Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (died 8 December 1986), also known as Bawa, was a Tamil-speaking teacher and Sufi mystic from Sri Lanka who came to the United States in 1971, established a following, and founded the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship in Philadelphia.¹ The German Wikipedia article describes him as a Sufi saint from Sri Lanka, born around 1900.²

Little is known of his early personal life; his public career began in Sri Lanka in the early 1940s, when he emerged from the jungles near Kataragama and met pilgrims visiting shrines.¹ He spent time at Jailani, a cliff shrine dedicated to Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, an association that links him to the Qadiri order of Sufism.¹ Many of his followers around Jaffna were Hindus who addressed him as swami or guru, and he worked there as a medical and spiritual faith healer; his followers then formed an ashram in Jaffna and a farm south of the city.¹ Invited to Colombo, he saw the Serendib Sufi Study Circle formed there by 1967, and the "God's house" he had founded at Mankumban in 1955 was completed by visiting American students and opened in 1975.¹

In 1971 Bawa was invited to the United States and moved to Philadelphia, where he formed the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship in 1973; its meeting house offered weekly public gatherings.¹ During the Iranian hostage crisis of 1978–1980 he wrote letters to world leaders encouraging a peaceful resolution, and interviews with him appeared in Psychology Today, the Harvard Divinity Bulletin and American newspapers.¹ From 1971 to 1986 he authored over twenty-five books, created from over 10,000 hours of audio and video transcriptions of his discourses and songs, and he established vegetarianism as the norm for his followers.¹

Bawa died in Philadelphia on 8 December 1986.¹² The Mosque of Shaikh M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen had been completed on the fellowship's Philadelphia property in May 1984, built in six months largely by the fellowship's members under his direction.¹ His mausoleum, or mazar, stands at the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship Farm in Chester County near Coatesville; construction began shortly after his death and was completed in 1987, and it is a destination for his followers.¹ The fellowship has not appointed a new leader to replace his role as teacher and personal guide.¹

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