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| Robert Darr | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1951 Orange County, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Robert Abdul Hayy Darr |
| Known for | Books on Sufism |
Robert Darr (born 1951 in Orange County, California), also known as Robert Abdul Hayy Darr, is the author of several books on Sufism.
Orange County is a county in the Los Angeles metropolitan area in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2010 census, the population was 3,010,232, making it the third-most populous county in California, the sixth-most populous in the United States, and more populous than 21 U.S. states. Its county seat is Santa Ana. It is the second most densely populated county in the state, behind San Francisco County. The county's four largest cities by population, Anaheim, Santa Ana, Irvine, and Huntington Beach, each have a population exceeding 200,000. Several of Orange County's cities are on the Pacific Ocean western coast, including Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Dana Point, and San Clemente.
Sufism, or Taṣawwuf, variously defined as "Islamic mysticism", "the inward dimension of Islam" or "the phenomenon of mysticism within Islam", is mysticism in Islam, "characterized ... [by particular] values, ritual practices, doctrines and institutions" which began very early in Islamic history and represents "the main manifestation and the most important and central crystallization of" mystical practice in Islam. Practitioners of Sufism have been referred to as "Sufis".
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A U.S. citizen and resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, Darr is a translator and interpreter of classic Islamic mystical texts. He was introduced to Sufism in the 1970s through the works of Idries Shah. By 1985 he left the Shah groups and began working in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan and making overland trips inside Afghanistan. There he befriended a number of Sufis in the region including Khalilullah Khalili. Darr spent the next couple of decades studying traditional Sufism along with specialized disciplines such as abjad (Islamic numerology). From 1988 to 1998, he studied miniature painting with Afghanistan's great miniaturist, Homayon Etemadi (died 2007). For almost two decades he was the student of the late Afghan Sufi, Raz Mohammed Zaray (died October 2010). Since 1996, Darr has been the director of the Arques School Of Traditional Boatbuilding in Sausalito, California.
San Francisco Bay is a shallow estuary in the US state of California. It is surrounded by a contiguous region known as the San Francisco Bay Area, and is dominated by the large cities of San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland.
Idries Shah, also known as Idris Shah, né Sayed Idries el-Hashimi and by the pen name Arkon Daraul, was an author and teacher in the Sufi tradition who wrote over three dozen books on topics ranging from psychology and spirituality to travelogues and culture studies.
Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the world’s sixth-most populous country with a population exceeding 212,742,631 people. In area, it is the 33rd-largest country, spanning 881,913 square kilometres. Pakistan has a 1,046-kilometre (650-mile) coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China in the far northeast. It is separated narrowly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in the northwest, and also shares a maritime border with Oman.
