Master · Istanbul

Kenan Rifâî

An Ottoman educator who received the Rifāʿī khilāfa in Medina, opened a lodge in his family's garden in Istanbul, and — after the lodges were closed in 1925 — kept the path alive in private conversation. His students, many of them women, carried it on.

I. Two first guides

Born in Thessaloniki, he grew up partly in Plovdiv (Filibe) with his grandfather. His mother, Hatice Cenan Hanım, was a disciple of Edhem Şâh of Plovdiv, an Uwaysī-Qādirī guide who held no lodge. She was her son's first guide and then entrusted him to her own sheikh; the sources say his spiritual character was formed by these two.

After the Galatasaray school he served as a teacher and director of education in Balıkesir, Adana, Manastır, Kosovo (Skopje) and Trabzon. In Manastır his guide left him as khalīfa before dying.

II. Medina and the Rifāʿī khilāfa

Offered the directorship of the state school in Medina, he answered that he would go even as a doorkeeper. In Medina, Sheikh of Sheikhs Hamza Rifâî, a descendant of Sayyid Ahmad al-Rifāʿī, gave him the khilāfa and ijāza of the Rifāʿī path.

III. The Ümmü Kenan lodge and after

After a second visit to Medina in 1908 he settled in Istanbul and began to guide disciples in the Ümmü Kenan lodge, built at his own expense in the garden of the family house at Hırka-i Şerif. When the lodges were closed by law in 1925 the building became the family home, and his teaching continued in sohbet for family and friends, recorded by his students Sâmiha Ayverdi and Semiha Cemal. He died on 7 July 1950 and is buried in an open tomb in the courtyard of the Merkez Efendi mosque.

IV. Works

• Rehber-i Sâlikîn — a treatise on the rules and courtesy of the path
• Tuhfe-i Kenan — about 340 ḥadīth and al-Būṣīrī's Burda, in verse translation, with ilahis
• Ahmed er-Rifâî — the fullest Turkish work on the Pîr, with fifty-two of his litanies
• İlâhiyyât-ı Kenan — his poems and the notation of some seventy-five ilahis
• A commentary on the first book of Rūmī's Mathnawī, compiled from his students' notes

V. The circle after him

Among his students were the dentist Server Hilmi Bey, the calligrapher Hattat Aziz Efendi, the philosophy teacher Semiha Cemal, the novelist Safiye Erol, the architect Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi and the writer Sâmiha Ayverdi. After 1950 the circle was led by women: Sâmiha Ayverdi, and after her Cemalnur Sargut. Sâmiha and Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi founded the Kubbealtı Academy in 1970.

The circle's openness to modern life, and its women teachers, are the subject of Atik's thesis and of Burak Adli's 2020 dissertation, which studies this network specifically.

His line also reached Canada. His grandson Cemil Aksoy (d. 2018), raised under his teaching, came to Canada in the 1960s; in Toronto he taught Murat Coşkun, now shaykh of the Rifai Order / Canadian Institute of Sufi Studies — a community with mixed-gender zikr and turning, open to people of every faith. Aksoy, saying he held no licence to initiate, sent Coşkun to Tosun Bayrak for that.

Statements about present-day leadership here come from a 2007 thesis and are dated accordingly. See Living tradition.