by Elif Shafak
“You cannot know that; only God can. Besides, what makes you think any of those men who pushed you out of the mosque today are closer to God?”
“Even if they are not closer to God,” I replied, unconvinced, “who will tell them that? Will you?”
But the dervish shook his head. “No, that’s not the way the system works. It is you who needs to tell it to them.”
“Do you think they would listen to me? Those men hate me.”
“They will listen,” he said determinedly. “Because there is no such thing as ‘them,’ just as there is no ‘I.’ All you need to do is keep in mind how everything and everyone in this universe is interconnected. We are not hundreds and thousands of different beings. We are all One.”
I waited for him to explain, but instead he continued: “It’s one of the forty rules. If you want to change the way others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Unless you learn to love yourself, fully and sincerely, there is no way you can be loved. Once you achieve that stage, however, be thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It is a sign that you will soon be showered in roses.” He paused briefly and then added, “How can you blame others for disrespecting you when you think of yourself as unworthy of respect?”
I stood there unable to say a word as I felt my grip on what was real slip away. I thought about all the men I had slept with—the way they smelled, the way their callused hands felt, the way they cried when they came.… I had seen nice boys turn into monsters and monsters turn into nice boys. Once I had a customer who had the habit of spitting on prostitutes while he had sex with them. “Dirty,” he would say as he spit into my mouth and all over my face. “You dirty whore.”
And here was this dervish telling me I was cleaner than fresh springwater. It felt like a tasteless joke, but when I forced myself to laugh, the sound didn’t pass through my throat, and I ended up suppressing a sob.
“The past is a whirlpool. If you let it dominate your present moment, it will suck you in,” said Shams as if he had read my thoughts. “Time is just an illusion. What you need is to live this very moment. That is all that matters.”
Upon saying that, he took out a silk handkerchief from the inside pocket of his robe. “Keep it,” he said. “A good man in Baghdad gave it to me, but you need it more than I do. It will remind you that your heart is pure and that you bear God within you.”
With that, the dervish grabbed his staff and stood up, ready to go. “Just walk out of that brothel.”
“Where? How? I have no place to go.”
“That’s not a problem,” Shams said, his eyes gleaming. “Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That’s the hardest part and that’s what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.”
I nodded. I didn’t need to ask in order to understand that this, too, was one of the rules.
Suleiman the Drunk
KONYA, OCTOBER 17, 1244
Before midnight I downed my last drink and left the tavern.
“Remember what I said. Watch your tongue,” Hristos cautioned as he waved good-bye.
I nodded, feeling fortunate to have a friend who cared about me. But as soon as I stepped into the dark, empty street, I was seized by a kind of exhaustion such as I had never felt before. I wished I had taken a bottle of wine with me. I could have used a drink.
As I tottered with my boots clacking on the broken cobblestones, the sight of the men in Rumi’s procession crossed my mind. It pained me to recall the flicker of loathing in their eyes. If there was one thing I hated most in the world, it was prudishness. I had been reprimanded by prim and proper people so many times that even the memory of them was enough to send a shiver down my spine.
Struggling with these thoughts, I turned a corner and entered a side street. It was darker here because of the massive trees towering above. As if that weren’t enough, the moon suddenly hid behind a cloud, shrouding me in thick, dense darkness. Otherwise I would have noticed the two security guards approaching me.
“Selamun aleykum,” I chimed, my voice coming out too merrily in the attempt to hide my anxiety.
But the guards didn’t return my greeting. Instead they asked me what I was doing out on the streets at this late hour.
“Just walking,” I mumbled.
We stood face-to-face, anchored in an awkward silence pierced only by the howling of dogs far away. One of the men took a step toward me and sniffed the air. “It stinks around here,” he blurted out.
“Yeah, it reeks of wine,” the other guard confirmed.
I decided to treat the situation lightly. “Don’t worry yourselves. The stench is only metaphorical. Since it is only metaphorical wine that we Muslims are allowed to drink, the smell must also be metaphorical.”
“What the hell is he raving about?” the first guard grumbled.
Just then the moon came out from behind the cloud, covering us with its soft, pallid light. I could now see the man facing me. He had a square face with a protruding chin, ice blue eyes, and a sharp nose. He could have been handsome were it not for his lazy eye and the permanent scowl on his face.
“What are you doing on the streets at this hour?” the man repeated. “Where are you coming from, and where are you going?”
I couldn’t help it. “These are profound questions, son. If I knew the answers, I would have solved the mystery of our purpose in this world.”
“Are you making fun of me, you filth?” the guard demanded, frowning, and before I knew what was happening, he took out a whip, cracking it in the air.
His gestures were so dramatically exaggerated that I chuckled. The next thing he did was to bring the whip down on my chest. The strike was so sudden that I lost my balance and fell.
“Perhaps this will teach you some manners,” the guard retorted as he passed his whip from one hand to the other. “Don’t you know drinking is a major sin?”
Even when I felt the warmth of my own blood, even as my head swirled in a sea of pain, I still couldn’t believe I had been lashed in the middle of the street by a man young enough to be my son.
