All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (25 page)

I couldn’t help smiling. ‘So you are a miracle worker.’

The
pir
tilted his head and, yes, there was just the faintest hint of a grin. ‘God is the miracle, young man. I am the vessel. It is simple.’

We fell silent for a time, the
pir
accepting a glass of sweet black tea, which he cradled in his hands, blowing on its surface with puckered lips. When his glass was empty, he held out his hands towards me.

‘You are a scholar, yes? You are interested in all religions. But there is another reason you have come to see me.’

I reached forward and put my hands in his, pulling my stool closer. This wasn’t the first time on my journey that someone had shown unusual insight in ascertaining my true motivation.

‘There is,’ I admitted, ‘another reason. I’m searching for something, even if I’m not exactly sure what that is. Somehow I keep searching, moving from place to place. I can’t seem to stop.’

The old man adjusted his shawl about him, and reached out his hands. I was transfixed by them: they seemed longer than any pianist’s. ‘
Acha
. This is quite common, actually. God puts this current in us. He turns it up until we have no choice but to see Him.’

I closed my eyes. The old
pir
was very close to me now, and he put his hands out to touch my face. He traced his fingers across my cheekbones, my eyelids and forehead; his skin was as soft as a child’s. Finally his hands came to rest on the crown of my head, where they spread out a little. I heard him take a deep breath and then sigh.

‘It is good you are here,’ he muttered. ‘All will be well. Don’t worry.’

Kneeling there, my mind tensed in expectation, I felt a sense of déjà vu. Several times now, I’d stood before some holy man or woman, waiting for some spellbinding act that would change everything. Now, for the first time, I rid myself of expectation. As Yogi Raj had told me, answers would never come in the form of rational knowledge.

In that instant a warm heat began to pulse across my crown. For a second my mind began to ripple with surprise, and then it quietened. I felt a great slackening of pressure, and a sense of a wise awareness passing through me. It was like an electric current travelling through circuits, or a warm liquid flushing out a blocked-up drain. Above me I could hear him chanting faintly, and as I glanced up I could see his withered lips moving, the betel-stained teeth, his eyes firmly closed.

This went on for some time. I felt calm and at peace. For a time there were no questions, no thought processes at all. It bore resemblance to the stillness I’d experienced in Ramana Maharshi’s cave, and the euphoria of the rumbling
om
s echoing out over Arunachala hill. An amazing awareness of the old
pir
’s kindness shook me forcibly. Perhaps he really was a saint?

‘There are no djinns,’ he said at last, snapping me from my reverie. ‘But I feel something. Tell me what you see in your dreams.’

I blinked a little, still uncertain what he had just done. Something very unusual had just happened. ‘I remember them in the second after I wake up,’ I said eventually. ‘And then they vanish.’

‘You must write them down. Dreams are messages from God.’

‘If it’s not a djinn, what could the problem be?’

He shrugged. ‘I do not deal in specifics. I deal in cures. Blockage is there, yes. But I have cleared it. Problems will be dissipating in no time.’

Then it was over. He sat back upright, and removed his hands from my head. For a time I forgot to move. What had occurred was not visually spectacular in the way of the Ladakhi oracle, and yet I was filled with euphoria, a sense of having been touched by some kind of grace. I’d
invited
him to heal me and so there was no sense of violation, and yet I felt as if another person had accessed my innermost thoughts and perceptions.

‘Now I will write you a
taweez
.’

‘It’s an amulet,’ said Wasi, who had been observing courteously until this point. ‘Hadji Abdul Shah will write some sacred symbols on a piece of paper, and then place them in an amulet.’

‘I write verses from the Koran,’ corrected the
pir
. ‘A verse that is specific to you. We believe that the Koran itself is medicine. It leads us to the truth. It can protect us from djinns. It keeps us safe.’

One of the grandsons brought some paper and a pen to the old
pir
, who scribbled briefly before the paper was cut with a pair of tailor’s scissors and folded tightly. From a battered-looking box, a dun metal amulet was taken, and the paper inserted. Then it was tied to a black leather cord and presented to me.

‘Let me pay for this,’ I began.

The
pir
wheezed with delight. ‘We will not accept. We are glad you have come here today. But young man, there is something I must add. All around you is the water, and yet you try to analyse it without getting wet. This is a common problem these days. But you are a
particularly
bad case. Reach forward and drink!
Then
your life will be complete. That is all I have to say.’

He got up to go, his grandsons reaching forward to steady him. Unexpectedly, I found tears in my eyes.

‘Don’t worry,’ whispered the
pir
in parting, again displaying that strange habit of staring right at me, even though his eyes remained blank. ‘God is with you.’

It would be flippant of me to say that
all
was well after the meeting, and yet undeniably, something had shifted. I felt light and relaxed, and my sleep that night was as deep and restorative as any I’d known in years. And yet the next morning, as I ate my breakfast chapattis overlooking the Delhi skyline, I found my mind struggling to rationalise the experience. Perhaps it was merely the old
pir
’s gravitas which had got to me, or the sense of having received the advice of a wise elder? Perhaps it was the rituals which comforted, and not the treatment itself?

Even as this process of rationalisation unfolded, I was watching it happen. Would I ever escape this need to break
everything
down into its component parts? Wasn’t it possible merely to accept the facts as I felt them in my own body: that I felt healthier, more serene than I had done in months? (Freud himself declared that there are many ways of practising psychotherapy, and all that lead to recovery are good.)

