(Chapter Eight) Aisha was the Self-Appointed Director of Recruitment Services/Publishing Services

 It started from the earliest days of our marriage.  Aisha contacted members of other Sufi groups--notably the followers of Sufism Reoriented, who in turn were disciples of the Sufi/Hindu Godman Meher Baba, who was very much in vogue in the mid-Sixties as the 'Silent Avatar' who had renounced speaking and combinated thru a combination of gestures and a Ouiiji Board where he would spell out difficult words.

There were also still remnants of Murshid 'Sufi Sam' Lewis and the San Francisco Sufi Choir who performed their Dances of Peace in the Bay Area and had a large ashram in a Victorian home in downtown San Rafael.

Aisha would make overtures to many and would occasionally invite them to come to our home and become students of Sidi's 'Subjects' by copying them out into notebooks the same way all of us had in Jerusalem.

She would also press the new 'student' to speak with Sidi and, if offered, to 'take his hand' as a disciple. And if it all came to pass, she seemed to regard it as a kind of triumphal moment.

On more than one occasion, it backfired.  I remember one male 'newcomer' bursting out of a`session' with her in tears, wailing, "But I thought you loved Me for who I WAS!"

In other words, he felt somehow mislead by her.  I wondered about the incident.  But the fellow was soon gone and forgotten.

Still, it was an example of Aisha's idealized REAL job as a disseminator of Sidi's Teaching and Practice.

And when it became a reality that Sidi was to start lecturing in America,  I believe she saw herself less and less a 'mere' wife and mother and more an authority and teacher as one of Sidi's ealiest and certainly most devoted students.

Sometimes I think that was why she wanted me to take up a second wife--so she could devote herself more fully to travelling with or for Sidi around the world.

Unfortunately for her, because she didn't have Arabic the way Sidi needed his translator to have, nor was she temperamentally provided with worldly charm or medical qualifications, as some of Sidi's more recent followers were. She had to satisfy herself with a more obscure, though I am sure, impressive to many, the role of being 'chosen' to publish Sidi's books. (Not that there was a formal proceedure for this.  She more-or-less just took it on.  And she did have the advantage of being able to ask Sidi's sons for the meanings and/or contexts of certain Arabic words Sidi would use.  Which would support her ascention to the job.  And, as well, the well-produced final products bore witness to her careful attention to accuracy.