ROBERT IRWIN (August 1946 - June 2024)
published in Critical Muslim, issue 56, Autumn 2025
Robert Irwin was my role model of a free scholar and a creative writer. There was also something timeless about the way he lived his life. I could so easily imagine him slipping into the streets of Abbasid Baghdad, or the Athens of Demosthenes, or Mameluke Cairo – just as easily as he moved around his 20th-century London homeland.
Robert mostly wrote at home, but like the pinball machines that he loved to play, there were a number of fixed points in London which he bounced off from, and where you might come across him. He worked for decades as the Middle East editor at the TLS (The Times Literary Supplement) both commissioning reviews and writing them himself. I remember his early advice which was to react passionately about a book one-way or the other. Your task was to engage with, not to solemnly salute this new arrival with a precis of its contents. The stream of books to the TLS kept him in touch with every scholarly feud, which he would observe with amused detachment at book launches, leaning against the bookshelves glass in hand, which made him a familiar face at such London bookshops as Hatchards, Daunts, Sandoes and Waterstones.
He was also a regular face at any interesting lectures in the Royal Asiatic Society or SOAS, and liked to use the desks in the London Library, or the London college of printing or within the rarefied world of the Warburg Institute and Alastair Hamilton’s once secretive Arcadian library.
But throughout his academic life, there was an invisible moat of brimstone, that divided any gathering of Middle Eastern academics into two adversarial camps. This division originated with Edward Said’s Orientalism (published in 1978) which looked at how the western intellectual tradition had worked to diminish the societies it had studied, and in the process weaken and subordinate them. It is a very interesting thesis, (albeit almost buried in academic jargon) and was a liberating concept that kick-started post-colonial studies. But it had the unfortunate biproduct of nationalising scholarship, of unintentionally upholding the ethnic right to record your own history, and casting suspicion on the work of outsiders. Robert knew just how much work yet needed to be done (most especially in the editing and transcription of medieval manuscripts, as well as their translation and publication) and was infuriated by how Orientalism was used to negate and delay and dismiss.
There was, I believe, another, almost personal agenda behind Edward Said’s book. Edward Said was Palestinian by blood but in every other way was a highly cultured, and privileged Levantine intellectual who had been educated in an Egyptian boarding school directly modelled on the English system. But Orientalism was a weapon which he forged which could assist his Palestinian homeland resist the erosion of their identity by the incredible energy of the many pro-Zionist western intellectuals, exemplified by Bernard Lewis. Robert Irwin had studied under Bernard Lewis at SOAS, alongside such brilliant writers as John Wansbrough, Michael Cook and Patricia Crone whose work (sometimes collectively known as the Revisionists) seemed to be dismantling the foundations of Islamic culture. It was not true of course, but it added further fuel to the fire of factionalism.
Just when things were calming down a little between the two rival camps of scholars, Robert published (in 2006), For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies – an accurate and relentless assault on Edward Said’s many errors of fact, as well as an explanation of how the vast range of European scholarship stood outside the narrow imperialist machinations of France and Britain. Robert’s book might have punctured hundreds of holes into Edward Said’s thesis but the Neocon supported invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the USA (publicly acclaimed by the 90 year old Bernard Lewis) also showed the world how much we needed Edward Said. In my review, I likened For Lust of Knowing to a petrol bomb casually lobbed into the dying embers of a communal bonfire.
Robert Irwin was also an active member of the editorial board of the Critical Muslim. He haunted antiquarian bookshops. He enjoyed the quixotic search for a rare work of French scholarship, by Claude Cahen on northern Syria. Typically for a man so fascinated by the bizarre coincidences, when he at last found himself a copy, he also found out from the crossed out institutional label, that it was the same one he had read in the medieval department library of St Andrews all those years ago.
He also adored the October Gallery, which was at one and the same time a temple to outsider art, but also an open house to dance, story-telling, scientific self-sufficiency and the shared strands of world mythology.
