by Elif Shafak
‘Maybe,’ Azur said. ‘You see, you’re not the only one apologizing to God.’
On the screen the battery turned from black to red. ‘Would you do something for me?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I’d like to have one more seminar. Now.’
He laughed. ‘What do you mean? On what?’
‘On forgiveness and love,’ she said. ‘And knowledge. I’ll be the professor this time, deal?’
A wary pause. ‘I’m listening, dear.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Today’s lecture is on Ibn Arabi and Ibn Rushd – Averroës. Ibn Rushd was an eminent philosopher, Ibn Arabi a young and hopeful student when the two of them met for the first time. They immediately felt a rapport, as they were both devoted to books and learning and neither embraced the orthodoxy. But they were also very different.’
‘How?’
‘You see, it’s the same question East and West, isn’t it? How do you increase your knowledge of yourself and of the world? Ibn Rushd had a clear answer: through reflective thinking. Reasoning. Studying.’
‘And Ibn Arabi?’
‘He wanted both reason and mystical insights. He believed it was our duty as human beings to expand our wisdom. But he also recognized there were things beyond the limits of the mind. Before they went their separate ways, Ibn Rushd asked Ibn Arabi, one last time, Is it through rational consideration that we unveil the Truth?
‘And what did Ibn Arabi say?’
‘He said yes, and he said no. “Between the yes and the no,” he said, “spirits fly from their matter and minds from their bodies.” He thought no one was more ignorant than those who seek God and yet only those who pursue a truth bigger than themselves have a chance to attain it.’
‘Tell me, Peri, why were you interested in this story?’
‘Because I was always in that limbo between yes and no. No stranger to faith, no stranger to doubt. Undecided. Vacillating. Never self-confident. Maybe it made me who I am, all that uncertainty. It also became my worst enemy. I saw no way out of it.’ She paused. ‘I told you about the baby in the mist. If not a hallucination, it was a type of experience you had never heard of before. Another scholar would have scoffed at it, sure, but you didn’t. You were always open to the new. I admired you for that.’
‘You think you were the only one confused. But many of us are.’
Us. A sigh of a word. So tiny, so huge. We the confused.
Peri shook her head. ‘I admired you too much. Now I can see it clearly. When we fall in love we turn the other person into our god – how dangerous is that? And when he doesn’t love us back, we respond with anger, resentment, hatred …’
She said, ‘There’s something about love that resembles faith. It’s a kind of blind trust, isn’t it? The sweetest euphoria. The magic of connecting with a being beyond our limited, familiar selves. But if we get carried away by love – or by faith – it turns into a dogma, a fixation. The sweetness becomes sour. We suffer in the hands of the gods that we ourselves created.’
‘I must be one of the last persons on earth to be considered a god,’ Azur said.
‘It wasn’t you,’ Peri said. ‘It was the Azur I had created for myself. The one I needed in order to make sense of my own fragmented past. That’s the professor I was infatuated with. The Azur in my mind.’
So she continued. Her voice building in strength, her eyes now fully adjusted to the dark, a mobile flickering in her injured hand, she gave a lecture to a man in a house outside Oxford while his dog waited patiently by his side. It could easily have been the other way round: he in danger, she in safety. Today she was the tutor; he, the pupil. Roles shifted, words never stayed still. The shape of life was a circle, and every point on that circle was at an equal distance from the centre – whether one called that God or something else altogether.
She heard the sound of sirens closing in on the seaside mansion. In a few minutes, no more, everything was going to change – a new beginning or an end too soon. As the phone gave one last beep before it died completely, she opened the door of the wardrobe and stepped out.
Acknowledgements
My motherland, Turkey, is a river country, neither solid nor settled. During the course of writing this novel that river changed so many times, flowing with a dizzying speed.
My heartfelt thanks to two people who are very dear to me: my agent Jonny Geller and my editor Venetia Butterfield. I am indebted to both for their encouragement, support and faith; for taking care of my anxieties and panic attacks and for being on this journey together. Special thanks to Daisy Meyrick, Mairi Friesen-Escandell, Catherine Cho, Anna Ridley, Emma Brown, Isabel Wall and Keith Taylor: the wonderful teams at Curtis Brown and Penguin, it is a true joy to work with you.
I owe a ‘thank you’ the size of Istanbul’s traffic to Stephen Barber, who has read and reread this book, offering me most precious advice. I am grateful to Lorna Owen for her valuable insights and contribution. It is a blessing for an author to work with the brilliant Donna Poppy. Thank you to Nigel Newton for his enthusiasm and camaraderie.
Thanks in abundance to my children, Zelda and Zahir, for putting up with my irregular writing hours and tolerating the music I listen to while writing. It’s too noisy, I know.
Motherlands are beloved, no doubt; sometimes they can also be exasperating and maddening. Yet I have also come to learn that for writers and poets for whom national borders and cultural barriers are there to be questioned, again and again, there is, in truth, only one motherland, perpetual and portable.
Storyland.
THE BEGINNING
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First published 2016
Copyright © Elif Shafak, 2016
The epigraph by Rainer Maria Rilke appears by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Translation by Babette Deutch, from Poems from the Book of Hours, copyright © 1941 by New Directions Publishing Corp.
The epigraph by Rabia appears by kind permission of Daniel Ladinsky.
Translation by Daniel Ladinsky, from Love Poems from God, edited by Daniel Ladinsky.
Copyright © Daniel Ladinsky
The extract here by Hafez appears by kind permission of Daniel Ladinsky. Translation by Daniel Ladinsky, from The Gift, edited by Daniel Ladinsky. Copyright © Daniel Ladinsky
The extract here from The Rock by T. S. Eliot, copyright © T. S. Eliot.
Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber LTD
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-97887-0
* efendim: ‘sir’.
* Sherefe: ‘To your honour’.
* canimin içi: ‘core of my soul’.
* ayran: ‘cold yoghurt drink’.
* Opening chapter of the Quran.
* Canim: ‘My life’.
* nazar boncugu: ‘evil-eye bead’.
* darbuka: ‘Middle Eastern goblet drum’.
* Tövbe, tövbe: ‘Repent, repent’.
* manti: ‘homemade dumplings filled with meat’.
* Rumi.
† Diogenes.
‡ Meister Eckhart.
§ Spinoza, of course.
* Evladim: ‘My child’.
(Series: # )
