Mevlevi Sheikh Ibrahim Gamard was invited to write about his association with Mevlevi tradition as part of the celebration of the thirtieth year since the founding of the International Mevlana Foundation (Istanbul and Konya)
My Shefik Jan Story by Ibrahim Gamard, October 2026It was about the year 2000 and I was living in the beautiful California town of Pacific Grove with my wife, Sher, and our daughter, Marri. I was working with depressed elders in nursing facilities as a licensed Psychologist. Marri was close to finishing high school and "flying from the nest". Sher was writing a memoire about the earlier years of our marriage, when we were students of a brilliant transpersonal psychiatrist. Through his teachings, we became attracted to Sufism, especially me. I enjoyed visiting various Sufi groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly when they engaged in group devotional chanting [zikr--remembrance of God]. I felt the strongest spiritual connection to the Mevlevi Sufi tradition which included studying the mystical poetry of Rumi and participating in zikr and "whirling.dervish" gatherings. I did not have the guidance of a Mevlevi sheikh, despite the fact that the only authorized Mevlevi sheikh in the United States, Kabir Helminski, lived in Watsonville, California: south of Santa Cruz and only forty miles from my home.
Shefik Jan had been famous in Turkey for translating Rumi's works into Turkish. Now, I had been teaching myself to read Persian since about 1981. And in 1985, I met a scholar from Afghanistan, Ravan Farhadi. whose native language was Persian. That was when I began a very fruitful collaboration that lasted for many years. He turned out to be my teacher in medieval Persian.
Here's how that came about: I heard that there was a new professor of Persian Literature at UC Berkeley. I visited his office and showed him some of Rumi's quatrains that were written using Turkish letters. Dr. Farhadi wrote the quatrain using Persian letters and dictated their translations. Afterwards, he said to me: "Why don't we translate all of Rumi' s quatrains?" And so began an intense period of scholarship that lasted for twenty-two year (in our spare time), plus another three years of revisions for the second edition (2023). During this time Dr. Farhadi worked as the Afghan Ambassador to the United Nations and I worked as a Psychologist.
Many years later, I read somewhere that a Mevlevi Sheikh in his nineties named Shefik Jan from Istanbul was invited by Kabir Helminski to come to his Mevlevi center (the Threshold Society) in Watsonville, California--forty miles from my home. When I saw the name of Shefik Jan, I knew that I had to be there. (I had a fantasy of being denied acceptance and then coming to the door wearing my Mevlevi whirling dervish clothing and demanding to be admitted.) When I phoned, I was told that I could come as long as I participated in the daily programs and not only to have contact with Shefik Jan. I agreed. The first evening, I connected strongly with the Sheikh. I sang and recited some of Rumi's Persian verses, which I knew that he would know and enjoy hearing. You might say that I fell spiritually in love with the Sheikh. Shefik Jan had come with his wife, Sabahat hanim, and a young man named Najit, who came to assist and translate.
Unfortunately, the next day, the Sheikh had to be hospitalized for a severe bowel obstruction. I started going every the evening to see him in the Emergency Room (also about forty miles from my home). There, I led the Muslim prayer [namaaz] in his room, played Mevlevi music with my flute at his bedside, and read Persian verses from Mevlana Rumi’s works. It was then that I felt a strong wish to become the Sheikh's disciple. I told this to Najit. We prayed namaaz and did zikr chanting of the divine Name, "Allah" under a tree in the front yard of the hospital. Then we went to the Sheikh's room, where I knelt at the Sheikh's bedside, kissed his outstretched hand, and said in poor Turkish: "I wish to make a pledge [bey'at] to join the Mevlevi Path [tarikat]." Then Najit spoke my wish into the Sheikh's good ear and the Sheikh accepted it. After I returned home, I felt a special joy of being connected to generations of Mesnevi teachers down through the ages.
I decided to wait for divine guidance before visiting my Sheikh in Turkey (even though he was in his nineties). The guidance came four years later when Esin Chelebi Bayru (the twenty-second generation descendant of Mevlana Rumi and the sister of the President of the International Mevlana Foundation, Faruk Chelebi) her first visit to the US. She had been invited to California by a Mevlevi-affiliated universalist Sufi group. When I told her that I had taken hand with Shefik Can Efendi, she said: "I visit him every weekend. You must come to Istanbul and I will take you to his house." Soon after, in April 2004, I travelled to Istanbul and went with Esin hanim to Shefik Jan's house. The Shaykh remembered me and how I played my flute next to his hospital bed in California. He said (about me, translated): "He will go very fast." And then he looked at me with a spiritual gaze, commented on the light on my face, and said to the others (about me), "I see more than you can (referring to his spiritual senses), even though I can't see as well as you." Then Esin hanim asked the Sheikh's permission to take me to Konya and it was granted. We took a bus (together with a woman friend of Esin's) and saw the Sheikh's empty grave there. After returning to Istanbul, I told the Sheikh how blessed he was that his empty grave was so near to Hz. Mevlana's tomb. After hearing this, he became very happy and told his wife, Sabahat hanim, to go to the closet and give me his suit jacket, vest, and pants. He told me to put these on and they fit well. I then stood in front of the Sheikh, bowed, and whirled out of joy. The Sheikh also gave me another suit as well as a sweater that his mother had knitted for him. Esin hanim and Nur Artiran (who originally came to the Sheikh's house to assist him by gathering material for the books he was writing) were present. During another visit, the Sheikh gave me a signed copy of his translation into Turkish from Persian of Hz. Mevlana's complete quatrain poems [rubaiyat], published in 1991. This was significant because I had been teaching myself to read Persian since the early 1980's in order to understand Hz. Mevlana's teachings in the original language. And I had been gradually translating Mevlana's quatrains into English for many years. When I told the Sheikh that I would be returning to the US the next day, he said, "We will be connected, heart to heart." These were the last words that he said to me. Twelve days after I returned to the US, I received news that Shefik Jan had a major stroke. In September of that year, I returned to Istanbul and visited Shefik Can Efendi in his island home. It was unclear if the Sheikh remembered me, as he was not talking, but he signed his name in one of his books as a gift. He had a second stroke a couple of months later and passed away on January 23, 2005.
The next time that I travelled to Konya, I made several visits to Shefik Jan's grave where I felt strong emotions, prayed for him, and contemplated how his grave was now filled with his remains.
Recently, I travelled to Konya, Turkey where I attended a conference (in September 2026) that was a commemoration of thirty years since the beginning of the International Mevlana Foundation. A number of Western Mevlevi sheikhs were invited to give speeches. My speech had been translated into Turkish and was projected onto a screen above and behind me. When I spoke, I told about my affiliation with the Foundation, including how I met Sheikh Shefik Jan and became his disciple. Shefik Jan (who was well-known in Turkey for his translations of Mevlana Rumi's works into Turkish) would have been especially well-known to this audience. At one point, I stood up and slowly moved my hands down my chest. There followed an exquisite moment of "loud silence" during which a huge wave of emotions swept over the room. It felt like loud applause but without clapping or vocalizations--other than gasps of happy surprise as the audience realized that I was now wearing the suit that Shefik Jan gave to me twenty years before. I kissed the lapel (as I would a sacred garment in Mevlevi tradition). After enjoying the moment together with everyone, I sat down, continued to read most of my speech, and ended by singing the first five couplets of the Mesnevi, which was followed by tremendous applause. This was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life.