Robert Irwin was also one of the three co-founders and directors of Dedalus Books. This publishing house, founded in 1983 had literary ambition, but was not afraid to also champion the Bizarre, Grotesque, Surreal and Gothic. I also ran a small publishing company, so we would try to keep ourselves cheerful in the great book fairs dominated by four giant international corporations.
Robert Irwin for many years co-hosted a gathering of creative writers in the upstairs room of the Blue Post pub in Fitzrovia, so that we could steal each other’s plots and swap gossip about publishers and agents. Poets were theoretically banned, but in practice there was no membership policy behind this fascinating gallery of faces and sharply held opinions, all buying their own drinks. He also chaired a group which had been formed out of the creative courses run by Morley College – an amazingly progressive and active late 19th century London institution founded to make all forms of education open to workers.
As an academic Robert Irwin had a lifelong passion for the late medieval world of the central Middle East. The Mameluke Sultanate, ruling from the two great cities of Damascus and Cairo, was at the heart of his historical area of interest, which naturally embraced the historian Ibn Khaldoun and the street story-telling tradition embodied within the tales of the 1,001 nights. He wrote histories, biographies, commentaries and undertook original translations that expanded our knowledge of this fascinating era. On behalf of the interested, general reader, ignorant of both Arabic, Persian and Turkish, I can attest that he always succeeded in making things accessible without ever dumbing down.
The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994) was the first book of his that I read and remains one of my favourites, as he takes his scholarship onto the road, trying to track down the last of the public story-tellers. It was followed by a fluent, illustrated survey of Islamic Art (1997) and then by Night Horses and the Desert, an inspiring anthology of classical Arabic literature (1999), well published by Penguin. His The Alhambra (2004) was succeeded by, Mamluks and Crusaders (2010) and Ibn Khaldoun: an Intellectual Biography (2018). There was also a book on camels published by Reaktion, in their series on literary animals. These books were in fact just surface smoke for the great work on Mameluke history (sourced from original documents), which he had first started upon as a callow student, but had never completed, either as a thesis or a doctorate, let alone a finished book. Somehow it is entirely appropriate that this hefty academic volume, larded with footnotes and bibliography was completed before Robert died, but will be published by the Princeton University Press some fifty years after it was began and when he is dead.
I have listened to Robert speak at many learned societies and academic conferences, so began to realise that although he was relaxed and wacky and amused in conversation, this ease disappeared in direct relationship to the size of his audience. I noticed that he needed to grip the lectern to keep his hands from shaking, and sometimes beads of sweat would appear on his forehead by the time he had finished his paper. And although I have always found him inspiring as a writer he was not a gifted lecturer, preferring (or perhaps needing) to read out from a typescript, with little eye to eye engagement with his listeners. I never asked him about this, but talking in public clearly looked an ordeal, and probably helped necessitate his choice to become a freelance writer rather than remain a university lecturer. He loathed (and would not easily speak about his schooldays) and I imagined that this nervous twitch might have been acquired at his English boarding school. His younger brother found the experience of this school so depressing that he came close to taking his life. He showed me the scars on his wrist, many decades after he had inflicted them on himself. He was fortunately saved by working in the theatre and the love of a good woman, and is now a remarkably busy and happy and honest and open man.
Robert and his younger brother were first educated at Dane Court, a brand-new day school that had branched off from a traditional Preparatory Boarding school. Robert was one of the first batch of a dozen schoolboys taught by the headmaster Robin Pooley. He was a major and positive influence on both boys. 'Mr Robin' would arrive in class waving a copy of the Manchester Guardian declaring it to be the only newspaper worth reading. He force-fed the children under his care with literature (especially Conrad) and regaled us with tales of his life in the wartime Merchant Navy which included being torpedoed off West Africa and surviving on a lifeboat. Ted Irwin wrote, “This school was a joyous experience unlike the Gulag-on-the-Downs that was to follow.”
