- 12 تشرين أول 2019
- ثقافيات
By: Dr. Ali Qleibo
In contemporary Turkish literature the Arabic reader finds a mirror image. The intellectual probing of cultural identity in modernity that dominated twentieth-century Arabic Renaissance (Asr el-Nahdah) survives in Turkish contemporary novels. The revolutionary steps taken by the Arab literary pioneers, such as Tawfiq el Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz, Ihsan Abd al-Quddus, etc., which documented the middle-class transition from a traditional conformist society to Westernised modernity in which the individual actively shaped his identity, reverberates in modern Turkish novels of writers as diverse as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, among others. During the twentieth century, the introduction of Western art forms such as the novel, short story, and drama, and the reinterpretation of Muslim values in terms of Western humanism permeated all aspects of cultural expressions ranging from music and cinema to sculpture, architecture, and furniture. The literary discourse ended with the death of the genius pioneers of Asr el-Nahdah.
For a long time the cultural capital was Cairo. A walk through any bookshop in Istanbul yields a new trove and another bond between Palestinians, Ottoman civilisation, and contemporary Turkish literature.
Elsewhere I have written about the passion of the Palestinians for Turkish social dramas, such as to make Istanbul the cultural tourist capital, thus supplanting the Cairo of the last century. In literature and in the novels of Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, on the other hand, we meet the intellectual heirs of the Arab Renaissance. Accessible in English translation, the novel proffers our existential condition in contemporary terms. Pamuk, in his masterpiece, Istanbul, describes a city, a time, and a way of life that has passed away and that parallels the tragic loss of Jerusalem’s historic Muslim character. The huzon (nostalgic melancholy) he evokes and the feelings conjured correspond to the feelings sensed by a Jerusalemite. As one reads Istanbul, one reads Jerusalem. We share a common sensibility and passion, and an overwhelming sense of longing for the lost spirit of the place. The introduction of perspective in the Turkish miniature in nineteenth century, the Westernisation of the Muslim world in the novel, My Name is Red, recreates the heritage we share and the changes our society has sustained. Reading Orhan Pamuk, I find myself gazing at a well-polished mirror reflection of myself; an identity whose sense of aesthetics, values, and sensibilities has been produced at the conjuncture of traditional Muslim discourses and Western secular humanism.
In a bookshop on Istiqlal Boulevard, while browsing through the English translations of Turkish novels, I was transfixed by a paragraph in Elif Shafak’s novel, Forty Rules of Love. I marvelled; the concept, the emotion, the feel, the cadence, the music, and the flow are identical to mine; we shared the same sensibility which hitherto I thought belonged exclusively to Arabic culture. Whereas the influence of Western European culture on Arabic artistic expression is readily visible, the formation of our Arab identity at a point of axis between Muslim culture as shaped by Ottoman sensibility, aesthetics, and values is overlooked. The constitution of our identity as purely Arab or Muslim (and the common use of the terms interchangeably) blocks us from perceiving our indebtedness to the all-pervasive Ottoman civilisation that has structured our cultural identity. The Ottoman influence is acknowledged only in relation to music. Through the mediation of English language in our knowledge of current Turkish literature, or Arabic dubbing of the social dramas, the linguistic barrier between contemporary Arabs and Turks dissolves.
It should not be forgotten that almost all Arabic twentieth-century intellectuals matured in French or British culture and language. In fact Tawfiq el Hakim admits that his novel, Awdet el Roh (Return of the Spirit), was written in French. His sense of patriotism compelled him to translate the first two hundred pages from French into Arabic, and thus he wrote the first twentieth-century Arabic novel. With the exception of Mahfouz, the Arab twentieth-century leading intellectuals lived at ease in the West and were fluent with English or French civilisation or both. They wrote in Arabic for a cosmopolitan Arab reader familiar with Western humanist discourses. Modern Turkish writers exhibit the same attitude.
A single paragraph in Elif’s novel, Forty Rules of Love, which describes the longing agitating within Jalal al-Din Rumi and accounting for the significance of Shams al-Tabrizi in his life, caught my attention. The paragraph could have been written by me.
“Bountiful is your life, full and complete. Or so you think, until someone comes along and makes you realise what you have been missing all the time. Like a mirror that reflects what is absent rather than present, he shows you the void in your soul – the void you have resisted seeing. That person can be a lover, a friend, or a spiritual master. Sometimes it can be a child to look after. What matters is to find the soul that completes you … For me that mirror is Shams of Tabriz.”
I had written about longing in the same vein. I leave to the readers the right of judgment.
