All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (26 page)

In practice, however, Atatürk’s reforms would do far more than merely ‘modernise’ Turkey. Madrasas were shut down, Western clothing was enforced and the fez banned. The Latin alphabet was adopted over the arabic script of the past. For Sufis, their way of life was made illegal, their
tekkelerin
(convents) and
zâviyelerin
(lodges) shut down. The last Head of the Mevlevi Sufi order, founded by Rumi’s son, fled to Syria. It was a forced disenchantment of almost unparalleled severity.

Three quarters of a century later, Istanbul appears to be just the kind of Westernised city which Atatürk would have wanted. Some young women do wear the traditional Islamic headscarves but the majority favour designer jeans and cropped T-shirts. A toothed skyline of blocks and office towers vies for position with the minarets, the former making no pretence at local flavour, but merely following the new ‘international’ aesthetic. Even my inflight magazine boasted of the city’s modernity. ‘The Sapphire will be the tallest skyscraper in the Levant,’ the article informed me. Apartments with a view of the Bosporus, to be completed in 2009, will cost from $1.65 million to more than $6 million. ‘A brand new life is beginning . . .’

Some old traits remained, I was pleased to note. In Sultan Ahmet, the area that has grown up around the Blue Mosque, I found a guesthouse which appeared little changed since the 1960s. Back then, when the great turn East was in full spate, crowds of hippies poured into Istanbul en route for India and Nepal. Stumbling in a ganja-scented haze from their buses, they brought a touch of free-spiritedness to a still conservative city. They brought Beatles tapes and guitars, kaftans and blotters of LSD. But mainly, they came looking for the mystic East and the East, true to form, rose to meet them.

My guesthouse resembled the kind of place where Richard Burton would have felt at home: knee-deep in Oriental rugs, with snaking hookah pipes and lascivious Orientalist art on the walls. The information desk offered ‘traditional belly dancing shows’, visits to the hammam and the spice bazaar. Scowling out from beneath his F1 racing cap, Salik the manager found it difficult to keep awake most of the time. He played in a rock band after hours, he confided, and had a record deal in the offing. ‘What kind of music?’ I asked. ‘Groove metal or power groove,’ he said casually. ‘Pantera, White Zombie, Five Finger Death Punch.’

I spent a few days acclimatising. At first sight Istanbul seems closer to New York than New Delhi, its aspirations entirely American. Looking deeper, you see that the city presents a more honest face. Behind the global brand names, and the middle-class youth conspicuously consuming along the length of Istiklal Caddesi, lurks the older city, a sprawling maze of crumbling Ottoman architecture and urban poor. Out of a city of fifteen million, perhaps six million live in
gecekondus
: shanty houses built without permission, foundations or amenities. Largely populated by economic migrants from Anatolia, the
gecekondus
, I immediately felt, said a lot about today’s Istanbul. They were incomplete, neither from East nor West, and most of them looked the same. But amongst them, in the sight of a barrow of unwaxed lemons piled high, or a traditional
tükürüklü köfte
(a dish of meatballs with herbs), smoking over hot coals, one gains a whiff of the city that came before. Its foundations are not of stone but of memory, and its blood will keep on flowing as long as the stories remain alive.

It was amongst these stories that I hoped to find a way into Sufi culture. Turkish friends assured me that Sufis still existed, and if I looked hard enough it would not be difficult to find one of their
tekke
(dervish lodges). Although the laws are still in place, the government doesn’t waste too much time enforcing them.

Sufism, of course, existed in Turkey long before Rumi, or Mevlana (the Master), as he is more simply known in his homeland. But it was Rumi, according to legend, who first began the slow whirling dance that has become the most recognisable practice not merely of the Sufi movement, but of the mystical experience itself. According to legend, Rumi was reading poetry one day, and became so caught up in mystical ecstasy that he broke into a spontaneous whirling. Standing with his arms outstretched, eyes closed, and his long robe flowing in perfect circles, he continued for hours, utterly absorbed in the divine flow.

After Rumi’s death, his followers began to practise and systematise the whirling method espoused by their master. And so the whirling dervishes were born and with them a whole culture of rituals, symbolic dress and music. A version of this whirling is still visible in many Turkish towns, principally as a tourist attraction, a kind of spiritual ballet. But whether these performers are real Sufis, or merely out-of-work dancers happy to spin for a few euros, is debatable.

‘What about this performance at Sirkeci train station I’ve seen advertised?’ I asked Mehmet, a local journalist, recommended to me as one of Istanbul’s most knowledgeable and irascible sons. We were meeting in a
kahvehane
, a traditional Turkish coffee shop that served a superb medium roast with cardamom. Around us, the hum of conversation was punctuated by the occasional shout, as one acquaintance after another hailed Mehmet loudly from across the room.

Mehmet’s face, impressively craggy and with a lustrous moustache that drooped ponderously from his upper lip, creased unhappily. ‘My God. These are not Sufis. They are not trained. This is a circus show.’

‘But surely, if the government realises the value of dervish performances as a tourist draw, they would do it authentically?’

‘Authentically!’ he snorted. ‘They do not care about anything but this.’ Mehmet rubbed the finger and thumb of his right hand together. ‘Turkey is about money now. Not Allah.’

‘What can you tell me about Sufism as it persists now, since Atatürk?’

He sipped his coffee appreciatively, the cup comically small within his giant’s hand. ‘It is here. But it is not on the surface. Atatürk created something called the Ministry of Government Affairs to run the mosques – some 75,000 of them in Turkey – so he could monitor what was going on. He was afraid of the mullahs, of course. Afraid of the power of Islam. But the Sufis do not bow down to the state. Where they exist now, it is in private. Groups of like minds who see that . . .’ his voice grew sober, ‘the affairs of this world, as the Koran says, are but a sport and a pastime compared to the one beyond.’

