The bond that unites them is a nest for two, where there is no room for a third person. They nod, smile, chuckle, or frown in the same way and at the same time, exchanging long, meaningful glances between words. Even their moods seem to depend on each other. Some days they are calmer than a lullaby, eating nothing, saying nothing, whereas other days they whirl around with such euphoria that they both resemble madmen. Either way, I cannot recognize my husband anymore. The man I have been married to for more than eight years now, the man whose children I have raised as if they were my own and with whom I had a baby, has turned into a stranger. The only time I feel close to him is when he is in deep sleep. Many nights over the past weeks, I have lain awake listening to the rhythm of his breathing, feeling the soft whisper of his breath on my skin and the comfort of his heart beating in my ear, just to remind myself that he is still the man I married.
I keep telling myself that this is a temporary stage. Shams will leave someday. He is a wandering dervish, after all. Rumi will stay here with me. He belongs to this town and to his students. I need do nothing except wait. But patience doesn’t come easily, and it’s getting harder with each passing day. When I feel too despondent, I try to recall the old days—especially the time when Rumi stood by me despite all odds.
“Kerra is a Christian. Even if she converts to Islam, she’ll never be one of us,” people had gossiped when they first got wind of our impending marriage. “A leading scholar of Islam should not marry a woman outside his faith.”
But Rumi took no notice of them. Neither then nor later on. For that reason I will always be grateful to him.
Anatolia is made up of a mixture of religions, peoples, and cuisines. If we can eat the same food, sing the same sad songs, believe in the same superstitions, and dream the same dreams at night, why shouldn’t we be able to live together? I have known Christian babies with Muslim names and Muslim babies fed by Christian milk mothers. Ours is an ever-liquid world where everything flows and mixes. If there is a frontier between Christianity and Islam, it has to be more flexible than scholars on both sides think it is.
Because I am the wife of a famous scholar, people expect me to think highly of scholars, but the truth is, I don’t. Scholars know a lot, that’s for sure, but is too much knowledge any good when it comes to matters of faith? They always speak such big words that it is hard to follow what they are saying. Muslim scholars criticize Christianity for accepting the Trinity, and Christian scholars criticize Islam for seeing the Qur’an as a perfect book. They make it sound as if the two religions are a world apart. But if you ask me, when it comes to the basics, ordinary Christians and ordinary Muslims have more in common with each other than with their own scholars.
They say that the hardest thing for a Muslim converting to Christianity is to accept the Trinity. And the hardest thing for a Christian converting to Islam is said to be letting go of the Trinity. In the Qur’an, Jesus says, Surely I am a servant of God; He has given me the Book and made me a prophet.
Yet for me the idea that Jesus was not a son of God but a servant of God wasn’t that hard to believe. What I found much harder to do was to abandon Mary. I haven’t told this to anyone, not even to Rumi, but sometimes I yearn to see Mary’s kind brown eyes. Her gaze always had a soothing effect on me.
The truth is, ever since Shams of Tabriz came to our house, I have been so distressed and confused that I find myself longing for Mary more than ever. Like a fever running wild through my veins, my need to pray to Mary comes back with a force I can hardly control. At times like these, guilt consumes me, as if I am cheating on my new religion.
Nobody knows this. Not even my neighbor Safiya, who is my confidante in all other matters. She wouldn’t understand. I wish I could share it with my husband, but I cannot see how. He has been so detached; I am afraid of distancing him even more. Rumi used to be everything to me. Now he is a stranger. I never knew it was possible to live with someone under the same roof, sleep in the same bed, and still feel that he was not really there.
Shams of Tabriz
KONYA, JUNE 12, 1245
Befuddled believer! If every Ramadan one fasts in the name of God and every Eid one sacrifices a sheep or a goat as an atonement for his sins, if all his life one strives to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and five times a day kneels on a prayer rug but at the same time has no room for love in his heart, what is the use of all this trouble? Faith is only a word if there is no love at its center, so flaccid and lifeless, vague and hollow—not anything you could truly feel.
Do they think God resides in Mecca or Medina? Or in some local mosque somewhere? How can they imagine that God could be confined to limited space when He openly says, Neither My heaven nor My earth embraces Me, but the heart of My believing servant does embrace Me.
Pity the fool who thinks the boundaries of his mortal mind are the boundaries of God the Almighty. Pity the ignorant who assume they can negotiate and settle debts with God. Do such people think God is a grocer who attempts to weigh our virtues and our wrongdoings on two separate scales? Is He a clerk meticulously writing down our sins in His accounting book so as to make us pay Him back someday? Is this their notion of Oneness?
Neither a grocer nor a clerk, my God is a magnificent God. A living God! Why would I want a dead God? Alive He is. His name is al-Hayy—the Ever-Living. Why would I wallow in endless fears and anxieties, always restricted by prohibitions and limitations? Infinitely compassionate He is. The name is al-Wadud. All-Praiseworthy He is. I praise Him with all my words and deeds, as naturally and effortlessly as I breathe. The name is al-Hamid. How can I ever spread gossip and slander if I know deep down in my heart that God hears and sees it all? His name is al-Başir. Beautiful beyond all dreams and hopes.
