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Memoirs of a Dervish is haunting for reasons other than Irwin’s dreams, not least for the way it weaves its very disparate strands in a narrative that is occasionally random, but never rambling. It presents the 1960s not through the eyes of a mover or swinger, but from the point of view of an intelligent, lonely and insecure person in search of the Meaning of Life (Irwin’s capitals, not mine). It describes the author’s fascination with, and initiation into, an order of Muslim sufi mystics. And it conveys with power and eloquence the writer’s gratitude for having nourished the spiritual side of life and his disapproval of the way that many Muslims today interpret the Qur’an.
Irwin admits to the problems of recreating events from half a century back. He has diaries and other papers, but there are times when there is either no entry, or he is unable to make sense of what he wrote. There is also much he cannot remember. Happily, the details that have survived are more than enough to tell this tale.
Early on at Oxford, he hung a note by threads from his ceiling: ‘Now you are awake, remember your dreams.’ His diaries are full of them and, whatever else they were trying to say, they reveal the author’s longing to find a pattern to life, to make sense of the random nature of our existence. Religion seemed to offer an answer. The young student spent a night walking barefoot around the college quad reciting ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ The demands of a sufi brotherhood were a natural progression. While his fellow undergraduates were off to ‘the overseas empire of psychedelia’ — Tangier, Formentera and Kathmandu — Irwin spent his holidays in a zawiya, a Muslim monastery on the Algerian coast, a convert both to the religion and the spiritual order.
His Algerian summers, and subsequent spiritual encounters in Europe, were defining moments in his life; yet nothing is romanticised or glazed with sentimentality. The story is too important to pollute in that way, for it is driven by the need of an older man to tell his tale — think of Conrad’s narrator, Charles Marlow, spinning his yarns. Part of its success — and this is a book that succeeds on so many levels — is the fact that the voice of the older Irwin resonates just as strongly as the desires of the younger. The richness of texture and tone that this creates, coupled with the unusual nature of the story and the honesty of a man considering his own mortality and both wanting and needing to bear witness, make Memoirs of a Dervish compelling, fascinating and enriching.
Because you read about biography
Also by Anthony Sattin
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