Living branch · North Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania

The Rufai tekkes of the Balkans

In the Balkans the order is called Rufai (Albanian Rufai, Rifai). Here, unlike in Türkiye, Rifāʿī lodges kept their doors open through the twentieth century, and some still hold their weekly zikr and the great spring gathering of Sultan Nevruz.

I. Skopje, North Macedonia

The Rufai tekke of Skopje (Turkish Üsküp) was founded on 20 April 1818 by Şeyh Mehmet bin İsmail Efendi, called Baba İsmail, who bought a house and made it a lodge. His son Sadeddin Efendi built its fountain and entrance in 1848 and is buried in its tomb. Selçuk Kürşad Koca's 2025 study counts nine sheikhs in succession. The ninth, Şeyh Murtazan, took office on 22 March 2006, with his licence from Sheikh Mehdi of Rahovec in Kosovo. Koca calls it the only Rufai tekke still active in North Macedonia.

The tekke's year turns on two gatherings. At Sultan Nevruz on 21 March, kept since its founding, a 2024 report counted about five hundred guests and large circles of zikr. In Muharram, ten days of fasting end in cooking aşure, with sohbet, zikr and hymns. Visitors also come to the tombs to pray for healing and make vows, as at many Balkan shrines. The poet Yahya Kemal remembered Friday zikr so crowded that the women's galleries were full.

II. Kosovo: Gjakova, Rahovec, Prizren

Raif Virmiça, writing for the 2006 Turkish Historical Congress, counted eleven Rufai tekkes in Kosovo. The first and central one, the âsitâne of Gjakova (Yakova), was founded in the late nineteenth century by Şeyh Musa Efendi (1855–1917), who received his licence in Istanbul. His son Âdem Nuri (1896–1938), licensed in Istanbul, carried the order into Albania, as far as Shkodra. Virmiça found the Gjakova tekke active under Şeyh Masar, with zikr after Friday prayer and ten days of continuous zikr in Muharram.

Şeyh Cemali founded a second tekke at Rahovec (Orahovac) and later revived the order in Prizren, buying a house and gathering the scattered dervishes; an earlier Prizren tekke had closed when its sheikh fled to Albania. In the twentieth century Sheikh Jamālī Jamāladdīn of Prizren (d. 2004) held both the İzzeddînî line and, from 1976, the Sayyâdī line, and passed them to Chicago in 1999.

Prizren's Sultan Nevruz is public. In March 2015 the President of Kosovo visited the Rufai tekke for it. In March 2018 the Associated Press reported dervishes walking through the snow to the tekke under Sheikh Adri Hyseini, with chanting, swaying zikr and, at its height, the piercing of cheeks with long needles. Women watched from a balcony.

The piercing seen at Nevruz is the practice the tradition calls burhān, “proof”. It is described here as reported; this site does not present it as the heart of the path, nor as something to imitate. Not every tekke in Kosovo that pierces at Nevruz is Rifāʿī: the much-photographed ceremony in Gjakova in 2023 was in a Qādirī lodge.

III. Albania

The Rüfai tekke of Berat, also called the Sheikh Riza tekke, was built in the eighteenth century by Ahmet Kurt Pasha and is a listed Cultural Monument of Albania. Âdem Nuri's lodges in northern Albania are recorded in the Chicago community's history.