by Elif Shafak
“Yes, I can,” Moses assured him. “Let me come with you. I promise, I won’t ask you any questions.”
So they set out on the road, visiting various towns on the way. But when he witnessed Khidr perform senseless actions, like killing a young boy or sinking a boat, Moses could not hold his tongue. “Why did you do those awful things?” he asked desperately.
“What happened to your promise?” Khidr asked back. “Did I not tell you that you can ask me no questions?”
Each time Moses apologized, promising not to ask anything, and each time he broke his promise. In the end, Khidr explained the reason behind each and every one of his actions. Slowly but surely, Moses understood that things that can seem malicious or unfortunate are often a blessing in disguise, whereas things that might seem pleasant can be harmful in the long run. His brief companionship with Khidr was to be the most eye-opening experience in his life.
As in this parable, there are friendships in this world that seem incomprehensible to ordinary people but are in fact conduits to deeper wisdom and insight. This is how I regard Shams’s presence in my father’s life.
But I know that other people don’t see it in the same way, and I am worried. Unfortunately, Shams does not make it easy for people to like him. Sitting at the gate of the seminary in an embarrassingly tyrannical manner, he stops and interrogates everyone who wants to go in to talk to my father.
“What do you want to see the great Mawlana for?” he asks. “What did you bring as a gift?”
Not knowing what to say, people stammer and falter, even apologize. And Shams sends them away.
Some of these visitors return in a few days with presents, carrying dried fruits, silver dirhams, silk carpets, or newborn lambs. But seeing these goods annoys Shams even more. His black eyes aglow, his face glittering with fervor, he chases them away again.
One day a man got so upset with Shams he shouted, “What gives you the right to block Mawlana’s door? You keep asking everyone what they are bringing! How about you? What did you bring him?”
“I brought myself,” Shams said, just loud enough to be heard. “I sacrificed my head for him.”
The man trudged off, mumbling something under his breath, looking more confused than enraged.
The same day I asked Shams if it didn’t trouble him that he was so widely misunderstood and underappreciated. Scarcely able to contain my apprehension, I pointed out that he had gained many enemies lately.
Shams looked at me blankly, as if he had no idea what I was talking about. “But I have no enemies,” he said with a shrug. “The lovers of God can have critics and even rivals, but they cannot have enemies.”
“Yes, but you quarrel with people,” I objected.
Shams bristled with fervor. “I don’t quarrel with them, I quarrel with their ego. That’s different.”
Then he added softly, “It is one of the forty rules: This world is like a snowy mountain that echoes your voice. Whatever you speak, good or evil, will somehow come back to you. Therefore, if there is someone who harbors ill thoughts about you, saying similarly bad things about him will only make matters worse. You will be locked in a vicious circle of malevolent energy. Instead for forty days and nights say and think nice things about that person. Everything will be different at the end of forty days, because you will be different inside.”
“But people are saying all sorts of things about you. They even say for two men to be so fond of each other there has to be an unspeakable bond between them,” I said, my voice failing me toward the end.
Upon hearing this, Shams put his hand on my arm and smiled his usual calming smile. He then told me a story.
Two men were traveling from one town to another. They came to a stream that had risen due to heavy rainfall. Just when they were about to cross the water, they noticed a young, beautiful woman standing there all alone, in need of help. One of the men immediately went to her side. He picked the woman up and carried her in his arms across the stream. Then he dropped her there, waved good-bye, and the two men went their way.
During the rest of the trip, the second traveler was unusually silent and sullen, not responding to his friend’s questions. After several hours of sulking, unable to keep silent anymore, he said, “Why did you touch that woman? She could have seduced you! Men and women cannot come into contact like that!”
The first man responded calmly, “My friend, I carried the woman across the stream, and that is where I left her. It is you who have been carrying her ever since.”
“Some people are like that,” Shams said. “They carry their own fears and biases on their shoulders, crushed under all that weight. If you hear of anyone who cannot comprehend the depth of the bond between your father and me, tell him to wash his mind!”
Ella
NORTHAMPTON, JUNE 15, 2008
Beloved Ella,
You asked me how I became a Sufi. It didn’t happen overnight.
I was born Craig Richardson in Kinlochbervie, a harbor village in the Highlands of Scotland. Whenever I think about the past, I fondly remember the fishing boats, their nets heavy with fish and strands of seaweed dangling like green snakes, sandpipers scurrying along the shore pecking at worms, ragwort plants growing in the most unexpected places, and the smell of the sea in the background, sharp and salty. That smell, as well as those of the mountains and lochs, and the dreary tranquillity of life in postwar Europe composed the background against which my childhood was set.
While the world tumbled heavily into the 1960s and became the scene of student demonstrations, hijackings, and revolutions, I was cut off from it all in my quiet, green corner. My father owned a secondhand-book store, and my mother raised sheep that produced high-quality wool. As a child I had a touch of both the loneliness of a shepherd and the introspectiveness of a bookseller. Many days I would climb an old tree and gaze out at the scenery, convinced that I would spend my whole life there. Every now and then, my heart would constrict with a longing for adventures, but I liked Kinlochbervie and was happy with the predictability of my life. How could I know that God had other plans for me?
