Shams
KONYA, OCTOBER 30, 1244
Before I met Rumi, just one night prior, I sat on my balcony at the Inn of Sugar Vendors. My heart rejoiced at the magnificence of the universe God had created in His image, so that everywhere we turned, we could both seek and find Him. And yet human beings rarely did that.
I recalled the individuals I had met—the beggar, the prostitute, and the drunk. Ordinary people who suffered from a common malady: separation from the One. These were the kind of people that the scholars failed to see while sitting in their ivory towers. I wondered if Rumi was any different. If not, I made a note to myself that I should be a conduit between him and the underbelly of society.
The town had finally gone to sleep. It was that time of night when even the nocturnal animals are reluctant to disturb the reigning peace. It always made me both immensely sad and elated to listen to a town sleep, wondering what sorts of stories were being lived behind closed doors, what sorts of stories I could have lived had I chosen another path. But I hadn’t made any choice. If anything, the path had chosen me.
I remembered a tale.
A wandering dervish arrived in a town where the natives didn’t trust strangers. “Go away!” they shouted at him. “No one knows you here!”
The dervish calmly responded, “Yes, but I know myself, and believe me, it would have been much worse if it were the other way round.”
As long as I knew myself, I would be all right. Whosoever knows himself, knows the One.
The moon showered me with its warm glow. A light rain, as delicate as a silk scarf, began to fall on the town. I thanked God for this blessed moment and left myself in His hands. The fragility and brevity of life struck me once again, and I recalled another rule:
Life is a temporary loan, and this world is nothing but a sketchy imitation of Reality. Only children would mistake a toy for the real thing. And yet human beings either become infatuated with the toy or disrespectfully break it and throw it aside. In this life stay away from all kinds of extremities, for they will destroy your inner balance.
Sufis do not go to extremes. A Sufi always remains mild and moderate.
Tomorrow morning I will go to the big mosque and listen to Rumi. He can be as great a preacher as everyone says, but in the end the breadth and scope of every speaker are determined by those of his audience. Rumi’s words might be like a wild garden, full of teasels, herbs, spruces, and shrubs, but it is always up to the visitor to pick his fancy. While pretty flowers are instantly plucked, few people pay attention to plants with thorns and prickles. But the truth is, great medicines are often made from these.
Isn’t it the same with the garden of love? How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.
There is only one more day before I meet my companion. I cannot sleep.
Oh, Rumi! The king of the realm of words and meanings!
Will you know me when you see me?
See me!
Rumi
KONYA, OCTOBER 31, 1244
Blessed is this day, for I have met Shams of Tabriz. On this last day of October, the air has a new chill and the winds blow stronger, announcing the departure of autumn.
This afternoon the mosque was packed, as usual. While preaching to large crowds, I always take care to neither forget nor remember my audience. And there is only one way of doing this: to imagine the crowd as one single person. Hundreds of people listen to me every week, but I always talk to one person alone—the one who hears my words echo in his heart and who knows me like no other.
When I walked out of the mosque afterward, I found my horse readied for me. The animal’s mane had been braided with strands of gold and tiny silver bells. I enjoyed listening to the tinkling of the bells at every step, but with so many people blocking the way it was impossible to proceed very fast. In a measured pace, we passed by shabby stores and houses with thatched roofs. The calls of the petitioners mingled with the cries of children and the shouts of beggars eager to earn a few coins. Most of these people wanted me to pray for them; some simply wished to walk close to me. But there were others who had come with bigger expectations, asking me to heal them of a terminal illness or an evil spell. These were the ones who worried me. How could they not see that, neither a prophet nor a sage, I was incapable of performing miracles?
As we turned a corner and approached the Inn of Sugar Vendors, I noticed a wandering dervish push his way through the crowd, strutting directly toward me and regarding me with piercing eyes. His movements were deft and focused, and he exuded an aura of self-sufficient competence. He had no hair. No beard. No eyebrows. And though his face was as open as a man’s face could ever be, his expression was inscrutable.
But it wasn’t his appearance that intrigued me. Over the years I had seen wandering dervishes of all sorts pass through Konya in their quest for God. With striking tattoos, multiple earrings and nose rings, most of these people enjoyed having “unruly” written all over them. They either wore their hair very long or shaved it off completely. Some Qalandaris even had their tongues and nipples pierced. So when I saw the dervish for the first time, it wasn’t his outer shell that startled me. It was, I dare to say, his gaze.
