The Wet and the Dry (23 page)

But undeniably the upper-end rakis possess perfumes that linger in the lungs. They make you want to sit and sink into a mellow and mildly useless despondency, to mimic the sudden cloudiness in the glass. It is the perfect drink for introspection and observation. “What a lovely drink this is,” Atatūrk once said of it, with a touch of regret, “it makes one want to be a poet.” It did not make him into one.

Wherever one is, one is susceptible to the addictions that are
on offer. In the rituals of day by day and night by night, one chooses the opiate that is least inauthentic to that place.

One night at the bottom of my little street, Samyeli Sokak, a new sign appeared at the corner of the connecting road, a bright blue sign for Efes beer that announced the opening of that most miraculous thing, a
liquor store
.

There was a new window filled with curious bottles, the most obvious of which was Olmeca tequila and brands of gin I had never heard of. It seemed to be run by a young husband-and-wife team who called out “
merhaba
” every time I walked by, obviously hopeful that this interloping foreigner might be exactly the kind of neighborhood customer they were intending to hit up. Not only that, but the store was open
all night long
. A twenty-four-hour vodka and tequila depot right on my doorstep, but one that was never filled with customers that I could see. It was like a friendly porn store open all night to those who knew how to shop with discretion.

But every night, as I struggled up the steep hill, as often as not fairly inebriated after an evening of raki by the water, I passed the lit window with the woman sitting there alone eating potato chips and our eyes met for a moment. “Come in,” hers said, fully aware of the temptations of those displays of Olmeca tequila. “Better not,” mine replied as I walked on, but glad that a bottle of Olmeca was now on hand. “You have no idea where that will lead me.”

There is, however, one more side to the hidden life of Istanbul that the drinker, the believer in wine, cannot ignore. Underlying
the official Islam of the Turks and the Ottoman state, there has always been the near-heresy of Sufism and the sects that are sometimes grouped, perhaps erroneously, under that name. Sufism is not a Turkish invention—it seems to have reached its greatest blossoming in Persia. Rumi and Hāfez, its two greatest poets, spoke Persian by birth, though Rumi was born in what is today Afghanistan.

But Rumi’s family was forced west by the Mongol invasions, and they eventually settled in Konya, in the Seljuk Turk sultanate of Rum. As Hāfez is the poet of Shiraz, so Rumi is the poet of Konya. It was there that he held high academic office before meeting the incandescent Shams e-Tabriz, the wandering dervish or mendicant who changed his life.

Konya is one of the holiest cities of modern Turkey, and Turks therefore claim Rumi as their own. The Mevlevi school of “whirling” dervishes was founded by Rumi in Konya, and its ritual, the
sema
, has become the country’s preeminent tourist spectacle.

The Sufis relished wine as the supreme metaphor of love. Their poems are time and again celebrations of drunkenness, taverns, wine cups, intoxicated madness, all intended metaphorically but described as if physically known.

Rumi writes:

Come, come, awaken all true drunkards!

Pour the wine that is Life itself

O cupbearer of the Eternal Wine,

Draw it now from Eternity’s Jar.

This wine doesn’t run down the throat

But it looses torrents of words.

In Sufi metaphors, wine is the love that inebriates the soul; the wine cup is the body. The
saaqi
or cupbearer is an aspect of God’s grace. The lingering effect of love is called a “hangover.”

Many a miniature depicts Hāfez tipsy in the wine bars of Kharabat, the tavern district of Shiraz, being served by voluptuous cupbearers. There is no memory of such a district in the Shiraz of today. Moreover, in Shia Sufic poetry, the hidden imam is sometimes called the
Pir-e Kharabat
, the Elder of the Kharabat or the Great Drunkard.

Hāfez writes:

Cupbearer, it is morning, fill my cup with wine.

Make haste, the heavenly sphere knows no delay.

Before this transient world is ruined and destroyed,

Ruin me with a beaker of rose-tinted wine.

The sun of the wine dawns in the east of the goblet.

Pursue life’s pleasure, abandon dreams,

And the day when the wheel makes pitchers of my clay,

Take care to fill my skull with wine!

