All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (29 page)

‘I am not just a trader,’ he explained, dropping some of his mercantile bluster. ‘But something of a scholar. I have written a history of traditional Seljuk carpets.’

‘Are these Seljuk?’ I asked, pointing to the ones I was sitting on.

He shook his head. ‘Those are of Ottoman design. Original Seljuk carpets are incredibly rare. Only a handful left in the world. But we believe those are the methods which the Ottomans learned from and copied. They were the pioneers.’

I asked if his book was available in English.

Hakan, as he now introduced himself, shook his head mournfully. ‘Only in Turkish, my friend. Very few copies available. Small readership.’

Could he tell me more about Seljuk culture?

Hakan looked pleased. ‘Certainly, my friend. What a pleasure! The Seljuks were a fascinating people. They came from somewhere north of the Caspian sea, a branch of Oghuz Turks. Their empire stretched from here to the Hindu Kush, and from central Asia to the Persian gulf. Until the beginning of the eleventh century, they controlled Jerusalem, if you can believe it.’

‘Were they tolerant?’

‘They were like modern liberals!’ roared Hakan. ‘Other faiths like Christians were allowed to go about their business. Poets and scholars found patronage. New types of architecture began to be used. Caravanserais spread out along the Silk Road.’

‘And they were tolerant of Sufis?’

He held a finger aloft. ‘For them the Sufi was a highly evolved man, a great man. It was a Seljuk sultan, you know, who invited Bahauddin to bring his family here.’

The coffee arrived. A pretty young woman wearing a paisley scarf laid down a silver tray. Turkish coffee steamed in its
cezve
– the long-handled copper pot used to make the traditional brew. She looked timidly at the ground, then retreated quickly from sight.

‘You will try this coffee,’ said Hakan. ‘My wife makes the best.’

Certainly, it was delicious, medium sweet, brewed so that the grounds rested on the bottom. (One sure sign of a poor cup of Turkish coffee is to get a mouthful of grounds in the first sip.)

The caffeine was working on Hakan like engine oil. He picked up speed, his arms flew about in florid gestures. ‘I will tell you my theory of the Turkish carpet,’ he began. ‘It’s a perfect metaphor for the people themselves.’

‘How so?’

‘Woven of many threads,’ he began. ‘A fusion of many different geographical regions. On one hand practical, but on another tending towards luxury, aspiring towards fine detail and even the metaphysical.’

‘A carpet can be metaphysical?’

‘Do Muslims not pray four times a day on a carpet?’ said Hakan, his voice rising. ‘In the Koran, carpets are mentioned in the description of Paradise. “Rich carpets, all spread out!” it says. And, there are the motifs.’ Hakan laid down his cup and moved to one side of the room. He leafed through several small carpets until he found the one he was looking for. It depicted a lantern of sorts, set into a niche.

‘The light of God,’ he explained. ‘Shining from the wall of his house, a mosque.’

‘And what of the new carpets?’ I asked. ‘I’ve seen many synthetic ones, using chemical dyes, artificial fibres, machine-made.’

Hakan’s eyes gleamed. ‘You are an old-fashioned man,’ he said. ‘A fine quality. And it is true that the new carpets, like the country, are becoming modern too quickly. We are in too much of a hurry to forget the past.’

I told Hakan a little of my journey, and my wish to understand the world of the Sufis. He was easy to talk to and I found myself becoming as loquacious as him. Not even Atatürk, I conjectured, could rid a country of a thousand or more years of history. Soon, whether in ten years or a hundred, Turkey would
have
to allow the Sufis to practise again. They were not, like the fez, the symbol of a past allied purely to religious tradition. They were a symbol of man’s capacity to smash tradition for something purer, something beyond linguistic definition. Even as I finished Hakan was nodding.

‘You are correct, my friend. Rarely am I hearing such words. But,’ his voice lowered stealthily, ‘I should warn you to be careful of speaking these opinions too often in Konya. There are those who will, as I do, find them pertinent. But others do not wish our country to liberalise. They seek a return to the total control of orthodox Islam. You know, quite recently, some local politicians tried to enforce the segregation of men and women on the buses. Can you
imagine
if such a bill had passed! They would have us return to the dark ages.’

‘What of Sufis?’ I asked. ‘Is it still possible to find them?’

Hakan looked surprised. ‘I am a Sufi,’ he said. ‘What of it?’

‘But what of the laws? Could you not be arrested?’

He seemed to find this hilarious. ‘Arrested? I think not. We are peaceful men. We harm no one. Where is the problem with this?’

‘So you belong to a
tekke
?’

‘Certainly.’

‘And you practise whirling?’

‘Of course! This is what Mevlana taught.’

I sat back, bemused. Clearly, there were differences of opinion on the matter.

‘So I could visit your
tekke
?’ I enquired delicately.

He tugged his beard. ‘It may be. But I would have to ask permission. This is not, you might say, a usual request. But I don’t see why not. Did not Mevlana himself say “Come everyone”?’

Meeting Hakan and his family turned out to be the very key I needed to unlock the gates of the city. They were that family I’ve met time and time again across the world: happy to open their arms to a stranger, generous to a fault, expecting nothing in return. Returning the following day, I was ushered through the side door of the shop into a warm kitchen, and saw a vinyl-covered table, a blue bowl of walnuts, an Ottoman carpet hanging from the wall. If their possessions were few, their pride was immense. In preparation for my visit, Hakan’s wife, Nursel, had got up early to make cheese
borek
– a filo pastry filled with pungent feta cheese and spring greens. The rich smell of it hung in the air. While I sat at the kitchen table, where their son was drawing ocean liners on a length of brown paper, I felt that sense of contentment which always comes when one eats in the house of a local. Here is where real life happens.

