Early in A Poet of the Invisible World, the recent novel by Michael Golding ’80, the young protagonist, Nouri, is shaken awake, swept up in the clattering movement of the busy fictional city Tan-Arzhan in thirteenth-century Persia. Nouri, an orphan, recently has begun lessons with a Sufi master—the benevolent Sheikh Bailiri—whose small order offered him shelter when he was just a foundling.