Robert Abdul Hayy Darr (spyoftheheart.com) has for forty years been a student of classical Islamic culture. In the 1970s he studied North Indian classical music at The Ali Akbar Khan School of Music in California. By the early 1980s he was studying Persian poetry with tutors. In 1987 he met Afghanistan’s poet laureate in exile, Ustad Khalilullah Khalili. This friendship led to Darr’s English translation of the poet’s quatrains in 1988.
In 1989 he began the study of Persian miniature painting with Ustad Homayon Etemadi, Afghanistan’s last court painter and royal librarian. Mr. Etemadi was also his tutor of Persian literature. Robert Darr spent nearly twenty years as the murid of the late Ustad Raz Mohammed Zaray, an Afghan Sufi poet who had immigrated to the United States.
The Spy of the Heart chronicles Robert Abdul's years of travels, many adventures, and imprisonment among Afghan warlords and tribes-people during the Soviet occupation just before the rise of the Taliban. This fascinating autobiographical traveloge, which presents a more positive view of Islam than currently represented in the Western pressor by the more literalist exponents of Islam, details the author’s spiritual search that led him ultimately to convert to Islam, but not without asking many questions about the purpose and problems inherent in adopting any religion.
Between 1985 and 1990, Darr, an American, was in and out of Afghanistan working with aid organizations delivering medicines and humanitarian aid to those affected by the war with the Soviet Union. He had already been a student of Islamic culture for more than a decade, with a particular interest in Sufism.
Eamen Hameed interviews
Robert on his background, experiences, and knowledge in this program.
