Robert Irwin 
Memoirs of a Dervish 
Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties

In the summer of 1964, while a military coup was taking place and tanks were rolling through the streets of Algiers, Robert Irwin set off for Algeria in search of Sufi enlightenment. There he entered a world of marvels and ecstasy, converted to Islam and received an initiation as a
faqir. He learnt the rituals of Islam in North Africa and he studied Arabic in London. He also pursued more esoteric topics under a holy fool possessed of telepathic powers. A series of meditations on the nature of mystical experience run through this memoir. But political violence, torture, rock music, drugs, nightmares, Oxbridge intellectuals and first love and its loss are all part of this strange story from the 1960s.

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Robert Irwin is a novelist, publisher, reviewer, Arabist and historian. He was formerly a lecturer in the Department of Mediaeval History in the University of St Andrews and he is currently a Senior Research Associate of the History Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. He has published seventeen books, of which six are novels. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Memoirs of a Dervish is published by Profile in 2011.