All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (28 page)

‘Listen to how the reed complains,’ he wrote. ‘It is telling a tale of separation.’

Slowly, the dervishes began to walk around the hall, stopping to bow reverently to one another. Then, after the third circle, they returned to their posts, bowed again to the master and, in one fluid motion, threw off their black cloaks to leave only pure white robes. According to Sufi lore, this is a symbolic departure from their shrouds, leaving their worldly existence behind. They stood in the gesture called an
alif
: both arms crossed so that each hand rests upon its opposite shoulder.

Now, as the musicians began to play, the whirling began. Unfolding their arms, the dervishes held their right hands upwards towards Allah, their left tilted to the earth. What followed was essentially a spinning dance, but with one foot anchored to the ground like an axis. The right foot propels the rest of the body around this central point, the dancer spinning anti-clockwise in tightly controlled movements.

And as they whirled, heads gently tilted, eyes closed, a palpable awe passed through us. They moved with such grace, the hems of their skirts flowing out like water, that they seemed to have moved beyond human form. This was the
sema
– meaning ‘hearing’ – and it has evolved within the Mevlevi order into complex forms and symbolic details. But watching it, one sees beyond the ritual to the simple human act of spinning, as the earth does, or as a child may hold out its hands and whirl across a summer field. There’s something elemental about it, something of the act which takes us immediately beyond ‘mind’ into pure existence.

Minutes passed, or was it much more? Rarely has any sight uplifted or transported me as much as the sight of these dervishes whirling through space. They moved round the room like a carousel, each dervish locked within the silence of his own orbit. Afterwards, I thought of the reason humans dance at all: to resist gravity, to free themselves of worldly problems, to lose themselves. Certainly, as the attendant had said, this could scarcely be called performance. It felt more like prayer or meditation, and these men ethereal forms, moving through emptiness.

As the whirling stopped, we heard more chanting from above, this time the
fatiha
, the first
sura
of the Koran. All the dervishes bent to kiss the floor. Then the master began another prayer to Mevlana, and finally, all at once, the dervishes chanted ‘
Hu
’, all the names of God in one, a low trembling noise.

As they filed out of the room, we were left alone again. The city rushed back.

The train left at 7.20pm. There was just time to make the ferry for Haydarpasa, the train station on the Asian side of the Bosporus. Over the handrail I watched the city passing through the gloom, smelled diesel oil smoking on the ferry chimney. Beside me, a gypsy woman of incredible girth munched grey meat from waxed paper. I heard a dance beat ring once from a distant phone, gulls crying, the harsh static of the boat driver’s CB radio.

In the station I found an old-fashioned restaurant, bought hoummous, a large piece of flat bread, some olives and fried aubergine. The proprietor had the ghoulish face of a mortuary attendant and soft hands bedecked with a ring the size of a plum. He packed the provisions carefully for me and added a baklava for good measure. Behind him, moustachioed dock workers drank glasses of clear raki at the day’s end.

Thus supplied, I boarded the train with five minutes to spare, and lay down in the blissful confines of my own cabin. Far from the rickety locomotive I might have expected for travel to Anatolia, this was the latest in sleek modern trains. I had two bunks to choose from, a washbasin, curtains to draw back across the windows. I lay back on the lower bunk. The train eased out of the station as if it were running on oiled tracks. The city receded into memory.

Konya: Birthplace of Rumi

Less well known than Rumi in the West, but certainly a sublime mystical poet in his own right, was a man called Bahauddin Valad, Rumi’s father. By the time of his son’s birth in 1207, Bahauddin was famous throughout the Islamic world, often by his sobriquet ‘The Sultan of Mystical Knowing’. But by 1212, Bahauddin’s renown was beginning to cause him problems. When the King of Balkh became convinced that the mystic wished to usurp his power, it is said he sent Bahauddin the keys to his crown. Out of respect, Bahauddin took his family into exile. Their journey would take many years, leading them through Baghdad, Mecca and Damascus, but finally, by invitation of the pious Sultan of Rum, the family came to rest in Konya.