His black eyes blazing at me sharper than daggers, he stood in the middle of the street and raised his arms high and wide, as if he wanted to halt not only the procession but also the flow of time. I felt a jolt run through my body, like a sudden intuition. My horse got nervous and started to snort loudly, jerking its head up and down. I tried to calm it, but it got so skittish that I, too, felt nervous.
Before my eyes the dervish approached my horse, which was shying and dancing about, and whispered something inaudible to it. The animal started to breathe heavily, but when the dervish waved his hand in a final gesture, it instantly quieted down. A wave of excitement rippled through the crowd, and I heard someone mutter, “That’s black magic!”
Oblivious to his surroundings, the dervish eyed me curiously. “O great scholar of East and West, I have heard so much about you. I came here today to ask you a question, if I may?”
“Go ahead,” I said under my breath.
“Well, you need to get down from your horse first and be on the same level with me.”
I was so stunned to hear this that I couldn’t speak for a moment. The people around me seemed equally taken aback. No one had ever dared to address me like this before.
I felt my face burn and my stomach turn with irritation, but I managed to control my ego and dismounted my horse. The dervish had already turned his back and was walking away.
“Hey, wait, please!” I yelled as I caught up with him. “I want to hear your question.”
He stopped and turned around, smiling at me for the first time. “All right, do tell me, please, which of the two is greater, do you think: the Prophet Muhammad or the Sufi Bistami?”
“What kind of a question is that?” I said. “How can you compare our venerated Prophet, may peace be upon him, the last in the line of prophets, with an infamous mystic?”
A curious crowd had gathered around us, but the dervish didn’t seem to mind the audience. Still studying my face carefully, he insisted, “Please think about it. Didn’t the Prophet say, ‘Forgive me, God, I couldn’t know Thee as I should have,’ while Bistami pronounced, ‘Glory be to me, I carry God inside my cloak’? If one man feels so small in relation to God while another man claims to carry God inside, which of the two is greater?”
My heart pulsed in my throat. The question didn’t seem so absurd anymore. In fact, it felt as if a veil had been lifted and what awaited me underneath was an intriguing puzzle. A furtive smile, like a passing breeze, crossed the lips of the dervish. Now I knew he was not some crazy lunatic. He was a man with a question—a question I hadn’t thought about before.
“I see what you are trying to say,” I began, not wanting him to hear so much as a quaver in my voice. “I’ll compare the two statements and tell you why, even though Bistami’s statement sounds higher, it is in fact the other way round.”
“I am all ears,” the dervish said.
“You see, God’s love is an endless ocean, and human beings strive to get as much water as they can out of it. But at the end of the day, how much water we each get depends on the size of our cups. Some people have barrels, some buckets, while some others have only got bowls.”
As I spoke, I watched the dervish’s expression change from subtle scorn to open acknowledgment and from there into the soft smile of someone recognizing his own thoughts in the words of another.
“Bistami’s container was relatively small, and his thirst was quenched after a mouthful. He was happy in the stage he was at. It was wonderful that he recognized the divine in himself, but even then there still remains a distinction between God and Self. Unity is not achieved. As for the Prophet, he was the Elect of God and had a much bigger cup to fill. This is why God asked him in the Qur’an,
Have we not opened up your heart?
His heart thus widened, his cup immense, it was thirst upon thirst for him. No wonder he said, ‘We do not know You as we should,’ although he certainly knew Him as no other did.”
Breaking into a good-natured grin, the dervish nodded and thanked me. He then placed his hand on his heart in a gesture of gratitude and stayed like that for a few seconds. When our eyes met again, I noticed that a trace of gentleness had crept into his gaze.
I stared past the dervish into the pearl gray landscape that was typical of our town at this time of the year. A few dry leaves skittered around our feet. The dervish looked at me with renewed interest, and in the dying light of the setting sun, for a split second, I could swear that I saw an amber aura around him.
He bowed to me respectfully. And I bowed to him. I don’t know how long we stood like that, the sky hanging violet above our heads. After a while the crowd around us began to stir nervously, having watched our exchange with an astonishment that verged on disapproval. They had never seen me bow to anyone before, and the fact that I had done so for a simple wandering Sufi had come as a shock to some people, including my closest disciples.
The dervish must have sensed the censure in the air.
“I’d better go now and leave you to your admirers,” he said, his voice dwindling to a velvety timbre, almost a whisper.
“Wait,” I objected. “Don’t go, please. Stay!”
