by Orhan Pamuk
Hurufis, for whom it became difficult to hang on in Iran after the execution of Fazlallah and his associates, crossed over into Anatolia, thanks to the poet Nesimi who was one of Fazlallah’s successors. The poet, loading Fazlallah’s books and manuscripts on Hurufism in a green trunk which would achieve legendary status among Hurufis, traveled throughout Anatolia, hitting each and every town to find fresh adherents in remote seminaries where even the spiders took naps in lazarettos and tekkes for the lazy that teemed with lizards, and in order to illustrate for his trainees that not only the Koran but the whole world swarmed with secrets, he resorted to letter and word games inspired by the game of chess which he loved. Poet Nesimi—who, in two lines of verse, likened a feature and a beauty spot on his sweetheart’s face to a letter and a period, the letter and the period to a sponge and pearl in the bottom of the sea, himself to a diver who dies for the sake of the pearl, the diver who voluntarily dives into death to a lover seeking God, and so, coming full circle, likened his sweetheart to God—was arrested in Aleppo, subjected to a long trial, and flayed to death: After his body was strung up and exhibited in the city, the corpse was cut into seven parts, and each part was buried, as an object lesson, in one of the seven cities where he had found himself adherents and where his poems were recited.
Under Poet Nesimi’s influence, Hurufism had spread rapidly among the Bektaşis in the land of the Ottomans, and had even turned on Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror some fifteen years after his conquest of Constantinople. When the theologians around him realized that the Sultan carried Fazlallah’s treatises around, holding forth on the mystery of the world, the enigma of letters, the secrets of Byzantium, which he observed from his palace where he had moved in recently, and that he investigated how each and every chimney, dome, and tree that he pointed out individually could provide the key for penetrating into the mystery of another realm that existed underground, they had schemed against those Hurufis who managed to get close to the Sultan and had them burned alive.
In a little book which had a handwritten note appended to its last page, informing (or misinforming) that it was printed covertly in Horasan, near Erzurum, at the beginning of World War II, Galip came across pictures of Hurufis being beheaded and burned after an assassination attempt on the Conqueror’s son, Bayazit II. On another page, Hurufis who’d been burned to death for not obeying Süleyman the Magnificent’s order for their deportation had been depicted with a childlike execution and an expression of horror. In the undulating flames that lapped up the bodies, the alifs and lams of the word Allah were legible, but what was stranger was that the bodies, which burned furiously in the Arabic alphabet, emitted from their eyes tears that were adorned with O’s, U’s, and C’s of the Latin alphabet. This constituted the first Hurufi interpretation that Galip had run across of the 1928 Alphabet Reform—the transition from Arabic characters to the Latin alphabet—but since his mind was on the formula for the solution to a riddle, he continued reading what he found in the box without evaluating what he’d seen.
He read a great many pages attesting that God’s essential attribute was a “hidden treasure” (a kenz-ı mahfı), a mystery. The question was to find a way to get to it. The question was to realize that the mystery was reflected in the world. The question was to comprehend that the mystery was present in everything, every object, every person. The world was an ocean of clues, every one of its drops had the salt taste that led to the mystery behind it. The more Galip’s tired and inflamed eyes read on, the more he knew that he would penetrate into the ocean’s secrets.
Since the signs were everywhere and in everything, the mystery was also everywhere and in everything. Like the beloved’s face in poems, the pearls, roses, wine goblets, nightingales, golden hair, night, and flames that Galip kept reading about, the objects around him were both signs of themselves and of the mystery that he was slowly approaching. The curtain lit by the weak light of the lamp, the old armchairs teeming with memories of Rüya, the shadows on the walls, the ominous phone receiver, the very fact that they were so replete with stories and allusions, gave Galip the feeling that he was being sucked into a game unawares, as he had sometimes felt when he was in his childhood. He continued to go ahead, feeling only slightly mistrustful on account of his conviction that he could get out of the scary game (where everyone impersonated someone else and every object simulated something other than itself) by becoming, as he did when he was a child, still another someone else. “If you’re afraid, I’ll turn the light on,” he used to tell Rüya, realizing that she was just as scared as he was when they played the game in the dark. “Don’t turn it on,” said undaunted Rüya, who liked being scared. Galip went on reading.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, some Hurufis had settled in remote villages that had been abandoned by the peasantry who had fled from pashas, judges, bandits, and imams during the Jelali uprisings that had left Anatolia in shambles. Galip was trying to make sense of the lines in a longish poem describing the felicitous and meaningful lifestyle that once prevailed in these Hurufi villages, when he recalled the happy memories of his own childhood spent with Rüya.