‘Compared to what there was, would you say there’s a healthy Sufi community in Turkey?’

He shook his head. ‘No, no. Things began to change in 1980, with the election of Turgut Özal to Prime Minister. He was a Naqshabandi Sufi, although politically it was difficult for him to admit it. Under him, Sufism began to re-emerge, at least in the sense that it was not overtly clamped down upon. But still, there are now a mere
handful
of
tekkes
. Before Atatürk there were probably thousands. Even
if
the practices remain, what has been lost is the Sufi culture: the architecture, calligraphy, music. These represented the highest achievements of Ottoman civilisation. Like much in this Istanbul . . .’ he motioned disdainfully towards the rooftops, ‘we’ve forgotten the things which made us. We’re orphans, I think. The orphans of history.’

That afternoon I wandered around the city. In places the last magenta blooms of the Judas trees were visible, astonishing against the grey-blue waters of the Bosporus. According to legend, the flowers of the Judas tree (European redbud) were once a pure white. After Judas Iscariot hung himself from its branches, the leaves turned colour out of shame.

As with any new city, one watches at first through the veil of expectation. A thousand writers before me had conjured a city of pungent spices,
loukoum
(Turkish delight), covered bazaars and bright ceramics, the evidence of which I was looking for to confirm my psychic ‘arrival’. But gradually, discovering the city on my own terms, through many hours of walking, a real destination became apparent.

From the harbour of the Bay of Bebek, I watched gargantuan oil tankers gliding into the Bosporus. At 17 miles long and just 700 yards wide at its narrowest point, this has been one of the world’s most strategic waterways for millennia. It is said that Jason and his Argonauts passed through here on their search for the Golden Fleece. Today’s prize, of course, is more prosaic. With vast oil reserves discovered under the nearby Caspian sea, oil is the twenty-first-century fleece, and the 50,000 commercial vessels that pass annually through the Bosporus are largely given over to its transport. Ecologists (and mere lovers of Istanbul) are united in condemning the sheer volume of this traffic (some of which stands as big as three football fields laid end to end) because of the danger of transporting such vast quantities of oil through the middle of a city. There seemed something glaringly symbolic about all this: East and West split by a waterway, through which oil moved like some relentless intravenous liquid.

As evening fell, I visited the tomb of Eyup Sultan, Mohammed’s standard bearer, whose mosque is one of the holiest pilgrimage sites in the Islamic world. As with Nizammudin in Delhi, a mere visit to the tomb is believed to bring benedictions upon the faithful, not least because of a stone said to bear the footprint of the Prophet himself. Similarly, to be buried in the vicinity of the saint is auspicious, and the area now boasts one of the most exquisite cemeteries in the Islamic world. How often, I reflected, I seem to find myself in cemeteries. They’re places not merely for the bereaved, but for those seeking refuge as well. Inside them are flowers, even in neighbourhoods shorn of almost all natural flora. And on the tombstones, stories of the past, mementoes of lives brief and protracted, like guidebooks for those of us who remain.

Wandering quietly amongst the lichen-clad stelae, I found a perfect place to appreciate the past. Here was pristine spring air. Smells of wet grass. To the edge of my field of vision, an old man wearing a skullcap laid saffron yellow tulips on a grave. In the distance, the sound of fog horns. Birds in flight. Nearest the mosque, the tombstones, reflecting centuries of Ottoman culture, watched the city rise and fall through a screen of cypress trees. The men’s tombs were often crowned with a turban, depicting their rank and status, while the women’s bloomed with intricate carved flowers. A third type denoted the resting places of Sufis. Above them, renderings of their characteristic felt hats protruded above the ancient stone, some of them carved with
gul
– rosettes depicting the specific Sufi order. Some lines of Rumi came to me, unbidden.

I died a mineral, and became a plant.

I died a plant and rose an animal.

I died an animal and I was man.

Why should I fear

When was I less by dying.

Later that week, I visited Istanbul’s Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, housed in the former palace of the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha. Here, amongst the relics of the Ottoman world, the years turned back and I walked, entranced, amongst the ceramics, textiles, jewellery and metalwork of a great civilisation. Most striking of all, however, was the calligraphy. Due to the Koranic injunction on depicting God (or his Prophet) in any form, calligraphy replaces painting and sculpture as the principal decorative form of Islamic art. For Muslims, copying the Koran is an act of piety in its own right, and the Arabic language revered as the chosen vehicle by which Allah imparted his message to Mohammed. But from within these seemingly tight strictures, incredible creativity and expressiveness emerges. Even without understanding the meaning, one is struck by the gravity and visual impact of these scripts. Certain of them exhibit something more: an idea of divinity beyond the boundaries of representative art, a transcendent grace.

Observing these masterpieces, trapped in their airless vitrines, I felt a pang of loss for a culture I had scarcely known until now. By banning the Arabic lettering, Atatürk felt that he was bringing his country into the present. (It is said the new alphabet, a modified version of Latin, was presented to him on a tablet of gold.) But the true cost of his actions was monstrous: one of the richest calligraphic traditions in human history was cast aside, and with it, the long genealogies of different calligraphers, the legends and fables and the schools where the very application of ink on paper was seen as a method of reaching God. (My own spidery handwriting, with which I’d been making notes throughout the morning, looked immeasurably superficial by comparison.)

After several hours I took the winding stairs to the second floor for my meeting with Dr Mahmud Erol Kilic, the museum’s director. More than the museum’s collection, I hoped that it would be he who could open a door on to the lost Sufi culture. Professor of Sufism at Istanbul University, he’s also one of the world’s foremost scholars on Ibn Arabi, a Sufi philosopher who espoused an idea of mystical unity not dissimilar to Rumi’s own.