I glimpsed a trace of thoughtfulness in his face, a wistful pucker of the lips, as if he wanted to say more but simply couldn’t or wouldn’t. And in that moment, in that pause, I heard the question he hadn’t asked me.
And how about you, great preacher? Tell me, how big is your cup?
Then there was nothing else to say. We ran out of words. I took a step toward the dervish, getting so close I could see the flecks of gold in his black eyes. Suddenly I was overcome with a strange feeling, as if I had lived this moment before. Not once, but more than a dozen times. I started to remember bits and pieces. A tall, slender man with a veil on his face, his fingers aflame. And then I knew. The dervish who stood across from me was no other than the man I had been seeing in my dreams.
I knew that I had found my companion. But instead of feeling ecstatic with joy, as I always thought I would be, I was seized by cold dread.
Ella
NORTHAMPTON, JUNE 8, 2008
Beleaguered by questions and lacking answers, Ella found that there were many things that surprised her about her correspondence with Aziz, particularly the fact that it was happening. The two of them were so different in every respect that she wondered what they could possibly have in common to e-mail each other about so frequently.
Aziz was like a jigsaw puzzle she aimed to complete piece by piece. With every new e-mail from him, another piece of that puzzle fell into place. Ella had yet to see the entire picture, but by now she had discovered a few things about the man she’d been corresponding with.
She had learned from his blog that Aziz was a professional photographer and an avid globe-trotter who found navigating his way through the farthest corners of the world as natural and easy as taking a stroll around the neighborhood park. A relentless nomad at heart, he had been everywhere, equally at home in Siberia, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Casablanca. Traveling with only a backpack and a reed flute, he had made friends in places Ella couldn’t even find on the map. Uncompromising border guards, the impossibility of getting a visa from hostile governments, waterborne parasitic diseases, intestinal disorders due to contaminated food, the danger of being mugged, clashes between government troops and rebels—nothing could hold him back from traveling east and west, north and south.
Ella thought Aziz was a gushing waterfall. Where she feared to step, he surged full blast. Where she hesitated and worried before acting, he acted first and worried later, if he ever worried at all. He had an animated personality, too much idealism and passion for one body. He wore many hats and he wore them well.
Ella saw herself as a liberal, opinionated Democrat, a nonpracticing Jew, and an aspiring vegetarian who was determined to cut all sorts of meat from her meals one day. She separated issues into clear-cut categories, organizing her world pretty much as she organized her house, neat and tidy. Her mind operated with two mutually exclusive and equally lengthy lists: the things she liked versus the things she hated.
Though she was by no means an atheist and enjoyed performing a few rituals every now and then, Ella believed that the major problem consuming the world today, just as in the past, was religion. With their unparalleled arrogance and self-proclaimed belief in the supremacy of their ways, religious people got on her nerves. Fanatics of all religions were bad and unbearable, but deep inside she thought that fanatics of Islam were the worst.
Aziz, however, was a spiritual man who took matters of religion and faith seriously, stayed away from all contemporary politics, and didn’t “hate” anything or anyone. A die-hard meat eater, he said he would never refuse a plate of well-cooked shish kebab. He had converted to Islam from atheism in the mid-1970s, as he jokingly put it, “sometime after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and before Cat Stevens.” Ever since then he had shared bread with hundreds of mystics from every country and religion, and he declared them “brothers and sisters along the path.”
A committed pacifist with strong humanitarian views, Aziz believed that all religious wars were in essence a “linguistic problem.” Language, he said, did more to hide than reveal the Truth, and as a result people constantly misunderstood and misjudged one another. In a world beset with mistranslations, there was no use in being resolute about any topic, because it might as well be that even our strongest convictions were caused by a simple misunderstanding. In general, one shouldn’t be too rigid about anything because “to live meant to constantly shift colors.”
Aziz and Ella lived in different time zones. Literally and metaphorically. For her, time primarily meant the future. She spent a considerable part of her days obsessing over plans for the next year, the next month, the next day, or even the next minute. Even for things as trivial as shopping or replacing a broken chair, Ella planned every detail in advance and went around with meticulous schedules and to-do lists in her bag.
For Aziz, on the other hand, time centered on this very moment, and anything other than now was an illusion. For the same reason, he believed that love had nothing to do with “plans for tomorrow” or “memories of yesterday.” Love could only be here and now. One of his earlier e-mails to her had ended with this note: “I am a Sufi, the child of the present moment.”
“What a bizarre thing to say,” Ella wrote him back, “to a woman who has always put too much thought into the past and even more thought into the future but somehow never even touched the present moment.”