Aged thirteen they were moved up to the English boarding school of Epsom College. Epsom was then locked into the traditional spartan attitudes of elite education in England which circled around excellence at sport or the classics, and very minimal standards of privacy or comfort. It had been founded as a school for the medical profession, in much the same way that Marlborough was associated with the Church of England. He made a few lifelong friends there, such as the maverick genius art-historian Peter Fuller (born in Damascus) as well as Robert Chenciner, an orphan from Canada who would become an expert on Daghestan culture in the Caucasus. Robert was hopeless at Maths, but exceptionally talented in the humanities. He read modern history at Merton College, then worked on a thesis on Mameluke documentation of the Crusades at SOAS under the supervision of the charismatic Professor Bernard Lewis. It was at this period that he met his wife, Helen, who was studying Russian in the nearby School of Slavonic Studies. Although he never actually finished his thesis, he was talent spotted for the medieval history department of St Andrews by Professor Lionel Butler to replace Jonathan Riley-Smith, who taught the Crusades (but from western historical documents). It would enrich the course to strengthen the Arabic perspective. By chance, Hugh Kennedy had also been recruited as an Arabic scholar to the same department, but rather than become rivals they became lifelong friends. Robert spent five years teaching in St Andrews, living in three different flats on the grand medieval avenue of South Street. In their third year Helen gave birth to their daughter, but two more Scottish winters (and the remorseless sound of dripping taps in a cold flat) were enough, especially as her old employers in London had generously given Helen the opportunity to return.
Robert was given the task of finding a house in London. All their friends laughed at their impossible list of requirements: for they had no inherited money but wanted a Georgian terraced house of old London-stock yellow brick, within walking distance of the House of Parliament and it had to have its own garden and space to house a library. Robert picked up one of those free-trade newspapers made up entirely of classified advertisements (there was a famous one called Exchange and Mart) in Waterloo station. It was the sole issue published, but by the end of that day Robert had found an affordable home (albeit on a busy road).
If you have read any of Robert’s novels you will not be surprised by the bizarre confluence of neighbours that he had chanced upon. Nearby was the British Iner-Planetary Society, the remnants of Vauxhall gardens (a licenced place of entertainment and debauch throughout the 18th century), a Catholic mission (St Anne’s) to minister to the slums of south London, the headquarters of Mi6 and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, one of London’s oldest and loudest drag bars. On the other side of the Thames stood Tate Britain (England’s leading art gallery) built over the vaults of a vast penitentiary – shaped like a vast, six petalled geometric flower, from where convicts were shipped off to Australia.
His wife now took over as the bread winner. Robert became a writer in residence at home and picked up their daughter from school in the afternoon. Helen had read History at King’s College and had toyed with also becoming an academic (albeit in modern Russian history). She had also, in a belts and braces manner, filled out an application to join the civil service. It transpired that she was what they were looking for, proven in her first placement among the bewigged clerks who ran Parliament in the Palace of Westminster.
Robert’s first (and his most successful) novel was The Arabian Nightmare (1983). This novel was also embedded in this world he knew so well through his academic studies. Robert created a naive young Western traveller, Balian of Norwich (both a Christian pilgrim and a French spy) who gets caught up, and drawn into a world full of charismatic sheikhs within Mameluke Cairo, followed closely by the reader who gets drawn into a labyrinth of stories within the story. It did not do well, until Annemarie Schimmel, the brilliant German Oriental scholar, fell in love with it, translated it and got it published in Germany. It was very well received in Europe ( twenty different translations would be made) which helped it get the attention it deserved in England, and would eventually be published by Penguin. But this was the first and last cross-over between his non-fiction and his fictional identities.
Robert’s second published novel was The Limits of Vision. This was the highly imagined world of an obsessive house-wife in South London, framed by her paranoia and aggressive neighbours expanded by her imagined allies amongst the great scientists. It must have been at least partly fed by his own experience of being a male house husband, and failing to bond with the mothers as the lone dad at the one o’clock club. The Mysteries of Algiers (1988) is an extraordinarily page-turning and violent chronicle of a French double agent, working for revolution within the Algerian War for Independence. Of all his works this would be the easiest to turn into a film. Exquisite Corpse (1995) manages to be both mockingly absurd, funny and sinister, as we follow the painter Caspar immersing himself into the pre-war Surrealist quarters of London, Paris and Munich, leaching into cult sex and dark neo-nazi mythology. Prayer Cushions of the Flesh is a novella set in 17th-century Istanbul, that playfully romps around the language and conventions of classic erotica, without of course getting a single historical detail wrong. It was made into a very low budget puppet film.
