Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen was a Sri Lankan Sufi mystic who taught Hindu, Muslim, and Christian students. In the 1940s, some pilgrims encountered him as an old man in a forest and invited him to their village, where he began attracting students. Later, he met a Westerner who brought him to Philadelphia in 1971. In 1973, a group of Guru Bawa’s Philadelphia students formed the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship; the mosque they built together has operated since 1984, and fellowship groups were also established in Sri Lanka, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Guru Bawa wrote 25 books and recorded 10,000 hours of video and audio. Although very little is known about his background, it is believed that he was well over 100 years old when he died in 1986.