After his second slice of
borek
, Hakan fetched his most treasured possession. It was a nineteenth-century Koran bound in red hide. It had been in his family for 150 years, he told me. His great-great-grandfather, a calligrapher of some repute, had spent almost twenty years copying it.

He slid it reverently across the worn surface of the table. Below me I saw a maze of intricate loops and whorls, dots and flares. I was too nervous to touch it.

‘The true calligrapher uses a pen cut from a reed,’ said Hakan. ‘That is best.’

‘Like the
ney
?’ I asked, referring to the reed used for the flutes favoured by Rumi.

‘Exactly! Then the reed is buried for several years in the earth until its colour changes. The masters know
precisely
when the time is right to dig up their pens.’

‘And the ink?’

Hakan drew closer, eyes sparkling. He was like an alchemist imparting secrets. ‘Soot is ground to a powder so fine it is like flour, and then mixed with water. That is the ink. The paper is dyed with tea, then coated with egg whites. At last, it is ready to receive the word of God. This, my friend, is a
true
Koran. They say that the more pious the one who copies it, the greater its quality.’

‘I wish I could understand it,’ I said, carefully turning one of the old pages. ‘Or see beyond the calligraphy.’

‘Even
when
you understand Arabic it is difficult,’ admitted Hakan. ‘Rumi himself compared the Koran to a bride. “Although you pull the veil away from her face, she will not show herself to you,” he said.’

‘Then what is the trick?’

A chuckle. ‘Stop pulling!’

That afternoon Hakan talked of Rumi. Although I had read much of the poet’s work, I knew little of his life. But as the afternoon lengthened, a steady stream of coffee cups coming and receding before us like tides, I heard a great many of the stories and legends which remain. First I had seen Hakan as a carpet seller, secondly as a family man. But as evening drew near, I began to see him as a fine example of the Sufi I had hoped to meet: eloquent, well versed in calligraphy, poetry and music. I felt sure Dr Kilic would have liked him.

‘By the time of his father’s death, Mevlana was already a great scholar,’ said Hakan. ‘At twenty-four, he was known throughout the country for his learning. But at that stage he was not a mystic! He was just a man. Until, one day, something happened which would change everything. Mevlana met Shams.’

‘Who was Shams?’ I asked.

Hakan’s face broke into the contented smile of storytellers everywhere who have received the very question they’ve been trying to provoke.

‘Shams Tabrizi was a mystic, a wandering dervish. He simply moved from town to town, immersed in his love of God. For him, God was not to be found in books but in life. Shams was a divine presence, and it was he who awakened in Mevlana the sudden realisation of the
true
path to God. He was Mevlana’s master, his friend. Before, Mevlana was – in a manner of speaking –
sober
. He was a scholar, a quiet man. But after meeting Shams, Mevlana was drunk! He found himself intoxicated by God. And he began to write poems spontaneously, because his intoxication was too great to be contained. It spilled out of him.

‘So began the greatest friendship of Rumi’s life. But Mevlana’s students were not happy about this elderly dervish who was taking up all of their master’s time. After several years, their threats to Shams became so violent that he left. Some stories, in fact, recount that he was murdered. And from this deep loss, this sense of being cut off, literally, from God, Rumi wrote some of his best poems.’

Later that week, with the permission for my visit to the
tekke
granted, Hakan and I walked the dark streets of Konya. Dusk had fallen and with it the promise of summer receded for another few weeks. I pulled my jacket more tightly around me, my breath streaming like frost in the air. Certainly, I felt a little nervous. From its earliest origins, Sufism has had something of mystery about it, something secret and hidden. Bahauddin and Rumi lived in times similar to our own in many ways, with wars and strife raging about them, and the fundamentalists clinging more and more staunchly to their doctrines. They, like the Sufis before and after them, rejected conventional beliefs. God is in our hearts, they claimed. He is not in the mosque or the madrasa or in the pages of books. He is within us.

That was the heresy for which they had long been pushed underground. Later, with Atatürk, their crime seemed not straying from doctrine, but speaking of faith at all. For as long as human beings have professed beliefs, I reflected, there have been others holding their own more important. It seemed the very mind set, trapped in right or wrong, that the Sufis were trying to move beyond. Idries Shah wrote:

Cross and the churches, from end to end

I surveyed; He was not on the cross.

I went to the idol temple, to the ancient pagoda,

No trace was visible there.

I bent the reins of search to the Ka’ba.

He was not in the resort of old and young.

I gazed into my own heart,

There I saw Him, He was nowhere else.

The
tekke
, when we came to it, was an unassuming building at the end of an unassuming street. From outside it looked like an office building from the last century: municipal, its masonry patched haphazardly with concrete. Inside the door, a substantial pile of shoes testified to the gathering within, at least a hundred pairs, I noted: shabby trainers, mud-caked loafers, effete Ottoman slippers.

A low-ceilinged corridor, calligraphy on the walls. Then we were in a large room. Men were sitting on prayer mats and brightly coloured cushions, many of them smoking. A chandelier above us was missing several of its bulbs; it gave off a sober golden light. The place had an air of happy decrepitude, not entirely dissimilar to a Turkish social club I’d once visited in the East End of London. It was, in fact, a
tariqat
, a school of Sufism, and these men
murīdīn
– meaning literally ‘desirous’ of the knowledge and love of God.

Before Atatürk’s time,
tariqats
, with their long-established
silsilah
(lineages), had enormous political power in Turkey, especially those of the Mevlevi, the followers of Rumi. This was an élite
tariqat
, which numbered senior bureaucrats and even sultans among its members; the early Ottoman rulers and princes wore the woollen Mevlevi (
Hurasani
) cap, while the reforming Selim III (1789–1808) was an enthusiastic member and patron of the order.