The sublime longing and intimations of the other may be spurred by the view from afar of a small dust-beaten mountain track winding its way towards a remote village lost in the distance that one glimpses momentarily from the car window on the drive between Antalia and Kos. The awareness of the rich diversity of humanity surges within the depth of our heart as a deep longing … I could be other, the possibilities are infinite. The intimations of the other may be provoked by the sight of a cluster of trees on a barren mountaintop, or the sweet fragrance of jasmine floating from behind a high wall on a star-studded summer night … a haunting melody, a poem, or a painting and, of course, every time we fall in love.
Elif’s cadence, sensibility, and understanding of the underpinnings of human solitude are not discontinuous with traditional Muslim discourse. As in Renaissance Arabic literature her discourse stands at the interstice; neither secular humanist nor orthodox Muslim but at the conjunction of both.
Traditional Sufi metaphors of the love, longing, yearning for, and dissolving of the self in the other as a means of self-discovery reverberate in Elif’s brilliant novel-within-a-novel love story. In Forty Rules of Love, two tantalising parallel narratives, unfold; one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his soul mate, Shams of Tabriz.
Reading Elif Shafak ushers one into a microcosm where feelings are dominated by thoughts, themselves formed by feelings. A dynamic dialectic produced by a culture that empowers the heart over reason and that bespeaks a discursive spiritual heritage in which the Sufi concept of love as a mystic bond plays a key role. Rule number forty in her novel reminds the reader, “A life without love is of no account. Don’t ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western … Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is….”
In fact, love without labels is what Elif sets up as her ambition. Through the narrative Elif liberates the love that binds Jalal al-Deen Rumi and Shams of Tabriz from the controversial sexual innuendos. On the surface, Jalal’s poems to Shams are amorous. Rumi is smitten with the Persian wise man. In Western perspective the relationship is misconstrued and is often viewed diagnostically, the infatuation of a young scholar with the father figure is seen as sexual. The accusation is rebuffed in her depiction of their spiritual bond without labels. But even in Konya of the thirteenth century, their friendship was the cause of anger. Shams, in Elif’s account, is killed in a plot concocted by Rumi’s own jealous son and hostile followers.
The universalisation of love, its secularisation, is the theme of the parallel novel that describes the self-discovery of the heroine as she falls in love. Neither sacred nor profane the heroine’s love affair is at a point of conjuncture of Muslim mysticism and the modern secular quest for self-knowledge. In Forty Rules of Love, Elif presents a Muslim perspective of man/man bonds of friendship but also of mysticism using the Western format of modern novel.
In Turkish literature we find a mirror of ourselves.
In Elif’s book I found an invitation to Konya and a new perspective of Jalal al-Din and Shams al-Tabrizi.
I took the first plane to Konya.
Konya is a dreamland whose fabric is woven with the legends of One Thousand and One Nights. Aladdin must have awoken in such an ancient Muslim city after having been kidnapped from Isfahan, his hometown, by the blue-eyed Moroccan wizard. A feeling that one is walking in the footsteps of Aladdin, to whom the universe opened by the mere rub of the magic lantern, echoes in every step one takes in historic Konya.
Sweet dreams are made of this.
A deep yearning for adventure stirs within us the desire to travel; a compelling need to emerge from the quotidian and reach out beyond the shores of oneself. Journeys provide the stimulus and pleasure of reflexive self-disengagement. In travel one’s sense of identity is altered. Even if for a transient fugitive moment one becomes sentient of the possibilities agitating within. We achieve otherness.
Konya is a Holy City. Despite modernism and heavy industrialisation, Konya has retained the spiritual allure that has drawn millions of pilgrims who have flocked over the past eight centuries to visit the sanctuary of Jalal al-Din Rumi and, a block away, that of his friend/lover/soul mate Shams al-Din al-Tabrizi.
In Konya the world expands timelessly to conjure the splendour of Muslim civilisation. Innumerable cities rush to my mind’s eye: Isfahan, Tabriz, Balkh, Qum, Nishapor, Bukhara, Samarqand, Tashkent, the Baghdad of the Abbasid’s, Damascus, Cairo, and Umayyad Cordoba and Granada. A world that is long gone. My Arab imagination has been fuelled by the literary discourse of Ibn Battuta, al-Qazwini, al-Ya’kubi, Evilya Chelebi….
Konya is a place out of time where familiar boundaries dissolve and where modern clichés fade. A centre of pilgrimage for Sufis from all over the world, members from the Baha’i faith from Iran, and hopelessly cosmopolitan romantic sentimentalists, Konya lures its visitors into a web of mosques, bazaars, Turkish baths, and spice markets that enthral the eye and bring joy to the heart. The whirling dervishes, started eight centuries ago by the great master Jalal al-Din Rumi, thrive as one of the last vestiges of the Muslim ardent desire to love God, to immolate oneself in the One and to glean a glimpse of the Eternal. In this quest for divine knowledge, gnosis, the path is open to all humanities alike. In Rumi the love of God transports one beyond the confines of religious boundaries.
Rumi says,
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.
