It was May and I had brought flowers into the hospital from my garden. As I placed them on the thick tile window sill in Baba’s gray hospital room, Baba called out to me in Turkish, long our common language, “Bring me my shoes, my daughter.” But there were no shoes to bring.

Baba Rexheb hadn’t walked for weeks. I could remember the last time he had slowly made his way down the stairs to the basement kitchen in the Bektashi tekke, a sort of Muslim monastery where Baba lived and which he had founded when he had come to...

“Where have I seen that word before?” I was in the ark-like library of the university on a Saturday morning, reading an article in The Encyclopedia of Islam for a class, and as I came across the word “Bektashi,” I stopped. I had seen this word, but not in a book. But where? I had grown up on an island in Michigan and studied in Maine and Vermont. My family was from Detroit. How could I know this word “Bektashi”?

I stopped reading whatever the article was for the class and went instead to the entry on Bektashis. There I...

The way I learned about Ali Haqi Baba, the spiritual teacher of Baba’s spiritual teacher, was through Baba’s recounting of one incident here, and later another encounter there. We would be reading poetry, and a phrase would remind Baba of Ali Haqi Baba’s last couplet, the one he composed just before his passing, of how nothing remained to him except sighs and wails, yet he should still praise God for this. When I asked him about the couplet, Baba noted that all Ali Haqi Baba’s friends were gone. And then I remembered Ali Haqi Baba’s close friend, Mustafa, whom Baba...

Baba’s native language gave him pleasure. When he talked about its grammar, he would reveal its delicate workings—such order, such subtlety. Baba explained the eight forms of the past tense in Albanian. And then the admirative, a wonderful mode almost unique to Albanian that shows surprise or wonder. How useful! Then we came to the middle voice.

The book Baba had given me on Albanian explained the middle voice as having a passive form and an active meaning. U lava, I washed, u vesha, I got dressed. Baba did not quite agree with this description, saying that it was...

Apart from his description of leaving his murshid, Baba mentioned his departure from his homeland in 1944 only in cursory fashion. My understanding of how Baba left is from accounts of other Albanians who accompanied him on different parts of the journey.

The beginning of this journey was leaving the tekke in southern Albania where he had spent 22 years as a Bektashi dervish. Whenever I asked Baba about this tekke, he would tell me about the trees that lined the way up to it. “Trees in lines, like soldiers,” he would say. One time he asked me what you...

Why had Baba gone from the Displaced Persons Camp in Italy to Egypt? Certainly after four years he had had enough of the camps. He had taken a quota number to come to America, but his number was way down on the list. In contrast, Albanians did not even need a visa to go to Egypt because the family of King Farouk was Albanian. There had been an Albanian community in Egypt for 150 years. As an Albanian who had grown up in Egypt put it, “Egypt was the mother of the world. When we were there, there were Italians,...

Like so many Bektashi tales, Baba’s time in America began with a negative experience.

Baba’s sister, Zonja Zejnepe, had come before him from Italy to America. With her were her in-laws, her young daughter, and the knowledge that she would be the sole support of them all in this new land. When they were still on the ship, her daughter remembered her mother standing by the railing and, while looking out on the waves, voice the hope that the ship would never reach the shore. She had not reckoned on her own courage and energy, for Zonja Zejnepe would work...

Despite all the remodeling and additions one window at the tekke has remained constant, the basement window facing back to where the barn used to stand. I always thought of it as the “egg window,” for after people gathered and washed eggs in the barn, they would walk across to the tekke and then pass the eggs down through the window to be sorted.

One day after lunch, when Baba went to sort eggs, I followed and asked if I could help. He told me to sit across from him and laf atmak, literally “throw words” at him. And so...

Lessons with Baba continued. We finished the poetry of Hatayi and then began reading the divan or collected poetry of Omar Khayyam in Turkish, not the original Persian. Only it was a Turkish full of Persian words. Khayyam is known for the beauty of his poetry. But he is also known for extolling the drinking of wine that may be interpreted as a metaphor for mystic love. At one point in my lined notebook, I made a list of words that Khayyam used for “wine glass” (eight), “drunk” (two), “wine” (seven), and “inn” (two). During one such lesson where a...

The early 1990s were times of change. Baba’s health had been slowly declining, but we had unconsciously adjusted to it. What woke many of us up was the passing of Zoti Qani during Matem of 1994. He was the last of the original founders of the tekke to die. It was Zoti Qani who had found the farm property in the first place back in the early 1950s. When word came that Zoti Qani was in the funeral home, Baba was sitting in his leather chair in the front room of the tekke’s new wing. He paused, and then shook...

Bektashis have long marked important events and relationships with poetry. The coming of a holiday, the love of one’s spiritual teacher, the desire to come closer to God—all these warrant the composing and reciting of poems. So it should come as no surprise that Baba’s epitaph was in quatrains.

I came to the tekke one Thursday morning, 10 years before Baba’s passing, to find Baba, his sister, Zonja Zejnepe, and his oldest friend, Zoti Xhevat, all sitting close together in the old study room. As I walked up the stairs from the back entrance, I could hear Zonja Zejnepe...