Satan Wants Me (1999) is a farcical but accurate portrait of the 60’s; with its drugs and sexual liberation, its manipulative but mean hippies, proto-paganism and failed academics. Arguably it is part of a trilogy that maps out some of Robert’s own experience. Wonders will Never Cease (2016) is a fabulous compilation of gangster violence with a detective-like quest that immerses the reader in Arthurian mythology set amongst one of the bloodiest episodes of the Wars of the Roses, so that we explore the language and belief systems of England in the Mameluke period. There is a bit part for a nasty side-kick called Barnaby. My Life is like a Fairy Tale (2019) is bewilderingly different, for it takes the reader on a dance through the Nazi film industry trailing behind the fabulous self-obsession, and criminal naivety of a film star. Robert claimed that this anti-hero was the closest that he came to creating a fictional self-portrait. This claim may have been based on his technical knowledge behind the dance scenes, for The Runes have been Castcomes much closer to home with its imagined world of academics from the Universities of St Andrews and Oxford immersed in Tolkien-like medievalism and M R James ghost stories. Tom’s Version continues to play around with the inverted imagination of the modern male mind; tied in with systems, collectors, control and deviant sexuality, to arguably conclude the trilogy begun with Satan Wants Me.
And Robert died while still writing. The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting was already in the hands of Pushkin Press and ready to be printed. Rapture of the Deep was nearly ready to be sent to the publishers with yet another work three-quarters written (which might be finished by a friend).
I was always amazed and impressed by his astonishing diversity, both of period, language, character and theme. Especially when you compare his work to other contemporary novelists, who in mood and theme and drawn characters seem drawn to just one invented world. But now I look back, I can see that there are certain things common to many of Robert’s novels. He respected the craft of the story-teller, so there is some sharp-paced plotting and lots of salacious details which allow for a galloping narrative. The central character tends to be an innocent plunged into a dark, complex, malevolent world, but we also begin to wonder as we progress into an Irwin book, how much is true, and how much is fearful imagination or delusional fantasy. A second, slower reading, will unearth an extraordinary playful delight in his accumulated literary sources, and the themes and attitudes of each chosen period displayed for our amusement, a sort of library echo box of the vast amount of reading that went into each apparently fictional work. I have been allowed to wander around his house, where there were six rooms filled with books (the shelves hugging the corners) while also serving as bedrooms, studies and sitting rooms. But within these rooms you could recognise great concentrations of books that had eventually been boiled down into a novel.
I remember him explaining the process at a mischievous speech he gave at a book launch one evening amongst the bookshelves of John Sandoe (a beloved tardis of literature surviving against all the odds in the centre of fashionable Chelsea). He claimed that he never planned a book in advance, but slowly became aware of one becoming incubated as he realized that he was becoming ever more obsessive, and immersed and particular in his reading. Once he had dug a historical hole for himself, he knew he could best escape by adding something new, spinning like a spider, a fictional ladder to escape his own web.
Robert had a trusted relationship with his lifelong literary agent, Juri Gabriel as well as Eric Lane, with whom he set up Dedalus Press, and who published most of his fiction. Robert first met Juri by attending his creative writing course at Morley college when they came back to London from teaching at St Andrews. The story I was told, which I only partly believe, is that Robert wanted to learn to become a book-binder, but that course was full up, but there was space on the creative writing course.
