Sixties mystic

The misery memoir is the fad of the moment. We seem to have a limitless desire to delve into other people’s hardships. Robert Irwin has gladly shown the way to a more enlightening type of memoir, that of the spiritual quest.

But surely, I hear you say, the spiritual quest is nothing new? Think of Dante, half way along life’s path, looking for the right turning. For Dante, read the young Irwin, still a teenager, up at Merton College to read History and very much in need of direction. The year was 1965. But while others were tuning in and turning on, Irwin, as he confides in his first sentence, ‘wanted to become a Muslim saint’. It isn’t every writer who can get away with such an opening, but then Irwin is no ordinary memorialist. Best known for the rigour of his scholarship on the history and literature of the Middle East, and for challenging Edward Said’s anti-orientalist project, Irwin has also written fiction: The Arabian Nightmare, a dream-mugging mystery set in medieval Cairo, still haunts me more than 20 years after reading it.

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.