After a convivial afternoon at the house of my photographer friend Ammar, I prepared to return to Nizammudin for that evening’s
qawwali
session. Although the more commonly known practices of mystical experience include meditation and yoga, such things take years of practice and yield results only over time. Devotional practices, of which
qawwali
is one, tap into the innate power of music to transport the listener to a similar place. They require nothing more than one’s full attention and a wholehearted desire to participate.

‘It will be very crowded tonight,’ warned Ammar, a long-time attendant at
qawwali
sessions. ‘Actually, it will be mayhem. But in this chaotic state, with everyone swaying to the music, the Sufis believe that one can enter a state called
wajad
– a blissful state that purifies the devotee from sins.’

Drawing close to the shrine a few hours later, I could see that he hadn’t been exaggerating. At the best of times these narrow lanes seem busy, but this evening they were distended with humanity. The vendors of rose petals were doing a roaring trade, the smoke from cooking fires was dispersing the scent of oily meat and the beggar children were darting this way and that, tugging at any empty hand for a few rupees.

‘Not just Muslims,’ shouted Ammar above the noise. ‘Hindus, Christians, Parsis, Jains. All faiths come here on a Thursday night. Perhaps there’s hope for India yet!’

As we drew close to the tomb itself, the prayers were just finishing. Every inch of the courtyard was packed with bodies, some people standing, others sitting cross-legged. Before the tomb entrance I could make out the musicians from the family of Nizami Khusro Bandhu, who have been leading the
qawwali
at Nizammudin for 750 years.

The music began at last. The plaintive voice of the senior singer, Ustad Meraj, cut the night air, soon added to by the other singers. To the reedy sound of a harmonium, accompanied by
tabla
,
dholak
(a classical Indian drum) and the innumerable hand claps of the devotees, he began a lament that, far outside the realms of language, seemed unbearably moving and profound.

Mein to naam japu Ali ka

Ali-Ali se mera vaasta

Ali-Ali mera maula . . .

Within minutes the entire crowd of listeners was rapt, trapped upon the knife edge of the music, rising and falling with every breath of the musicians. By the third song, all sense of my own personal identity was disappearing. Clapping along with several hundred others, I was travelling along a song-line through our common humanity, at one with the musicians as their hands sliced the air. With each song lasting twenty minutes or more, each
qawwal
was like an extended prayer, with our individuality, our aspirations and our darkest fears suddenly subsumed into a greater presence.

The night passed quickly, with that sense of time stopping which comes only when the rational mind ceases to function. A casual observer might have supposed the crowd gripped by some momentary madness or distasteful fervour, but it was anything but that. Sufi music seems to confirm the importance mystics place on ‘opening the heart’, for in its mysterious flow a powerful and all-encompassing love sweeps one up.

Towards the end of the evening, I came to for a brief instant, as if from the eye of the storm, blinking around me. This journey was taking me to places I would never have believed possible, I thought. If someone had told me a year ago that I would be crammed into a Sufi
dargah
in the middle of Delhi, so filled with life, I would never have believed them. The world once again had spun upon its axis – who knew where it would spin next?

Within a few weeks, although I didn’t know it just then, it would spin away from India altogether. Receiving the opportunity to write a travel article about Turkey, I suddenly saw the chance to continue my research into Sufism, and more specifically into the life of Jalalludin Rumi, the poet who had so gripped my imagination. To date I had seen
sadhus
, tantrics, an oracle and a Muslim
pir
during my time in India. But there was one thing I couldn’t find here, a form of mystical experience that required neither sitting nor singing, but a kind of dance: a dance which was said to take one into the realms of ecstasy. Illegal since the time of Atatürk, this mystical practice is now an underground one in Turkey. But with persistence, and a little luck, I hoped I might still find dervishes spinning their way to God.

In Search of the Whirling Dervishes

LAW
677

Which prohibits and abolishes the profession of tomb-keeping, the assigning of mystical names, and the opening of tekkes (dervish lodges), zaviyes (central dervish lodges), and tombs.

13 December 1925 (1341 H.)

Quoted in Shems Friedlander,
Rumi and the Whirling Dervishes

Late spring in Istanbul. Pale skies and a sharp, restless wind. I stood, quite literally, between East and West. Divided by the Bosporus, a waterway connecting the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, Istanbul both connects and separates Europe and Asia. It is, in fact, the only city in the world spanning two continents.

All of which seemed fitting for my own reasons for visiting. I was here to learn more about Sufism, and to see what evidence of it – if any – remained in the country of Rumi’s birth. For although Turkey was the place where the great mystic lived and died, and his image is still used in the glossy pamphlets of the tourist board, the practice of Sufism is illegal in Turkey, punishable by imprisonment. While the rest of the world is experiencing an unparalleled mystical resurgence, Turkey, it seems, harbours old grudges still.

I’d come to Turkey to find out more of the poet’s story. He’d lived much of his life in Konya, in the south-central Anatolian steppe. After his death, the Ottoman Empire ruled his homeland for 600 years, sustained and inspired by the Sunni branch of Islam. And yet in 1925, army officer and statesman Mustafa Kemal Atatürk made Turkey a secular state. Atatürk believed Turkey needed to Westernise, both politically and culturally, if it was to modernise.