DISAMBIGUATION:

• The titles Teacher and Acharya are the same thing. Acharya is a Sanskrit word and is the preferred title among those who want to use it.
  
  In Wayist tradition clergy typically write their names with a cross before or after their spiritual name

His father was a Turkish national, a Sufi of the Mevlevi Order. His mother was from an Armenian Christian house, she had lost all her family in the ethnic cleansing genocide. She was abducted by the killers and would have been sold in slavery had she not been rescued.

She suffered much abuse at the hands of the religious zealous because of her class, gender, and religious background. She was rescued by her husband, who then paid the great price of social outcast for that, and him being a mystic, a Sufi.

During the Turkish War of Independence (1919 to 1923), the Turkish Nationalist Movement carried out massacres and deportations in order to eliminate native Christian populations. They continued the Armenian genocide and other ethnic cleansing operations during World War I. +Yusa’s mother lost her family, and her innocence, during this time. Had it not been for the good heart of +Yusa’s father, a Turkish national, a Sufi, who took her in after rescuing her from an assault, and later married her, she would not exist.

In 1926, Teacher +Yusa’s father moved his family from Konya to Kurdistan to get away from the radical forms of Islam spreading in Turkey. His Sufi order, the Mevlevi, was banned by the newcomers, and he said it was time to move his family to safety. Konya was important to the family. It was home to the mysticism of the whirling dervishes, the Mevlevi mystics who had their main lodge in Konya. The poet and mystic, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi is buried in the main lodge in Konya, which is now a museum that draws upward of 2 million visitors per year.