“Then go ahead and punish me,” I retorted. “If God’s paradise is reserved for people of your kind, I’d rather burn in hell anyhow.”
In a fit of rage, the young guard started to whip me with all his might. I covered my face with my hands, but it didn’t help much. A merry old song popped into my mind, forcing its way past my bloodied lips. Determined not to show my misery, I sang louder and louder with every crack of the whip:
“Kiss me, my beloved, peel my heart down to the core,
Your lips are as sweet as cherry wine, pour me some more.”
My sarcasm drove the guard into a deeper rage. The louder I sang, the harder he hit. I would never have guessed there could be so much anger piled up inside one man.
“That’s enough, Baybars!” I heard the other guard yell in panic. “Stop it, man!”
As suddenly as it had started, the lashing stopped. I wanted to have the last word, say something powerful and blunt, but the blood in my mouth muffled my voice. My stomach churned, and before I knew it, I vomited.
“You are a wreck,” Baybars reprimanded. “You have only yourself to blame for what I did to you.”
They turned their backs on me and strode off into the night.
I don’t know how long I lay there. It could have been no more than a few minutes or the whole night. Time lost its weight, and so did everything else. The moon hid behind the clouds, leaving me not only without its light but also without a sense of who I was. Soon I was floating in limbo between life and death and not caring where I would end up. Then the numbness started to wear off, and every bruise, every welt, every cut on my body ached madly, washing me with wave after wave of pain. My head was wobbly, my limbs sore. In that state I moaned like a wounded animal.
I must have blacked
out. When I opened my eyes, my salwar was drenched in urine and every limb of my body ached dreadfully. I was praying to God either to numb me or to provide me with drink when I heard footsteps approaching. My heart skipped a beat. It could be a street urchin or a robber, even a murderer. But then I thought, what did I have to fear? I had reached a point where nothing the night could bring was scary anymore.
Out of the shadows walked a tall, slender dervish with no hair. He knelt down beside me and helped me sit up. He introduced himself as Shams of Tabriz and asked my name.
“Suleiman the drunk of Konya at your service,” I said as I plucked a loose tooth from my mouth. “Nice to meet you.”
“You are bleeding,” Shams murmured as he started to wipe the blood off my face. “Not only on the outside, but inside as well.”
Upon saying that, he took out a silver flask from the pocket of his robe. “Apply this ointment to your wounds,” he said. “A good man in Baghdad gave it to me, but you need it more than I do. However, you should know that the wound inside you is deeper, and that is the one you should worry about. This will remind you that you bear God within you.”
“Thank you,” I heard myself stutter, touched by his kindness. “That security guard … he whipped me. He said I deserved it.”
As soon as I uttered those words, I was struck by the childish whining in my voice and my need for comfort and compassion.
Shams of Tabriz shook his head. “They had no right to do that. Every individual is self-sufficient in his search for the divine. There is a rule regarding this: We were all created in His image, and yet we were each created different and unique. No two people are alike. No two hearts beat to the same rhythm. If God had wanted everyone to be the same, He would have made it so. Therefore, disrespecting differences and imposing your thoughts on others is tantamount to disrespecting God’s holy scheme.”
“That sounds good,” I said, amazing myself by the ease in my voice. “But don’t you Sufis ever doubt anything about Him?”
Shams of Tabriz smiled a tired smile. “We do, and doubts are good. It means you are alive and searching.”
He spoke in a lilting tone, exactly as if he were reciting from a book.
“Besides, one does not become a believer overnight. He thinks he is a believer; then something happens in his life and he becomes an unbeliever; after that, he becomes a believer again, and then an unbeliever again, and so on. Until we reach a certain stage, we constantly waver. This is the only way forward. At each new step, we come closer to the Truth.”
“If Hristos heard you talk like this, he would tell you to watch your tongue,” I said. “He says not every word is fit for every ear.”
“Well, he’s got a point.” Shams of Tabriz let out a brief laugh as he jumped to his feet. “Come on, let me take you home. We need to tend to your wounds and make sure you get some sleep.”
He helped me get on my feet, but I could hardly walk. Without hesitation the dervish lifted me as though I weighed nothing and took me on his back.
“I warn you, I stink,” I mumbled in shame.
“That’s all right, Suleiman, don’t worry.”
In this way, never minding the blood, urine, or stench, the dervish carried me along the narrow streets of Konya. We passed by houses and shacks plunged in deep slumber. Dogs barked at us, loudly and ferociously, from behind the garden walls, informing everyone of our presence.
“I have always been curious about the mention of wine in Sufi poetry,” I said. “Is it real or metaphorical wine that the Sufis praise?”
“What difference does it make, my friend?” Shams of Tabriz asked before he dropped me off in front of my house. “There is a rule that explains this: When a true lover of God goes into a tavern, the tavern becomes his chamber of prayer, but when a wine bibber goes into the same chamber, it becomes his tavern. In everything we do, it is our hearts that make the difference, not our outer appearances. Sufis do not judge other people on how they look or who they are. When a Sufi stares at someone, he keeps both eyes closed and instead opens a third eye—the eye that sees the inner realm.”
