Family Of Baba Haxhi Dede Reshat Bardhi

For fifteen years I have been the head of the worldwide movement of Bektashi. There are over seven million Bektashi in the world, including in the United States. Our sect derives from the Shia. We trace our heritage back to Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the prophet Mohammed.

We are the most liberal of Muslims. Our religious practices are in the language of the country where we live. Many of our rituals are secret. Ataturk expelled our order from Turkey in the early 1920s because we refused to take off our religious garb in public. It was then that we moved our center here to Tirana. All around us is the color green. This has been the color of our mosques for eight hundred years. Green is pure, peaceful and clean. It is the color of the earth.

At the time of the Nazi occupation the prime minister of Albania was Medi Frasheri. He was a member of the Bektashi. He refused to release the names of Jews to the Nazi occupiers. He organized an underground of all Bektashi to shelter all the Jews, both citizens and refugees. At that time nearly half of all Muslims in Albania were Bektashi. Prime Minister Frasheri gave a secret order: "All Jewish children will sleep with your children, all will eat the same food, all will live as one family."

We Bektashi see God everywhere, in everyone. God is in every pore and every cell, therefore all are God's children. There cannot be infidels. There cannot be discrimination. If one sees a good face one is seeing the face of God.

God is Beauty. Beauty is God. There is no God but God.