Stepping from the train into the sharp, grey light, I arrived in two cities simultaneously. In Rumi’s time, the city was the capital of the Seljuk empire, a liberal, highly creative hub of spiritual and artistic thought. Today, it’s the most conservative town in modern Turkey: sleepy, producing cement, carpets and fertiliser, home town of Necmeddin Erbakan, the nation’s most famous hard-line Islamic politician, and indeed one of the places where he found his strongest support.

Nevertheless, I was glad to be here. As I had wished, this was another world from Istanbul: a self-enclosed world, existing by its own logic. In a small café, snug with the heat of its log oven, I ordered
cey
(tea) and was offered a glass of spicy beet juice on the house. It flowed like blood from a clay-coloured jug, and left the teeth crimson. The taste was of earth and soil.

From my table, I found a perfect place to scrutinise the city. Through smeared glass, I saw huddled figures pacing towards the mosques with intent. A young woman carrying firewood tied with strips of plastic bag, twisted to create a makeshift twine. Boys with a football. A pear tree covered in white blossom.

‘You are here for Mevlana?’ asked the café proprietor, a grizzly of a man wearing half-moon glasses.

I said that I was. Few tourists would come to Konya for any other reason, I surmised.

‘Our greatest son,’ he muttered fondly. ‘People come from all over the world to this place. My grandfather fought in the War of Independence – against the Greeks, you know. He took a copy of Mevlana with him to the front.’

‘What happened to the book?’ I asked excitedly. ‘Do you still have it?’

The man shook his head. ‘My father lost it! His own father had kept the book safe through the Battle of Afyonkarahisar-Eskişehir. My father was a merchant seaman – he had his bag stolen in Algeria and the book was inside. Such carelessness!’

In the afternoon I walked to the mausoleum. Spring was breaking the back of winter and an effervescent light lit up the white marble. Here Sultan ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad, a Seljuk sultan, offered his rose garden as a fitting place to bury the great mystic Bahauddin. When Rumi himself died in 1273, he was entombed beside his father, and a mausoleum covered in exquisite turquoise faience was erected over his grave. Above the threshold, a Persian inscription reads:

This station is the Mecca of all dervishes

What is lacking in them is here completed

Whoever came here unfulfilled

Was here made whole.

After I passed through a turnstile, I strolled into a marble-paved courtyard, flanked to the left by seventeen dervish cells covered with small domes. In the middle of the space, there was a fountain built by Yavuz Sultan Selim, where the dervishes could wash before prayers. Once, it must have been a little like an ashram, I mused to myself: a place of learning, community and work. Now it was like museums everywhere: smelling of age and forgotten rituals, like a snuffed-out candle. Turnstiles clattered behind me as more pilgrims paid their dues.

At the entrance itself, I stepped through doors inlaid with Seljuk motifs and Persian text. Inside, the room was elevated, the air temperate. There was soft light from candelabras; oil lamps; chandeliers; the walls decorated with rare and precious Ottoman calligraphies. In the adjoining room, housing the tomb itself, I found myself surrounded by Muslim pilgrims. A tour bus that had driven overland from Iran had disgorged fifty theology students who were visiting the sacred sites of Turkey. They were in their early twenties but looked younger, clutching Korans, plastic briefcases, pads of notepaper. They wore the cheap black suits of missionaries.

‘Are you Sufis?’ I asked one of them, an earnest young man with bad skin. ‘We are Muslims,’ he said brusquely. ‘Are
you
a Muslim?’

‘No.’

‘Then why are you here?’

‘Mevlana said “Come everyone,” did he not?’ I pointed out. ‘Does one have to be Muslim to hear his words?’