I am a publisher, so have met more than my fair share of live writers. Robert was exceptional in not being interested in expensive restaurants, fashionable clothes, front row seats (be it on the aeroplane or the concert hall), boutique hotels or becoming a member of one of London’s establishment Clubs. He owned no car, no boat, no country cottage and never even bothered to learn how to drive. He adored books, but the other objects that decorated his home, were not designed to enhance his status as an aesthete or to demonstrate his clever eye. The wooden sculpture of a writer carved in Sierre Leone was a gift, the Venetian carnival mask that sat above the fireplace in the upstairs study (had been bought in a street market) and the Koran stand came from a rough and ready auction house in St Andrews.
Robert was interested in a life of learning, in reading, listening, dreaming and expanding the already vast internal theatre of his knowledge. He was never in any danger of becoming a curmudgeonly bachelor scholar alone in his tower or embedded in the well-salaried quad of an institute. He was a family man, a devoted husband and father and a climbed all-over grandfather. He could juggle, play with cards and conjure up some magic. He lived in a terraced house on a very busy London street, where the bus stop was visible from his front door. He could be (and often delighted) in being controversial in print but was entirely affable in the conduct of his personal life, going out of his way to encourage and counsel young writers and to quietly open doors, or recommend new lines of reading. Although he must qualify, on at least half a dozen categories, for his seat amongst the intellectual elite of this kingdom, there was something refreshingly, innately democratic about his soul.
One of his favourite activities, which he wrote of as being almost as sublime as sex, was rollerblading through the parks and streets of London. By some happy, neighbourly coincidence, he and his close friend Robert Chenciner (who was like myself the father of two daughters) would take my youngest daughter off for long roller-blading sessions on a Sunday morning, when all the parks in the centre of London (such as St James’s and Green Park) are closed to traffic and become a roller blader’s safe paradise. But in his younger days, Robert (the revered intellectual with an international scholarly reputation) would be part of that fast-moving column of highly animated life - the LFNS (the London Friday Night Skate) which used to start off at 8pm from Hyde Park corner.
I don’t know what it is like now, but on a summer evening, this column of skaters was a wonderful caravan of energy. A totally safe and free urban happening, often moving in time to some hidden rhythm, working to the beat of music on their headphones. Part Carnival-Part Sports Club, they made up their own rules. Fit outriders, would act as volunteer marshals, briefly stopping motorised traffic with no more than an outstretched arm, so that hundreds, if not a thousand skaters (often dressed in bright, fluorescent colours) would sweep through the narrow streets of central London.
Robert also loved wasting time on pin-ball machines, and as a young man, would invest hours on these games in the companiable squalor of the basement common room of SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies). There was a young Yemeni poet who was his most determined partner. SOAS had initially been established in the middle of the First World War as a semi-independent department of state. It’s principal aim being to teach diplomats and imperial administrators about the languages and culture they would have to work with. But England being England, it both did this, but also became an almost comical reversal of itself. I remember following Robert down for a cup of tea, before some lecture, to this hive of student militancy. Every conceivable revolutionary and insurrectionary movement in our world was represented by posters on the walls, and stacks of pamphlets on the tables, flyers on the floor and stapled to the doors, with at least half the tables being actively used for some loud, impassioned impromptu political meetings.
Robert never sold himself to a big corporation but always preferred to work with small businesses and self-governing charities. He loved a glass of red rioja, almost as much as myself, but despite sharing many bottles together, he would never be drawn into any vintage chateau chatter. I can remember how that topic was decisively dismissed, “I select my wine from whatever is stacked up on the discount shelf in the supermarket.” Robert as a young man had experimented with every mind-altering, mood enhancing drug in existence, but had come to the sage decision in the middle of his life that wine gave the most reliable and controllable lift.
The daily tenor of his life was otherwise remarkably calm and self-sufficient. Breakfast of brown toast with honey and coffee with milk, led to a round or two of solitaire ( a solo card game which he in later life would play on the computer screen) followed by the Times Crossword. He was then ready to write, fiction in the morning, a twenty minute nap after lunch, then non-fiction in the afternoon, all to the background hum of music. He had an eclectic library of hundreds of CD’s, old tapes and records – and much preferred to experience his music this way, rather than attend a live concert.