In those distant felicitous times, significance and action had been identical. In that Golden Age, things in our houses and our dreams of them were the same. Back in those years of happiness, everyone knew that daggers and pens, tools and such that we held in our hands, were extensions not only of our bodies but also of our souls. Back then, when a poet said “tree,” everyone could visualize that tree exactly, and everyone knew that in order for the word and the tree in the poem to signify whatever else was in the garden and life as well as the tree, there was no necessity to display undue skill enumerating the leaves and the branches. Everyone knew very well back then that words and what they described were so close that on mornings when fog descended on the phantom villages in the mountains, the words and what they described were intermingled. People who woke from their sleep on foggy mornings could not tell apart their dreams from reality, poems from life, and names from human beings. Back then, stories and lives were so real that nobody even conceived of asking which was the original life or which was the original story. Dreams were lived through and lives were thoroughly interpreted. As was everything else, people’s faces too were so meaningful back then that even those who weren’t literate, who couldn’t tell their alpha from an apple, their a from a hat, and their alif from a stick, began spontaneously reading the letters that reveal the meaning in our faces.
In those distant happy days people were not even conscious of time, the poet wrote that the orange sun stood still in the evening sky, and galleons whose sails were filled with a wind that did not blow made voyages without motion on a still ocean that was the color of glass and ash, and as Galip read he realized, having come across the image of white mosques and even whiter minarets rising like a mirage that would never vanish beside this sea, that the Hurufi imagination and life which had remained concealed since the seventeenth century had nonetheless encompassed Istanbul. When Galip read how the storks, albatrosses, simurghs, and the phoenix taking wing against the three-tiered white minarets toward the horizon swayed for centuries as if suspended in the sky above the domes of Istanbul; how every outing in the streets of Istanbul, none of which crossed each other at right angles nor according to some plan, was as heady and recreative as a holiday trip to eternity; and how on warm moonlit nights in summer, when it was possible to draw from wells not only ice-cold water but also pailfuls of mysterious signs and stars, everyone recited poems all night long that bespoke the meaning of the signs and the signs of the meaning, he understood not only that an unadulterated golden age of Hurufism had once existed in Istanbul, but that his own happy days with Rüya were long gone.
This felicitous age must have been short-lived. Galip read that soon after the golden age during which the secrets of the mystery became notorious, secrets had become more confusing—that in an effort to conceal their mysteries all the more, some people had resorted to elixir
s made of blood, eggs, hair, and shit, mixtures like those concocted by the Hurufis in the phantom villages; others had dug passageways under their houses in Istanbul’s secret locations in order to bury their mysteries. He read that there were those not as lucky as the ones who had dug passageways, men caught for joining the Janissary rebellions and hanged on trees, whose facial letters got deformed by the greased noose tightened around their necks like neckties, and also that bards who took their lutes to dervish lodges in the slums to whisper Hurufi secrets were met with walls of incomprehension. All this evidence confirmed that the golden age, which was lived as much in secret locales and mysterious streets in Istanbul as in remote phantom villages, had been abruptly brought to an end.
