Photo of Guru Sheikh M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen in Philadelphia during the 1970s courtesy of the Fellowship Press. Photo of my dad and me from a super-8 reel that my mom shot around the same time.
In 2015 I made this piece for a sound production course with WHYY reporter Elisabeth Perez-Luna. During the first week of the class, my dad had a heart attack. I went to visit and cook for him during his recovery. He asked me what I was working on, and then began talking about his own experience delving into sound production at the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship, a Sufi centre in Philadelphia where he and I lived during parts of my childhood. So I pulled out my phone, recorded an hour of his stories, and brought this piece to class a few days later.
Oud music at the start is by Hamza El Din, a Sufi musician from Nubia who was affiliated with the Fellowship. Vocal music is by Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a recording negotiated by my dad with Moses Asch for Folkways Records. The voices of Dr. Carroll Nash and Bawa Muhaiyaddeen,.with Dr. M.Z. Markar translating, are from a1973 archival tape (full transcript here).The sole current-day voice in “My Dad & His Guru” is that of Patrick Andrews, whose voice sounds a lot like mine.
A note about my own name: “Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews” means “Morgan, son of Patrick Andrews.” It’s a name that celebrates a patrilineal Scots-Irish heritage, but conceals German, Jewish, Arabic and Indian names elsewhere in my family—names that I intend to explore in a future project…