Shortly after I turned twenty, I discovered the two things that would change my life forever. The first was a professional camera. I enrolled in a photography class, not knowing that what I saw as a simple hobby would become a lifelong passion. The second was love—a Dutch woman who was touring Europe with friends. Her name was Margot.
She was eight years my elder, beautiful, tall, and remarkably headstrong. Margot regarded herself as a bohemian, an idealist, a radical, a bisexual, a leftist, an individualist anarchist, a multiculturalist, a human-rights advocate, a counterculture activist, an ecofeminist—labels I couldn’t even define should one ask me what they meant. But I had early on observed that she was one more thing: a pendulum woman. Capable of swinging from extreme joy to extreme depression in the span of a few minutes, Margot had unpredictability written all over her. Always furious at what she construed as “the hypocrisy of the bourgeois lifestyle,” she questioned every detail in life, waging battles against society. To this day it is still a mystery to me why I did not run away from her. But I didn’t. Instead I let myself get sucked into the whirling vortex of her animated personality. I was head over heels in love.
She was an impossible combination, full of revolutionary ideas, unbridled courage, and creativity, yet as fragile as a crystal flower. I promised myself to stay by her side and protect her not only from the outside world but also from herself. Did she ever love me as much as I loved her? I don’t think so. But I know she did love me in her own self-centered and self-destructive way.
This is how I ended up in Amsterdam at the age of twenty. We got married there. Margot dedicated her time to helping refugees who had found themselves in Europe for political or humanitarian reasons. Working for an organization that specialized in immigrants’ needs, she helped traumatized people from the most troubled corners of the world find their feet in Holland. She was their guardian angel. Families from
Indonesia, Somalia, Argentina, and Palestine named their daughters after her.
As for me, I wasn’t interested in greater causes, being too busy working my way up the corporate ladder. After graduating from business school, I started working for an international firm. The fact that Margot didn’t care about my status or salary made me yearn even more for the trinkets of success. Hungry for power, I wanted to sink my teeth into important works.
I had our life completely planned out. In two years we would start having children. Two little girls completed my picture of an ideal family. I was confident of the future that awaited us. After all, we lived in one of the safest places on earth, not in one of those troubled countries that kept pumping immigrants into the European continent like a broken faucet. We were young, healthy, and in love. Nothing could go wrong. It is hard to believe I am fifty-four years old now and Margot is no longer alive.
She was the healthy one. A staunch vegan at a time when the word hadn’t been coined, she ate only healthy things, exercised routinely, stayed away from drugs. Her angelic face brimmed with health, her body was always thin, brisk, and angular. She took such good care of herself that despite the age difference between us, I looked older than she did.
She died a most unexpected and simple death. One night, on her way back from a visit to a famous Russian journalist who had applied for asylum, her car broke down in the middle of the highway. And she, who always abided by the rules, did something completely out of her character. Instead of putting on the flashers and waiting for help, she got out of the car and decided to walk to the next village. Wearing a taupe trench coat with dark trousers, she didn’t have a flashlight or anything that would make her more noticeable. A vehicle hit her—a trailer from Yugoslavia. The driver said he never saw her. So completely had Margot melted into the night.
I was a boy once. Love opened up my eyes to a more fulfilled life. After I lost the woman I loved, I metamorphosed drastically. Neither a boy nor an adult, I became a trapped animal. This stage of my life I call my encounter with the letter S in the word “Sufi.”
I hope I haven’t bored you with such a long letter.
Love,
Aziz
Desert Rose the Harlot
KONYA, JANUARY 1246
Barring me from much these days, ever since the scandal I caused at the mosque, the patron doesn’t let me go anywhere. I am grounded forever. But it doesn’t upset me. The truth is, I haven’t been feeling much of anything lately.
Every morning the face that greets me in the mirror looks paler. I don’t comb my hair or pinch my cheeks to redden them anymore. The other girls constantly complain about my bad looks, saying that it keeps the customers away. They may be right. Which is why I was quite surprised when the other day I was told that a particular client insisted on seeing me.
To my horror, it turned out to be Baybars.
As soon as we were alone in the room, I asked, “What is a security guard like you doing here?”
“Well, my coming to a brothel is no more bizarre than a harlot going to a mosque,” he said, his voice heavy with insinuation.
“I am sure you would have loved to lynch me that day,” I said. “I owe my life to Shams of Tabriz.”
“Don’t mention that revolting name. That guy is a heretic!”
“No, he is not!” I don’t know what came over me, but I heard myself say, “Since that day Shams of Tabriz has come to see me many times.”
“Hah! A dervish in a brothel!” Baybars snorted. “Why am I not surprised?”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “It’s not like that at all.”
I had never told this to anyone else before and had no idea why I was telling Baybars now, but Shams had been visiting me every week for the past several months. How he managed to sneak inside without being seen by the others, especially by the patron, was beyond my comprehension. Anyone else would assume that it was with the aid of black magic. But I knew it wasn’t that. He was a good man, Shams. A man of faith. And he had special talents. Other than my mother back in my childhood, Shams was the only person who treated me with unconditional compassion. He had taught me not to be despondent, no matter what. Whenever I told him there was no way someone like me could shed the past, he would remind me of one of his rules: The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals.
Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.
If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.
Shams always told me, “You see, the present moment is all there is and all that there ever will be. When you grasp this truth, you’ll have nothing to fear anymore. Then you can walk out of this brothel for good.”
Baybars was watching my face carefully. When he looked at me, his right eye looked off to the side. It felt as if there were another person in the room with us, someone I couldn’t see. He scared me.
Realizing that it would be best not to talk about Shams anymore, I served him a pitcher of beer, which he drank in a hurry.
“So what is your specialty?” Baybars asked after he guzzled his second beer. “Don’t you girls each have a talent? Can you belly dance?”
I told him I didn’t have such talents and whatever gift I had in the past was gone now, as I was suffering from an unknown illness. The boss would have killed me if she heard me say such things to a client, but I didn’t care. The truth was, I secretly hoped Baybars would spend the night with another girl.
But, to my disappointment, Baybars shrugged and said he didn’t care. Then he took out his pouch, spilled a reddish brown substance from it into his palm, and popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly. “Do you want some?” he asked.
I shook my head. I knew what it was.
“You don’t know what you are missing.” He grinned as he reclined on the bed, drifting away from his own body into a stupor of cannabis.
That evening, high on beer and cannabis, Baybars bragged about the terrible things he had seen on the battlefields. Even though Genghis Khan was dead and his flesh decomposed, his ghost still accompanied the Mongol armies, Baybars said. Egged on by the ghost, the Mongol army was attacking caravans, plundering villages, and massacring women and men alike. He told me about the veil of silence, as soft and peaceful as a blanket on a cold winter night, that descended upon a battlefield after hundreds had been killed and wounded, and dozens more were about to give up their last breath.
“The silence that follows a massive disaster is the most peaceful sound you can hear on the surface of the world,” he said, his voice slurring.
“It sounds so sad,” I murmured.
Suddenly he had no more words inside him. There was nothing else to talk about. Grabbing my arm, he pushed me onto the bed and pulled off my robe. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice hoarse, and his smell was a repugnant mixture of cannabis, sweat, and hunger. He entered me in one harsh, abrasive thrust. I tried to move aside and relax my thighs to lessen the pain, but he pressed both hands on my bosom with such force that it was impossible to budge. He kept rocking back and forth even long after he came inside me, like a string puppet that was manipulated by unseen hands and could not possibly stop. Clearly dissatisfied, he kept moving with such roughness that I feared he was going to get hard again, but then suddenly it all came to an end. Still on top of me, he looked at my face with pure hatred, as if the body that had aroused him a moment ago now disgusted him.
“Put something on,” he ordered as he rolled aside.
I put on my robe, watching out of the corner of my eye as he popped more cannabis into his mouth. “From now on, I want you to be my mistress,” he said with his jaw jutting out.
It wasn’t all that uncommon for clients to come up with such demands. I knew how to handle these delicate situations, giving the client
the false impression that I would love to be his mistress and serve solely him, but for that to happen he had to spend a lot of money and make the patron happy first. But today I didn’t feel like pretending.
“I can’t be your mistress,” I said. “I am going to leave this place very soon.”
Baybars guffawed as if this were the funniest thing he had ever heard. “You can’t do that,” he said with certainty.
I knew I shouldn’t be quarreling with him, but I couldn’t help it. “You and I are not that different. We both have done things in the past that we deeply regret. But you have been made a security guard, thanks to your uncle’s position. I have no uncle backing me, you see.”
Baybars’s face became wooden, and his eyes, cold and distant up till now, suddenly widened with fury. Dashing forward, he grabbed me by the hair. “I was nice to you, wasn’t I?” he growled. “Who do you think you are?”
I opened my mouth to say something, but a sharp stab of pain silenced me. Baybars punched me in the face and pushed me against the wall.
It wasn’t the first time. I had been beaten by clients before but never this badly.
I fell on the floor, and then Baybars started to kick me hard in the ribs and legs while hurling insults at me. It was then and there that I had the strangest experience. As I cringed in pain, my body crushed under the weight of each blow, my soul—or what felt like it—separated from my body, turning itself into a kite, light and free.
Soon I was floating in the ether. As if thrown into a peaceful vacuum where there was nothing to resist and nowhere to go, I simply hovered. I passed over recently harvested wheat fields, where the wind fluttered the head scarves of peasant girls and at night, fireflies glinted here and there like fairy lights. It felt like falling, except falling upward into the bottomless sky.
Was I dying? If this was what death was like, it wasn’t terrifying at all. My worries diminished. I had tumbled into a place of absolute lightness and purity, a magic zone where nothing could pull me down. And suddenly I realized I was living my fear and, to my surprise, it wasn’t frightful. Wasn’t it because of the fear of being harmed that I had been scared to leave the brothel all this time? If I could manage not to be scared of death, I realized with an expanding heart, I could leave this rat hole.