When Galip reached the last page of the book of poetry that mice had gnawed along the edges and on the corners of which glass-green and turquoise mildew had flowered with the pleasant smell of paper and dampness, he came across a note that more elaborate information on the subject had been undertaken in another treatise. According to the long, ungrammatical sentence stuck in by the typesetter from Horasan in small print between the last lines of the poem and the addresses of the printers, the publishers, dates of composition and publication, the seventh book of the same series published by the same outfit in Horasan near Erzurum was a work penned by F. M. Üçüncü, called Mystery of Letters and Loss of Mystery, which had rated praise from the Istanbul journalist Selım Kaçmaz.
Galip, fogged out with dreams of Rüya and fantasies of words and letters, weary and sleepless, recalled Jelal’s early years in journalism. Back in those days, Jelal’s involvement with word and letter games did not go beyond sending coded messages to his lovers, family, and friends in the “Your Horoscope Today” and “Believe It or Not” columns. He searched furiously for the treatise among the wads of paper, magazines, and newsprint. After turning the place completely upside down, when he finally came across the book among the news clips from the early sixties that Jelal had saved, unpublished polemics, and some weird photographs in a box he was going through without any hope, it was way past midnight, and the sort of disheartening stillness that sends cold chills down your spine, characteristic of the curfew when the country was under martial law, had fallen on the streets.
Like many a “work” of this sort, the publication or the near-publication of which is announced prematurely, Mystery of Letters and Loss of Mystery had managed to see publication only many years later, in 1967, in another town, Gördes—it surprised Galip that the place even had a printing press back then—as a book of two hundred and twenty-two pages. On the yellowed cover was a dark picture which had been printed from a poorly made plate with cheap ink: in the crude perspective drawing, a road bordered with chestnut trees stretched out to the vanishing point. Beside each tree were letters, terrifying, blood-curdling letters.
At first glance, it looked like one of those books written some years back by “idealist” military officers, in the genre of “Why Have We Not Caught Up with the West in the Past Two Hundred Years? How Do We Make Progress?” It began with the sort of dedication seen in books printed in some out-of-the-way town in Anatolia at the writer’s expense: “War College cadet! You are the one who will save this country!” But when Galip began turning the pages, he realized he was in the presence of an entirely different kind of “work.” He got up from the chair and went to Jelal’s desk; placing his elbows on either side of the book, he began to read attentively.
Mystery of Letters and Loss of Mystery was comprised of three main sections, the first two appearing in the book’s title. The first section, “Mystery of Letters (that is, of Huruf),” began with the biography of Fazlallah, the founder of Hurufism. F. M. Üçüncü added a secular dimension to the story, introducing Fazlallah more as a rationalist, philosopher, mathematician, and linguist than as a Sufi and a mystic. As much as Fazlallah was a prophet, a messiah, a martyr and saint—or more than he was these—he was a subtle philosopher and a genius, but one “unique to us.” Attempting to explain his thought as Pantheism, or through Plotinus, Pythagoras, or the Cabala, as some Orientalists in the West had done, was nothing more than stabbing Fazlallah by using Western thought, which he had opposed all his life. Fazlallah was an unadulterated man of the East.
According to F. M. Üçüncü, East and West shared the two halves of the world: they were total opposites, rejecting, contradicting each other—like good and bad, black and white, angel and devil. Contrary to the optimistic assumptions of those who live in a dream world, it was not at all possible for the two realms to come to terms and live in peace. One or the other of the two had always dominated, one world playing the master and the other the slave. To illustrate this endless war of twins, the writer reviewed a progression of historical events loaded with special significance, starting with Alexander cutting the Gordian knot (“that is, the cipher,” the writer comments), the Crusades, the double meanings of the characters and numbers on the magic clock Haroun al-Rashid sent Charlemagne, Hannibal crossing the Alps, the Islamic victory in Andalusia (there was a whole page devoted to the number of columns in the Mosque in Cordova), the conquest of Byzantium and Constantinople by Mehmet the Conqueror who himself was a Hurufi, the collapse of the Khazars, and ending with the defeat of the Ottomans laying siege first to Doppio (The White Castle) and then to Venice.
