Craig “Ismail” Fenter: From the Priesthood to a Path He Found Rooted in Islam
Craig Victor Fenter grew up in a Catholic family in the United States. He entered seminary and, by his own account, spent about ten years serving as a priest and teaching religion. His life contained religious practice and learning, yet doctrinal questions and a sense of spiritual emptiness remained. Eventually he left both the priesthood and the church. Music gave him another vocation, but, he said, did not end the search.
In San Francisco in 2004, he met Esin Çelebi Bayru, a descendant of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Fenter later remembered telling her that he felt as though he were at the bottom of the ocean. In the exchange printed by Anadolu Agency, she replied that his search itself meant he had already found the beginning of the treasure, and invited him to Konya. The exchange is a later recollection, not a contemporaneous recording.
He accepted the invitation in December 2005, attended the Şeb-i Arus commemorations, and visited the Mevlana Museum. Fenter attributes a powerful inner experience to that visit, but his account did not stop at emotion. He began learning from Nadir Karnıbüyük and recorded Quranic passages and prayers to help him remember and understand them.
The decisive question became whether the path that had attracted him in Rumi’s poetry stood apart from Islam or led into it. He said he came to understand Rumi’s path as the path of the Prophet Muhammad. Admiration for a spiritual figure thus became, in his account, commitment to divine oneness and prophethood. He entered Islam in 2006 and took the name Ismail.
He returned to Konya year after year and later settled there. In February 2026, BBC World Service reporter Emily Wither met him there for an independent field interview. The episode presents the broad journey from former Christian minister, through spiritual searching and Rumi’s poetry, to Islam and the Mevlevi community. It corroborates his identity and general path without supplying an exact shahada date.
His story does not establish that literary attraction or a spiritual experience is sufficient by itself for a decision of faith. Its value lies in the movement he describes from attraction to learning, and from an open question to an understanding of how Rumi’s path related to Islam itself. The day, place and witnesses of his shahada have not been published and should not be reconstructed.
In Fenter’s account, the journey moved from a religious institution he had known for years to a search that would not accept emptiness, and then to study and decision. The decisive factor was not merely travelling to Konya, but the conclusion he said took root there: that the path he loved in Rumi returned to divine oneness and following the Prophet Muhammad.