Al-Jamal, al-Kayyum, al-Rahman, al-Rahim. Through famine and flood, dry and athirst, I will sing and dance for Him till my knees buckle, my body collapses, and my heart stops pounding. I will smash my ego to smithereens, until I am no more than a particle of nothingness, the wayfarer of pure emptiness, the dust of the dust in His great architecture. Gratefully, joyously, and relentlessly, I commend His splendor and generosity. I thank Him for all the things He has both given and denied me, for only He knows what is best for me.
Recalling another rule on my list, I felt a fresh wave of happiness and hope. The human being has a unique place among God’s creation. “I breathed into him of My Spirit,” God says. Each and every one of us without exception is designed to be God’s delegate on earth. Ask yourself, just how often do you behave like a delegate, if you ever do so? Remember, it falls upon each of us to discover the divine spirit inside and live by it.
Instead of losing themselves in the Love of God and waging a war against their ego, religious zealots fight other people, generating wave after wave of fear. Looking at the whole universe with fear-tinted eyes, it is no wonder that they see a plethora of things to be afraid of. Wherever there is an earthquake, drought, or any other calamity, they take it as a sign of Divine Wrath—as if God does not openly say, My compassion outweighs My wrath. Always resentful of somebody for this or that, they seem to expect God the Almighty to step in on their behalf and take their pitiful revenges. Their life is a state of uninterrupted bitterness and hostility, a discontentment so vast it follows them wherever they go, like a black cloud, darkening both their past and their future.
There is such a thing in faith as not being able to see the forest for the trees. The totality of religion is far greater and deeper than the sum of its component parts. Individual rules need to be read in the light of the whole. And the whole is concealed in the essence.
Instead of searching for the essence of the Qur’an and embracing it as a whole, however, the bigots single out a specific verse or two, giving priority to the divine commands that they deem to be in tune with their fearful minds. They keep reminding everyone that on the Day of Judgment all human beings will be forced to walk the Bridge of Sirat, thinner than a hair, sharper than a razor. Unable to cross the bridg
e, the sinful will tumble into the pits of hell underneath, where they will suffer forever. Those who have led a virtuous life will make it to the other end of the bridge, where they will be rewarded with exotic fruits, sweet waters, and virgins. This, in a nutshell, is their notion of afterlife. So great is their obsession with horrors and rewards, flames and fruits, angels and demons, that in their itch to reach a future that will justify who they are today they forget about God! Don’t they know one of the forty rules? Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment. Every time we fall in love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy, or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell. This is what Rule Number Twenty-five is about.
Is there a worse hell than the torment a man suffers when he knows deep down in his conscience that he has done something wrong, awfully wrong? Ask that man. He will tell you what hell is. Is there a better paradise than the bliss that descends upon a man at those rare moments in life when the bolts of the universe fly open and he feels in possession of all the secrets of eternity and fully united with God? Ask that man. He will tell you what heaven is.
Why worry so much about the aftermath, an imaginary future, when this very moment is the only time we can truly and fully experience both the presence and the absence of God in our lives? Motivated by neither the fear of punishment in hell nor the desire to be rewarded in heaven, Sufis love God simply because they love Him, pure and easy, untainted and nonnegotiable.
Love is the reason. Love is the goal.
And when you love God so much, when you love each and every one of His creations because of Him and thanks to Him, extraneous categories melt into thin air. From that point on, there can be no “I” anymore. All you amount to is a zero so big it covers your whole being.
The other day Rumi and I were contemplating these issues when all of a sudden he closed his eyes and uttered the following lines:
“Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not of the East, nor of the West.…
My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless.”
Rumi thinks he can never be a poet. But there is a poet in him. And a fabulous one! Now that poet is being revealed.
Yes, Rumi is right. He is neither of the East nor of the West. He belongs in the Kingdom of Love. He belongs to the Beloved.
Ella
NORTHAMPTON, JUNE 12, 2008
By now Ella had finished reading Sweet Blasphemy and was putting the final touches on her editorial report. Although she was dying to discuss the details of his novel with Aziz, her sense of professionalism stopped her. It wouldn’t be right. Not before she was done with the assignment. She hadn’t even told Aziz that after reading his novel she had bought a copy of Rumi’s poems and was now reading at least a few poems every night before going to sleep. She had so neatly separated her work on the novel from her exchange with the author. But on the twelfth of June, something happened that blurred the line between the two forever.
Up until that day, Ella had never seen a picture of Aziz. There being no photos of him on his Web site, she had no idea what he looked like. In the beginning she had enjoyed the mystery of writing to a man with no face. But over time her curiosity began to get the best of her, and the need to put a face to his messages tugged at her. He had never asked for a picture of her, which she found odd, really odd.
So, out of the blue, she sent him a picture of herself. There she was, out on the porch with dear Spirit, wearing a skimpy cerulean dress that slightly revealed her curves. She was smiling in the picture—a half-pleased, half-troubled smile. Her fingers firmly grasped the dog’s collar, as if trying to derive some strength from him. Above them the sky was a patchwork of grays and purples. It wasn’t one of her best pictures, but there was something spiritual, almost otherworldly, in this one. Or so she hoped. Ella sent it as an e-mail attachment and then simply waited. It was her way of asking Aziz to send her his photo.