Alone in my house after this long and exhausting night, I pondered what had transpired. As miserable as I felt, somewhere deep inside me there was a blissful tranquillity. For a fleeting moment, I caught a glimpse of it and yearned to remain there forever. At that moment I knew there was a God after all, and He loved me.
Though I was sore, sore all over, strangely enough I was not hurting anymore.
Ella
NORTHAMPTON, JUNE 3, 2008
Beach Boys tunes streaming through their open windows, university students drove past, their faces sporting early-summer tans. Ella watched, numb to their happiness, as her mind reverted to the events of the past few days. First she had found Spirit dead in the kitchen, and although she’d told herself many times to be ready for this moment, she was seized by not only a profound grief but also a sense of vulnerability and loneliness, as if losing her dog had the effect of throwing her out into the world all by herself. Then she found out that Orly was suffering from bulimia and that almost everyone in her class knew about it. This brought a wave of guilt to Ella, leading her to have doubts about her relationship with her younger daughter and to question her record as a mother. Guilt was not a new element in Ella’s repertoire of feelings, but this loss of confidence in her mothering was.
During this time Ella started exchanging multiple e-mails with Aziz Z. Zahara every day. Two, three, sometimes up to five. She wrote to him about everything, and, to her surprise, he was always prompt to respond. How he could find the time or even an Internet connection to check his e-mails while traveling in remote places was beyond Ella. But it didn’t take her long to become addicted to his words. Soon she was checking her e-mail at every opportunity—first thing in the morning and then again after breakfast, when she came back from her morning walk and while she was making lunch, before she went out to run errands and even during them, by stopping at Internet cafés. While she was watching her favorite TV shows, chopping tomatoes at the Fusion Cooking Club, talking on the phone with her friends, or listening to her twins rant about school and homework, she kept her laptop on and her mailbox open. When there were no new messages from Aziz, she reread the old ones. And every time she received a new message from him, she couldn’t help breaking into a smile, half gleeful, half embarrassed by what was taking place. For something was taking place.
Soon exchanging e-mails with Aziz made Ella feel that she was somehow breaking away from her staid and tranquil life. From a woman with lots of dull grays and browns on her life’s canvas, she was turning into a woman with a secret color—a bright, tantalizing red. And she loved it.
Aziz was no man for small pleasantries. To him, people who had not made their heart their primary guide to life, who could not open up to love and follow its path the way a sunflower follows the sun, were not really alive. (Ella wondered if this might put her on his list of inanimate objects.) Aziz didn’t write about the weather or the latest movie he had seen. He wrote about other things, deeper things, like life and death, and above all love. Ella was not used to expressing her feelings on such issues, especially to a stranger, but perhaps it took a stranger to make a woman like her speak her mind.
If there was a trace of flirtation in their exchange, Ella thought, it was an innocent one that might do them both good. They could flirt with each other, positioning themselves in distant corners within the infinite maze of cyberspace. Thanks to this exchange, she hoped to regain a portion of the sense of worth she had lost during her marriage. Aziz was that rare type of man a woman could love without losing her self-respect. And perhaps he, too, could find something pleasing in being the center of attention of a middle-aged American woman. Cyberspace both magnified and mellowed offline behaviors, providing an opportunity to flirt without guilt (which she didn’t want because she already had too much) and an adventure without risks (which she did want because she never had any). It was like nibbling on for
bidden fruit without having to worry about the extra calories—there were no consequences.
So maybe it was blasphemy for a married woman with children to write intimate e-mails to a stranger, but given the platonic nature of their relationship, Ella deduced, it was sweet blasphemy.
Ella
NORTHAMPTON, JUNE 5, 2008
Beloved Aziz,
In one of your earlier e-mails, you said the idea that we could control the course of our lives through rational choices was as absurd as a fish trying to control the ocean in which it swam. I thought about your next sentence a lot: “The idea of a Knowing Self has generated not only false expectations but also disappointments in places where life does not match our expectations.”
And now it’s time for me to confess: I’m a bit of a control freak myself. At least that’s what people who know me best will tell you. Until recently I was a very strict mom. I had a lot of rules (and believe me, they’re not as nice as your Sufi rules!), and there was no bargaining with me. Once my eldest daughter accused me of adopting the strategy of a guerrilla. She said I dug into their lives and from my trench I tried to capture every errant thought or desire that they might have!
Remember the song “Que Será, Será”? Well, I guess it has never been my song. “What will be, will be” has never sat right with me; I just can’t go with the flow. I know you’re a religious person, but I’m not. Though as a family we celebrate the Sabbath every so often, personally I don’t even remember the last time I prayed. (Oops, I do now. In my kitchen just two days ago, but that doesn’t count, because it was more like complaining to a higher Self.)
There was a time back in college when I got hooked on Eastern spirituality and did some reading on Buddhism and Taoism. I had even made plans with an eccentric girlfriend to spend a month at an ashram in India, but that phase of my life didn’t last long. As inviting as the mystic teachings were, I thought they were too compliant and inapplicable to modern life. Since then I haven’t changed my mind.