We are not men for piety, penance and preaching

But rather give us a sermon in praise of a cup of clear wine.

Wine-worship is a noble task, O Hafiz;

Rise and advance firmly to your noble task.

One night my friend Sébastien de Courtois, a French scholar of Islam, took me to the Nurettin Cerrahi Tekkesi, a little-known dervish school of the seventeenth-century saint Cerrahi Halveti, whose shrine lies in the back streets of the poor and
deeply religious neighborhood of Karagunduz near the Fatih Mosque. Fatih, or this part of it, is now one of the most religiously conservative areas of Istanbul. The Islamic revival is welling up quietly in places like Karagunduz.

We walked there through heavy snow, past textile shops and steamed-up cafés, asking the way from the fruit stands as we went. The
tekke
stood on a dark side street, and in front of it burly beggar women in black held out their hands to the worshippers coming into the gate. Beyond the gate there was a long passage, barred windows through which we peered into the saint’s sanctuary and burial shrine, the floors covered with dark red carpets. In the small lobby the sexes separated and took off their shoes. The women went up a stone staircase to a screened gallery that overlooked the main prayer room.

Sébastien took me through the first of the prayer rooms. It was crowded on a Thursday night, the men all in white skullcaps, listening to a recitation in the Arabic of the Koran relayed through the adjoining rooms by small speakers. The walls were covered with gilded framed Koranic verses, with the slightly crazed faces of former leaders caught by ancient cameras long ago. The men began to kneel and incline forward in prayer. Sébastien and I moved into other rooms until we were in a kind of salon next to the main prayer room. Into this heavily embellished salon the practitioners were flowing as they tried to press their way into the room beyond. An imam read there before a wall of dark blue Iznik tiles, amid lamps fringed with green glass beads.

The room filled with men, locals in jeans and work shirts,
their heads in white caps. On these walls there were racks of ancient flutes, framed calligraphy, old paintings of Constantinople, shelves with a ceramic decorative scimitar, and a glass cube with Koranic quotations. The men began to form lines, but others sat on the little sofas against the walls. In the main room, the recitations had ended and a chanting had begun—a slow repetition of what sounded like the words “
allahallah
.”

As all the men repeated it, they slowly turned their heads to the left and then to the right, dipping their foreheads down on the beat and the first syllable of the word
allah
.

This chant quickened until the heads were rolling left and right, the eyes closed, with a loud exhalation of breath at the end of each phrase. It was like the sudden utterance of a war band. We got up and walked to the open doors giving into the shrine.

A series of circles had formed, the men holding hands. They turned slowly clockwise, their heads still turning to left and right, dipping, the bodies bending slightly to the right as they uttered the same words. In the salon, the old men seated on the sofas made the same motions with their heads, their eyes closed. They were inducted into the same trance. The
sema
, the ceremony. Drummers had appeared, in white turbans. At the center of the circle stood a single dervish in his tall camel-hair
sikke
hat symbolizing the tombstone of his ego. He was younger than the leaders conducting the chants, the mustache carefully trimmed.

The chanting ebbed and flowed, changed rhythm and speed. The men began to sweat and half-dance as they turned. Something had clicked between them, and they were now fused into
a single whole. The man in the
sikke
began to rotate in the center of the space. His arms wide, dressed in white, he spun like a sycamore seed falling: an expression of pure intoxication.

It was, in some way, pre-Islamic. A hunting band dancing on a mountain before or after a kill. A war band in its trance. The old women above rocked their heads in time to the drums. This had nothing in common with the sweet and prettified Whirling Dervish spectacles that tourists enjoy all over the city in summer. This was like a sweat lodge.

The leader led the inmost circle, his body lunging left and right as he danced sideways hand in hand with his neighbors. The whirler’s head inclined to the right as he turned. His body had gone limp. It looked as if he were unconscious on his feet, his mind wandering into the “other world.”

“The ceremony,” Sébastien was whispering, “was invented by Rumi himself. It has come down to us like this—and to think these are locals who have learned it in their spare time. Twenty years ago this would have been outlawed.” Atatūrk had banned the lodges, and they had revived only the last ten years.

