2003. A friend of mine named Lili from Bern in Switzerland was over visiting, and we drove up from Sheffield where I was then living, through the Lake District and on to Scotland, where we spent a couple of nights. The first evening we were invited to dinner with David Bellak, shaikh and whirling dervish in Rumi’s sufi tradition. David lived in a comfortable ground floor flat in Edinburgh’s New Town - which is not new at all, but actually a historic UNESCO heritage district of Georgian and Neo-Classical buildings, constructed from local sandstone. It’s new relative to the medieval Old Town up the hill, famous for the Royal Mile running from the Castle d...