Irina Tweedie

Irina Tweedie was born in Russia on 20 April 1907. Revolution and exile made her a European of several countries; she married a British naval officer and, after his death, found herself a widow in mid-life with a mind that would not rest in ordinary consolation. In 1961 she went to India. In Kanpur she met Bhai Sahib — Radha Mohan Lal — a master of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi line. She had expected philosophy. She found a furnace.

For five years he trained her by methods that look, on the page, almost ordinary and, in the living of them, almost unbearable: waiting, longing, jealousy of the path, sudden warmth, sudden void, the stripping of every spiritual self-image. She kept a diary because he told her to. That diary became Daughter of Fire, one of the few Western records of a classical Sufi training written from inside the fire, by a woman, without decoration.

Bhai Sahib died in 1966. She returned to England and, after a long inner settlement, began to teach in London. The Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi current she carried is a silent one: the impression on the heart, the remembrance, the death of the person before physical death. She did not found a theatre. She sat with people and told the truth about what the path costs.

She died in England on 23 August 1999. The Golden Sufi work that followed — notably through Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee — continues that line. Her own instruction remains the diary’s: sit with what you actually feel, especially the ache you usually distract, and let the false furniture of ‘me’ burn.