According to F. M. Üçüncü, all these historical facts signified a salient point to which Fazlallah had made veiled allusions in his work. The periods during which either the East or the West dominated over its opposite number were not random but logical. Whichever realm was successful in seeing the world as an equivocal, mysterious place that swarmed with secrets “during the particular historic period” that realm got the better of the other and dominated it. Those who saw the world as a simple, unambiguous, un-mysterious place were condemned to defeat and its attendant result, which was slavery.
F. M. Üçüncü reserved the second section for a detailed discussion of the loss of mystery. No matter what it was, be it in reference to ancient Greek philosophy’s “idea,” Neoplatonic Christianity’s “Deity,” the Hindu’s “Nirvana,” Attar’s “simurgh,” Rumi’s “beloved,” the Hurufi’s “secret treasure,” Kant’s “noumenon,” or the culprit in a detective novel, mystery meant, each time, the “center” that remained hidden in the world. In which case, commented F. M. Üçüncü, observing a culture’s loss of the concept of “mystery,” one had to deduce that its ideas, being bereft of the “center,” had also gone out of kilter.
Galip went on to read lines he couldn’t get the hang of, related to the necessity for Rumi to have his “beloved” Shams of Tabriz murdered, his journey to Damascus to protect the mystery that he had “installed,” the insufficiency of his wanderings and searches through that city to support the idea of “mystery,” and the locales where Rumi stopped during his wanderings in order to relocate the “center” of his thoughts, which was going off-center. The writer maintained that committing the perfect murder, or disappearing without a trace, were good methods of reestablishing the lost mystery.
Later on, F. M. Üçüncü embarked upon the relationship of “letters and faces,” which was Hurufism’s most important topic. As Fazlallah had done in his Book of Eternal Life, he revealed that God, who was concealed, was manifest in human faces, he examined the lines in human faces at length, and he established the relationship between these lines and the Arabic characters. Following the pages of long, childlike discussions of lines in the poetry of Hurufi poets, such as Nesimi, Rafii, Misali, Ruhi of Baghdad, and Rose Baba, a certain logic was tabulated. During periods of felicity and success, all our faces had meaning, as did the inhabited world. We owed the meaning to the Hurufis, who saw mystery in the world and letters in our faces. Due to the disappearance of Hurufism, then, the letters in our faces, as well as the mystery in our world, had also disappeared. Our faces were, therefore, vacant; there was no longer any rationale to read anything in them; our eyebrows, our eyes, our noses, our gazes and express
ions were empty, and our faces meaningless. Although Galip felt like getting up to look at himself in the mirror, he kept on reading carefully.
The horrifyingly dark results of the art of photography, as it got directed toward people as subjects, were related to this emptiness in our faces, just as was the odd topography seen in the faces of Turkish, Arab, and Indian movie stars that reminded one of the invisible face of the moon. That the throngs of people in the streets of Istanbul, Damascus, and Cairo were as alike as restless ghosts moaning at midnight; that the scowling faces of the men all wore the same mustaches; and that all the women wearing the same sort of head cloth always stared identically, were the consequences of this emptiness. Therefore, it was necessary to construct a new system of observing letters in the Latin alphabet which would imbue our vacant faces with a renewed meaning. The second section of the book was concluded with the good news that that very operation would be performed in the third section titled “Discovery of Mystery.”
Galip had taken a liking to F. M. Üçüncü, who used words with double meanings and displayed a childlike innocence playing with words. Something about him was reminiscent of Jelal.
Chapter Twenty-seven
A LENGTHY CHESS GAME
Haroun al-Rashid would at times go around Baghdad in disguise, wishing to find out what his subjects thought about him and his rule. So, yet another night …
—The Thousand and One Nights
A letter that sheds light on a dark juncture in our recent history known as the years of “democratization” fell into the hands of a reader who does not wish his name divulged or, with good reason, the coincidental, compelling, and treacherous circumstances under which the letter was obtained. I am publishing it in these columns as is, without touching the language (the idiom of a Pasha), written by our erstwhile military dictator to one of his sons, or daughters, who was apparently residing abroad.