I once tried to talk to Robert about the influence of his father on his work, and whether his fictional interest with powerful sheikhs and the recording of dreams and fantasies, did not lead in some way back to his relationship with this man. I can remember the snort of derision with which he greeted this polite speculation, so what I now write, has been officially denied at its source.
Robert as well as hating his boarding school days, retained a powerful loathing for his father’s father who was a dentist who practised in Workington in Cumberland. Ted Irwin confirmed this, “Our English grandfather, known as 'Pop' by us, was a truly awful man. He treated his wife 'Nana' like dirt and made a habit of seducing neighbour's wives resulting in frequent house moves. He also had the appalling habit of kicking any dog that came within range of his feet. Their mother was devoted to their father yet she promised “that if he let that man (Pop) anywhere near her childrens' teeth she would leave him”.
Robert’s own father (Joseph) Alan Irwin was of a completely different temperament. He was halfway through training to be a doctor but was called up to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the last war. He never spoke so much as a word about his experiences at that time. And although a peaceable man, he clearly knew how to use his fists, especially when he saw a Canadian soldier pushing his luck too forcefully on a Dutch girl at a rowdy barn dance. He knocked the man down and rescued Wilhemina Cornelia Drapers. That impulsive action began a love affair that lasted all their lives, and Robert was born soon after their post-war marriage. His mother’s father was an established figure in Dutch society, the Royal Notary or some such thing, and presided every year over his three daughters and their extended families who were summoned to spend three weeks in the Grand beach Hotel (in Schevening) on the Dutch coast where he took over a whole floor.
After the war, Alan Irwin continued his medical training but got drawn towards psychiatry and eventually rose to become Superintendent of the Holloway Sanatorium, near Virginia Water. It was a vast Victorian complex, spread over 22 acres, with around 380 patients and 230 staff. Robert, his mother and younger brother, knew this Asylum well, helping his father humanise the place by playing there in the summer as well as attending Christmas Day celebrations. Ted Irwin wrote to me, “He was a good psychiatrist and beloved by those that worked with him. This I know because I once did a holiday job in the records office at Holloway. He could be 'on call' a couple of nights a week and summoned to local police stations to 'section' disturbed offenders. He also sat on tribunals at Broadmoor.
My suggestion to Robert that he had witnessed his father rule over this palace of madmen, like an enlightened Sultan, eavesdropping on their dreams whilst administering drugs, might have influenced some of his own work was once again roundly dismissed. Instead, I was informed how his mother and father had very bland contemporary taste (completely anti-gothic tendencies), building a light-filled suburban house outside Farnham, surrounded by fir trees and whose only ornament was a swimming pool. Far from being a Sultan his father switched off from his professional responsibilities by such simple and repetitive tasks as swimming, gardening and sunbathing. This was confirmed by his brother Ted who wrote, “He was handsome, a Ronald Colman lookalike, a good tennis player, swimmer and diver. I think that he was disappointed that neither Robert nor I showed any sporting talent. The most surprising thing about Dad was that he wrote the script for the annual Hospital Sports & Social Club Panto, "Sisterella", "Babes on the Ward", hit after hit.”
Years later, Robert did tell me what had affected him most deeply about his father, and it was a tale of everyday domestic terror that had stuck into him like a knife, and could and will probably happen in some shape or form to us all. It began with his beloved five-year-old daughter being rushed into hospital with a mastoid bone infection, the stress of which brought on Robert’s first attack of Neuralgia. His medically trained father sprang into immediate action, and quickly came up to give sympathy at St Thomas’s hospital. That evening Alan was floored by a massive stroke, and a failed rescue operation left him unconscious for thirteen years, the rest of his life. All that knowledge and experience lost and turned into a drooling half animated doll, albeit one lovingly cared-for by his wife. Then to cap it all, Robert’s mother (who had bought her own ambulance, so that she could take her husband home for the weekends from the hospital) was undermined by dementia which deteriorated into a paranoia that made her distrust her own children. This was his acknowledged burden.