I went back to the sofa at the back of the room and wedged myself between two groaning, head-rocking gentlemen in their later years. I slumped against the wall and felt my head spin. I steadied myself with both hands and looked through the window in the wall and up at the women’s gallery, where I could see the rocking heads of the old women behind the screen. A few younger boys came in late and knelt on the carpet and bowed their heads down to it. They looked over at me with a slight confusion, then rose to join the collective meditation.

Sébastien walked over and sat at the neighboring table. “You look pale. Are you all right?”

“I just got a little light-headed. It happens.”

“It’s a strange experience, I know. The first time especially.”

I feel drunk
, I thought,
as drunk as they are
.

The dance went on, and it occurred to us that after two hours, it might be opportune to make a quiet exit.

But before we could agree, the ceremony itself began to wind down, and the men who had crammed the shrine room began to pour back out into the salon. As they did so, they parted to create a narrow passage, and it was clear that down this gap the leader would walk, destined to park himself in a red velvet armchair that was hastily being prepared for him next to the sofa where they were seated. It happened in the blink of an eye. The leader, mopping his brow, came down toward them, surrounded by awestruck followers.

He seated himself with a sigh in the armchair, and two helpers came behind him. They pulled open his shirt and placed inside it a length of padding to shield his skin from the sweat-soaked fabric. His white cap was also replaced. He was about sixty, with cunning eyes and a short gray beard, cropped iron hair. He said, “
Cigari
,” and a man lunged forward immediately with a Camel Wide. Another sprang forward to provide the lighter flame. As the acolytes swarmed around their leader, we were trapped. We got up to leave at once. The leader blew out a lazy plume of smoke, cast an eye upon us, and said in Turkish, “You don’t have to leave.” We had no choice but to sit down again and endure the entire audience. The leader was going to take questions from his
disciples about life, death, and all things in between. In doing this, he would go through about eight cigarettes.

As he began answering the questions of his disciples—they sighed together and placed their hands on their hearts every time he said something profound—a Pakistani journalist appeared at his side with a Turkish interpreter, one of the disciples. The man had a formidable gray beard and grinned at everything the leader said, though it was obvious he spoke not a word of Turkish. He asked some simple-minded questions in English, and the leader replied with a verse in Koranic Arabic.

“Understand?” he asked the Pakistani in English.

No, the man did not get the Arabic.

“The leader says that by dancing this way, we pass over into the other world. We shed our ego in this life.”

“Yes, shed the ego,” the Pakistani repeated.

“We shed our normal consciousness.”

“Ah yes.” The Pakistani suddenly looked tense and a little at sea. “You mean we pass into a different state of mind?”

“It’s as Rumi says. We drink the wine of love.”

“Ah yes, love.”

“Love is what we are striving for. It is all about love. And no one can make love grow by itself. It cannot be forced. It must come of its own accord.”

There was a slight tension now. It was the idea of wine, even metaphorical wine. One can see why fundamentalists have always hated Sufism. For not only did Sufis use wine as a metaphor of intoxicating love, they also advocated love of Christians and Jews.

The advantage of the Pakistani’s presence was that now I could understand some of the exchanges better. The leader chatted and cajoled, chain-smoking furiously, cracking little jokes and demanding some chocolate biscuits and tea that boys were carrying around the room on precariously balanced trays. It lasted an hour. Eventually, the leader tired of it and called an end to the questions. All rose. There was an orderly and polite scramble for the doors. We put on our shoes outside, under dripping icicles, and came back into the street, mobbed by the burly beggars in black.

On the far side of Fevzi Paşa, the streets slope downward through ancient neighborhoods now rebuilt as cement tenements, their surfaces barnacled with satellite dishes. The lamps strung high up between them rock back and forth in the winds, making the alleys flash in and out of darkness. I went down alone, having said my fond goodnights to Monsieur de Courtois, and the mood of Sufi intoxication persisted until I came to the oval plaza of dark orange buildings where a forbidding Roman column stands, the Column of Marcian.