Death and the dervish

the long version

Death and the Dervish is a first-person narrative told from the point of view of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish at a Sarajevo monastery in the eighteenth century during the Turkish occupation. The spiritual leader of a group of Moslems, Sheikh Nuruddin has deliberately removed himself from the day-to-day activities of society. This distance is shattered, though, by the arrest of his brother. As Sheikh Nuruddin attempts to find out what has happened to his brother and to intervene on his behalf, he is drawn into the Kafkaesque world of the Turkish authorities. As he does so, he begins to question his relations with society as a whole and, eventually, his life choices in general. A literary masterpiece that was hugely successful when published in Yugoslavia in the 1960s, Death and the Dervish appears here in its first English translation.