I was fascinated to hear a slightly different perception of these events from his younger brother Ted, “Dad, as I remember it, suffered a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage and collapsed in the bathroom smashing his head on the corner of the bath as he fell. The failed operation that caused his final paralysis was to tie off the blood vessel that originally caused his collapse. His final words to me as they wheeled him into theatre were "Listen if this operation doesn't work no switching me off. I will take whatever life there is". He was effectively "locked in" unable to communicate by any of the many means we tried. However he undoubtedly enjoyed watching football on telly with me.”
In later life Robert was immensely proud of his daughter who worked at the Oxford Refugee Study centre. Robert also liked and admired his Irish son-in-law, whose first book had been on the troubled Border of Northern Ireland. But he had gained even greater status by abandoning the academic gravy train in order to dedicate himself to the organisation of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. I murmured something about secular saints which was politely ignored. For his wife Helen was another source of immense pride. On retiring from running the British parliament, in black robes and a hair whig, she was invited to visit other elected chambers and share her knowledge about the pragmatic details, such as how to set up select committees, how to take evidence and how to write it up in reports. And Robert was allowed to come along on some of these travels with a sense of purpose, as her plus one. And he had learned something very important from his father, which was to enjoy swimming and to enjoy lying completely idle beside a swimming pool. I agreed that was a useful skill to inherit.
Does this all add up? Not quite yet. Robert only wrote one factual memoir, which avoids any mention of his boarding schools or his time at Merton College Oxford or his family but chronicles his years as a highly impressionable student between 1964 and 1967. In this period he travelled across Europe every summer for three years to Mostaganem, on the northern coast of Algeria (just east of Oran) to attend a residential zaouia. At this place he formally converted to Islam, He learned to recite the Arabic of the Koran as a living revelation, not as a dry manuscript to be annotated. He learned to dance, or circle for the love of God, like St Francis of Assissi and the Mevlevi dervishes. It is the period before he met and fell in love with his wife Helen, and before he met his lifelong friend Hugh Kennedy ( who would rise to become Professor of Arabic at SOAS), so neither of these two intimates, feel able to comment on these years, or the how and the why that allowed him to identify as a Muslim for the rest of his life. I can remember hearing the intensity of this belief on just one occasion, which left me in no doubt that he believed in free will, and that his actions on this earth were vital choices, and that at some stage he would be called to account for them. Maybe a neo-Platonist could have said much the same thing in ancient Athens, the vital need to strive for knowledge in this life as the truest act of worship that an intelligent man can express from his gifts.
Memoirs of a Dervish is a fascinating and revealing but also confusing book. It is personal map of youthful experience, with no space for the historian. So there is no mention of the complexities of Algerian history, which had in 1962 emerged from an intense and savage War of National Liberation that in eight years had killed at least 400,000 Algerians to the loss of 26,000 French servicemen. The existence of this zaouia, freely welcoming naïve inquiring westerners to its assemblies, after such a brutal national experience, is therefore even more extraordinary. Esther Freud’s novel, Hideous Kinky, observes this same community, albeit through the eyes of a young daughter, accompanying her mother across Morocco in order to reach the zaouia at Mostaganem. The Alawiyya brotherhood had been founded during the strongest and most intense period of French rule in Algeria, by Ahmed Al Alawi, 1869-1934 who combined an easy going tolerance of his Christian neighbours (“if only they would abandon the concept of the trinity and the incarnation there would be no difference between us”) with suspicion of what the slow creeping spread of western secularism would do to the strengths of traditional society. So he was both easy going with European languages and its peoples, but intensely proud of his North African heritage: his clothing, his poverty, his virtual illiteracy and the fifteen-year traditional apprenticeship in learning that he received from his teacher, a sheikh of the Darkawi. As part of this confident yet tolerant heritage, the brotherhood opened branches in France for Algerians working in France, and tried to support the last Caliph-Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
Robert Irwin has written elsewhere on all these historical matters, which left him free in his own youthful memoir, to quote from my own published review:
“to dwell on a lifetime of reading, selective drug-taking, chanting, eastern travel and dancing, all undertaken in the search for God. Or at least the God within us, for Irwin is both sincere in his quest and like all true searchers also terrified of the final encounter. At one moment he reflects that ‘believing one is in love with the Invisible…was perhaps, like falling in love with a girl whom one has never seen” and yet two sentences later he speculates that ‘the mystic union between man and God was horrific and obscene, like copulation between a man and a shark.”
