Living branch · Türkiye, Bulgaria, North America
The circle of Kenan Rifâî today
The Istanbul circle of Kenan Rifâî (d. 1950) kept his path without a lodge. After the lodges were closed in 1925, it lived on in conversation, scholarship and cultural work, and since his death it has been led by women.
I. After 1950: teachers, not a tekke
After Kenan Rifâî's death the circle was led by the writer Sâmiha Ayverdi (d. 1993), and after her by Cemalnur Sargut. Ayverdi and her brother, the architect Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi, founded the Kubbealtı Academy in 1970. In 1966 she also founded the Turkish Women's Cultural Association, TÜRKKAD.
Cemalnur Sargut, born in Istanbul in 1952, trained as a chemical engineer and taught chemistry for twenty years. A student of Sâmiha Ayverdi, she began teaching the Masnavī to young people at Ayverdi's request when she was twenty-four. She has been president of TÜRKKAD since 2000.
II. How the circle works
The circle gives the path through sohbet — spiritual conversation — and through reading: the Qur'an, Rūmī's Masnavī and Ibn ʿArabī's Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam, with commentary drawing on Aḥmad al-Rifāʿī, ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī and others. It does not hold the public ceremonies of the traditional Rufâî lodges. From the 1970s some in Türkiye began to call those lodges “Rufâî” and this circle “Rifâî” to tell them apart.
Its public face is cultural and academic. TÜRKKAD and Sargut's circle held international symposia on Rūmī, Ibn ʿArabī, Shams-i Tabrīzī, Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī, Sultan Veled and others between 2005 and 2012. Sargut has lectured at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2000, and in 2009 she started an endowed chair in Islamic studies there. TÜRKKAD's activities list includes an international Kenan Rifâî symposium in Plovdiv, Bulgaria — where he grew up — on 5 June 2026. That event documents a Bulgarian connection, not a Rifāʿī lodge in Bulgaria.
“I think the guide can be neither a woman nor a man. They must be someone who has surpassed the gender.”
Women's leadership is central here. Scholars count this among the Turkish Sufi lines with flexible gender norms, which the circle traces to Kenan Rifâî's own teaching and to the women who formed him, beginning with his mother. Feyza Burak Adli's 2020 dissertation studies the network.
III. Toronto: the Rifai Order of Murat Coşkun
A second living line from Kenan Rifâî runs through his grandson Cemil Aksoy (d. 2018), who was raised under his teaching and came to Canada in the 1960s. In Toronto, Aksoy taught Murat Coşkun, who grew up in a Christian household in the Middle East and came to Canada at about sixteen. Saying that he held no licence to initiate, Aksoy sent Coşkun to Tosun Bayrak of the Jerrahī order for initiation.
“We trace this path from Kenan Rifai through the years to our Pir, Ahmed er-Rifai, through to our beloved light of guidance, Muhammad.”
Coşkun's community — the Rifai Order, also called the Canadian Institute of Sufi Studies — met in Toronto's west end for about a decade, first upstairs in a church and later in a space shared with a yoga studio. It holds zikr every two weeks, with music and sometimes turning; zikr and prayer are not divided by gender, and the gatherings are open to all faiths. It keeps Rūmī's urs each December and was building a permanent dargah outside the city with volunteer labour. Coşkun says he left the Jerrahīs over the separation of men and women in zikr, seeing himself as continuing work that Kenan Rifâî began.