He did.
When Ella saw the picture Aziz sent her, she thought it must have been taken somewhere in the Far East, not that she had ever been there. In the picture, Aziz was surrounded by more than a dozen dark-haired native children of every age. Dressed in a black shirt and black trousers, he had a lean build, a sharp nose, high cheekbones, and long, dark, wavy hair falling to his shoulders. His eyes were two emeralds brimming with energy and something else that Ella recognized as compassion. He wore a single earring and a necklace with an intricate shape that Ella couldn’t make out. In the background was a silvery lake surrounded by tall grass, and in one corner loomed the shadow of something or someone that was outside the frame.
As she inspected the man in the picture, taking in every detail, Ella had a feeling she recognized him from somewhere. As bizarre as it felt, she could swear she had seen him before.
And suddenly she knew.
Shams of Tabriz bore more than a passing resemblance to Aziz Z. Zahara. He looked exactly the way Shams was described in the manuscript before he headed to Konya to meet Rumi. Ella wondered if Aziz had deliberately based his character’s looks on himself. As a writer, he might have wanted to create his central character in his own image, just as God had created human beings in His image.
As she considered this, another possibility arose. Could it be that the real Shams of Tabriz had looked just as he was described in the book, in which case it could only mean that there was a surprising resemblance between two men almost eight hundred years apart? Could it be that the resemblance was beyond the control and perhaps even the knowledge of the author? The more thought Ella put into this dilemma, the more strongly she suspected that Shams of Tabriz and Aziz Z. Zahara could be connected in a way that went beyond a simple literary gimmick.
The discovery had two unexpected impacts on Ella. First, she felt the need to go back to Sweet Blasphemy and read the novel again, with a different eye, not for the sake of the story this time but to find the author hidden in its central character, to find the Aziz in Shams of Tabriz.
Second, she became more intrigued by Aziz’s personality. Who was he? What was his story? In an earlier e-mail, he had told her he was Scottish, but then why did he have an Eastern name—Aziz? Was it his real name? Or was it his Sufi name? And by the way, what did it mean to be a Sufi?
There was something else that occupied her mind: the very first, almost imperceptible signs of desire. It had been such a long time since she’d last felt it that it took her a few extra seconds to recognize the feeling. But it was there. Strong, prodding, and disobedient. She realized that she desired the man in the picture and wondered what it would be like to kiss him.
The feeling was so unexpected and embarrassing that she quickly turned off her laptop, as though the man in the picture could otherwise suck her in.
Baybars the Warrior
KONYA, JULY 10, 1245
“Baybars, my son, trust no one,” my uncle says, “because the world is getting more corrupt each day.” He claims that the only time when things were different was during the Golden Age, when the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was duly in charge. Since his death everything has been going downhill. But if you ask me, anyplace where there are more than two people is bound to become a battleground. Even at the time of the Prophet, people had their share of hostilities, didn’t they? War is the core of life. The lion eats the deer, and vultures reduce to bare bones what remains of the carcass. Nature is cruel. On land, in sea or air, for every creature without exception, there is only one way to survive: to be shrewder and stronger than your worst enemy. To stay alive you need to fight. It’s as simple as that.
And fight we must. Even the most naïve can see there is no other way in this day and age. Things took a nasty turn five years ago when a hundred Mongol diplomats sent out by Genghis Khan to negotiate for peace were all slaughtered. After that, Genghis Khan turned into a fireball of fury, declaring war against Isl
am. How and why the diplomats were killed, nobody could say. Some people suspected that it was Genghis Khan himself who had his own diplomats killed, so that he could start this massive war campaign in the first place. It could be true. One never knows. But I do know that in five years the Mongols devastated the whole Khorasan area, causing destruction and death everywhere they galloped. And two years ago they defeated the Seljuk forces at Kosedag, turning the sultan into a tribute-paying vassal. The only reason the Mongols didn’t wipe us out is that it is more profitable for them to keep us under their yoke.
Wars might be present since time immemorial, at least since Cain killed his brother Abel, but the Mongol army is like nothing we have seen before. Specialized in more ways than one, they use a vast array of weapons, each designed for a specific purpose. Every Mongol soldier is heavily armored, with a mace, an ax, a saber, and a spear. On top of that, they have arrows that can penetrate armor, set whole villages ablaze, poison their victims, or pierce the hardest bones in the human body. They even have whistling arrows, which they use to send signals from one battalion to another. With such well-developed warfare skills and no God to fear, the Mongols attack and annihilate every city, town, and village on their way. Even ancient cities like Bukhara have been turned into heaps of rubble. And it is not only the Mongols. We need to get Jerusalem back from the Crusaders, not to mention the pressure from the Byzantines and the rivalry between Shiites and Sunnis. When surrounded by cold-blooded enemies on all sides, how can we afford to be peaceful?