Konya is a unique city; like a rich tapestry it weaves classical Greek legends, a rich Byzantine past, and Seljuk glory under the dazzling tapestry of Muslim splendour. Perseus, the legendary Greek hero, conquered the city by revealing the unveiled “icon” image of Medusa’s serpentine head. Hence the original Greek name “Ikonion,” a cognate of the word icon. But the name of Prince Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad dominates the landscape of Konya. The minaret, castle, and mosque, whose silhouette looms over the city’s landscape, bespeak its illustrious past.
Konya became a Muslim capital soon after the defeat of the Byzantines in the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. The Seljuk capital reached its golden age in the second half of the twelfth century and lasted through the first decades of the thirteenth century. Early in the thirteenth century the city filled with refugees from the Khwarezmid Empire, from Persia, Afghanistan, and central Asia, fleeing the advance of the Mongol Empire. Sultan Ala’ fortified the city and built a palace on top of the citadel. In 1228 he invited Baha’i al-Din Veled and his son Jalal al-Din to settle and teach in Konya; a monument to humanity at large and a lighthouse to perplexed souls.
The spiritual charisma of Rumi was visible even in his adolescent years. “Here comes the sea followed by the ocean.” Thus did Ibn al-Arabi, the great Andalusian Sufi philosopher, describe Jalal al-Din as he saw him walk the trail of his father, Baha’i al-Din Veled. The great Persian poet Attar was equally impressed by adolescent Rumi when both father and son, on their flight from Balkh to Baghdad, stopped in Nishapor. Attar whispered to Rumi’s father, “Time will come when the fiery words of this boy will kindle the hearts of lovers all over the world.” Attar presented Rumi with a copy of Asrar Nameh (The Book of Secrets) – a book that Attar had composed during his own youth. That was to be Rumi’s companion throughout his life.
Rumi’s father was his first teacher. As the power of Genghis Khan and the threat of the Mongol army grew and as the supporters of the king and orthodox scholars made life difficult for the mystic preacher Baha’i Veled in Balkh, he decided to take his family and migrate westward. This was around 1219 when Jalal al-Din was barely a teenager.
Sultan Ala’ el Din Kayqubad built a medrassah (theological college) for Baha’i Veled to hold his classes and sermons. He held this position of authority until he died at the age of 80. Rumi assumed his father’s position. A scholar par excellence, Rumi became a popular orthodox Sunni preacher and teacher in Konya with hundreds of followers.
Following Jalal al-Din’s meeting with Shams al-Tabrizi, Rumi was transformed from the celebrated Sunni theologian (‘alim) to an (‘arif) a mystic, from a preacher to a poet. In their first meeting, Rumi (then 37) and Shams (possibly 60) fell for each other. Through subsequent conversations and retreats (a tradition called Soh’bat among the Sufis) Shams revolutionised Rumi’s lifestyle and perspective. Jalal al-Din withdrew from his social, religious, and family commitments to spend his time exclusively with Shams. In Shams he found his twin soul and they became inseparable. Rumi stopped preaching, and barely read or saw his wife and children. Together with Shams he spent his days on murâghibah (meditation), samâ (music and dancing which were later developed into the tradition of the whirling dervishes), and mushâ’irah (poetry).
Rumi’s disciples resented Shams who, in their opinion, had captivated their master’s heart and mind. Once Shams left Konya for Damascus in protest of the disciples’ hostile attitude, Rumi dispatched his older son to bring him back.
In 1248, Shams disappeared once and for all. It is believed that his younger son and jealous followers concocted a plot to kill Shams. Shams’ disappearance devastated Rumi. He went to Damascus twice in search of Shams, but finally concluded that Shams was within him.
During the past eight centuries Konya came to be closely associated with Jalal al-Din Rumi. Considered the Turkish Holy City, par excellence, devout Muslims flock to visit Rumi’s shrine. Sufis, mystics, and fans of Rumi visit his sanctuary in droves.
Barely one block away stands the sanctuary of Shams, a modest mosque rarely visited.
In homage to the man who helped bring out the inner light in Rumi’s heart, transforming the orthodox scholar into the most renown mystic and a beacon to those seeking knowledge of God in the heart, I made my Friday prayers in the mosque of Shams al-Tabrizi.
Dr. Ali Qleibo is an anthropologist, author, and artist. A specialist in the social history of Jerusalem and Palestinian peasant culture, he is the author of Before the Mountains Disappear, Jerusalem in the Heart, and the recently published Surviving the Wall, an ethnographic chronicle of contemporary Palestinians and their roots in ancient Semitic civilizations. His filmic documentary about French cultural identity, Le Regard de L’Autre was shown at the Jerusalem International Film Festival. Dr. Qleibo lectures at Al-Quds University. He can be reached at aqleibo@yahoo.com.