Yet when Irwin was a disciple of the dervish community at Mostaganem he soon got used to everyday visions, but as his teacher warns him “if you see a miracle, let it pass like a train before you…and continue on the Road.” Similarly, Irwin would later learn that the physical ecstasy of the mystical circular dances of the brotherhood (the Imara) was not an end in itself but a door opening in the search for purity and peace. The process could be likened to both a war dance and an instance of possession - where ‘It was as if something vast, alien and dispassionate was reaching into the heart of me to take me over’.
Irwin was a welcome guest at Mostaganem, though he makes it clear that he was never completely trusted by the Shaykh. This is in refreshing contrast to the vast majority of spiritual memoirs that I have worked my way through, whose overriding purpose is to raise the spiritual authority of the author.
Another surprising element of Memoirs of a Dervish is that it is consistently funny about the mystical search by westerners. The text bristles with brilliantly re-imagined comic scenes: the whispered aside that punctuates the theatrical but false solemnity of a pagan ritual, the horrors of being appraised during a naked encounter group or the babble of seasonal nonsense at a hippy poetry convention. He is also cruelly accurate with self-mockery, be it the opening line: “It was in my first year at Oxford that I decided I wanted to be a Muslim saint” or depicting himself, “I was pale and thin and my hands shook from unfocused intensity."
Irwin is also receptively alive to the other world outside the closed meeting halls of the gurus. The impact of the Velvet Underground, the merits of Donovan versus Dylan, the Sufi origins of Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’, or the redemptive power of the film ‘If”, are all treated not as the disposable scum of pop culture, but important enough to be put beside such key influences as John Fowles’s The Magus or J.D.Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. But in the process, he also introduces you to more gurus, sheikhs, spiritual movements and masters than is good for either your sanity or cheque-book. Most are revealed to be exploitative charlatans, on the Scientology scale of worthlessness. Others such as R.D. Laing and the School of Economic Science are given savagely short shrift. The claims of the latter to teach philosophy are described as ‘sub-occult tripe from Ouspensky’. P.J. Bennet and Schuon are also dissected ruthlessly but you are at least left with some respect for their original integrity, even if it was later occluded by egocentric madness. Others, like an old lecturer at Oxford, John Aiken, is affectionately assessed as ‘a walking encyclopedia of dodgy knowledge.” Fortunately there are a few magnificent, if deeply flawed, characters amongst this circus of intellects and Islamic-inclined God searchers whose work remains useful: Bernard Lewis before his Neo-Con apotheosis, his successor at SOAS, the American-born John Wansbrough (judged ‘one of the most remarkable men I have ever met’) and the Ottoman emigre and scholar of Ibn Arabi, Ali Bulent and a reticent scholar of manuscripts at the British Library, Martin Lings.
Irwin never turns his potent invective on his teachers back at Mostaganem. If there is a single heroic figure in Memoirs of a Dervish, it is Abdullah Faid, a Breton sailor long converted to Islam, a long-term resident of the Sufi zaouia in Mostagenam, who acts as a sort of spiritual assistant to the ruling Shaykh - especially when it comes to greeting and instructing visiting westerners. The sad tale of how he and his master would be treated, first as dissidents, then as potential traitors, by the Algerian Ministry of the Interior is like a dark shadow that grows into a true horror story.”
The importance of this period on the lifelong creative imagination of Robert Irwin is clear, even if the details are opaque. As we are often warned, “be careful what you show an eighteen year old mind”. Or let us be grateful, that the summer holidays from Cambridge tramping across central Asia helped inspire William Dalrymple, as it did Patrick Leigh Fermor charming his way across pre-war Middle Europe, or Robert Irwin dedicating his student summer holidays to a Sufi confraternity in western Algeria.