Irina Tweedie was born in Russia and studied in Vienna and Paris. After the Second World War, she married a British naval officer, whose death in 1954 led her on a spiritual quest. Little did she know that her trip to India in 1959, at the age of fifty-two, would mysteriously lead her to a Sufi Master from the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiya Sufi Order, whom she called Bhai Sahib (Elder Brother).
This meeting set her upon a journey to the “heart of hearts,” the Sufi path of self-realization.
Irina Tweedie was the first Western woman to be trained in this ancient Sufi lineage.
Her teacher’s first request of her was to keep a diary of her spiritual training which became the book Daughter of Fire, the Diary of a Training with a Sufi Master. This diary spans five years, making it an amazing record of spiritual transformation.
After her teacher’s death in 1966, she returned to England where she started a Sufi meditation group in North London. Gradually groups spread throughout Europe and North America. Irina Tweedie retired in 1992 after having named Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee as her successor to continue her work and the work of this Sufi Lineage.
She passed away in 1999.