‘Come everyone to
Islam
, he meant.’ The boy shouldered rudely past me to kneel down before Rumi’s tomb. Behind a panel of silver latticework, draped in a black silk shroud, rose the sarcophagi of Rumi and his father, and above them, stone versions of the Sufi fez, similar to those I’d seen in Eyup cemetery, symbolising the death of the ego.

I moved away, a little offended by such a curt reply. And yet such a response was a timely reminder of how very differently Rumi is perceived in parts of the Muslim world. While for Western liberals, Rumi’s poetry, whirling practices and seemingly broad-minded world-view make him a kind of poster child for liberal Islam, others consider this very far from the truth. Some scholars, much in the manner of the Iranian theology student, try to draw semantic lines around Rumi, emphasising his total faith in Islam and his meaninglessness outside that context. One can’t help but see the irony in this – or its refutation of everything that Rumi was trying to teach.

Some Islamic modernists go further still, rejecting Rumi altogether. Their principal complaint, it seems, is in Rumi’s assertion of absolute unity with God – called
Wahdat-ul-wujood
in Sufism. From the earliest origins of Sufi mysticism, this notion has caused problems. That anyone should claim absolute unity with God smacks of heresy, a lack of humility. In times gone by, many Sufis were put to death for such statements, such as Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, also known as al-Hallaj (the wool-carder), who was beheaded in Baghdad for having uttered ‘
Ana
’
l haqq
’ – I am the Truth.

I stepped outside, sooner than I had expected. I hadn’t found the peace or the sense of fulfilment I’d hoped the tomb would bring. It was the middle of the afternoon and the streets were almost empty. I wanted to walk for a time to stretch my legs. Strolling down the main street I found only shops selling religious paraphernalia: prayer beads, holy books, dried bunches of
miswak
– the twigs of the
Salvadora persica
tree with which it is said that the prophet Mohammed used to brush his teeth. In the public gardens, an old man fed pigeons from a paper bag; bees moved among the early flowers.

Dejected, I moved restlessly through the town. There were carpet shops everywhere, selling flat woven kilims the like of which would once have adorned the tents of nomads, simple huts, the grandest of Sultanate palaces all across the Ottoman world. Both Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo came through Konya, the latter referring to its carpets as ‘the most thin and beautiful’ he had ever seen.

‘Come in, come in,’ entreated the proprietors. ‘Lovely carpets. Wonderful kilims. Exquisite sisims.’

After an hour of wandering, I accepted. The carpet shop was an ancient building, exotically piled with inestimable carpets, its walls hung with them, only a bare strip of ceiling, from which an uncovered bulb cast a trembling light, free of their overwhelming presence. I’d accepted because it was about to rain and because the merchant in question was something of an exception: I put him at no more than six. He wore a tiny waistcoat, and the first fez I’d seen in Anatolia.

‘Anyone here?’

Just then the father appeared. He had bright umber eyes, a tight skullcap pulled over a short brow, and an enormously ugly face, redeemed by a laissez-faire smile.

‘Ah. Welcome, welcome. I see the boss has caught your attention.’

The tiny child, still grinning inanely at his own success, was repeating his entreaty like a kind of mantra. ‘Carpets, carpets, carpets, lovely carpets.’

‘That’s enough now,’ said the man. He switched to Turkish and the child ran scurrying to some inner sanctum. He turned to me. ‘How is his English? Very good, no?’

‘Very good. He’ll sell the hind leg off a donkey one of these days.’

The man roared. ‘A donkey’s leg, you say! Well, that would be something. Now, have a seat. What kind of carpet will you take?’

I confessed that, if the truth be absolutely known, I didn’t want one at all. I gestured to the clouds beyond the door lintel.

‘Ah well. That is honest. You take shelter, yes. I can understand this. We will have coffee, and then, perhaps, you will change your mind about that carpet. If you think my son has talent, well, I am the teacher.’

We ventured into the interior of the shop. He gestured to a pile of about twenty carpets, which made an appealing-looking seat.