Living from the heart

Uzair, rıght, talks about Turkish culture in the garden room that serves as our dining room, classroom, and place where people from all over the world gather for zıkr, Islamic devotional chanting ın the evenıngs.

Uzair was our tour guide today. A Sufi scholar, shop owner and the owner of the Dervish Brothers Center where we are staying, he imparted knowledge about what we were about to experience when visiting the tombs of Shams and Rumi by telling the story of their meeting in Konya.

Rumi was a seminary dean, a job he inherited from this father. Shams, which means light of the sun, was a wandering holy man. In their initial meeting, in one version of the story, Shams asked Rumi which had more power, the truth or Allah. Rumi first answered that Allah had more power but then fashioned the argument to come to the conclusion that the truth had more power.

That idea, that everything is always everything and that the world is a space where there are many truths, seems to be at the heart of Sufi practice. The two became fast friends and some six months later a jealous son or student beheaded Shams. There were some that warned him that he would be kiılled, but he merely answered that “it was his time.” For Rumi, the loss of his Beloved, birthed his poetry and the whirling dervishes. Rumi's son is credited for creating the Sufi practice.

Earlier Baba (the endearing term for father) Ismael, an Islamic Cantor from New York City and Istanbul, told us a story about when a king wanted to choose a prime minister. The way the story goes, he picked three men that he thought could do the job. One was a mathematician, one a philosopher and one a religious singer. He told them that they needed to study for 40 days after which he would give them a test. The mathematician and the philosopher studied hard, day and night. The religious singer decided that he had gotten this far in life and that he either would know the answer or he wouldn't. He rested and would sing his songs all day. The noise very much bothered the two scholars. They insisted that he cease.

Finally the 40 days passed and the king brought the three men to the palace for the test. He put them into a room and told them that he was going to lock the door and that they had to puzzle their way out. The mathematician and the philosopher quickly went to work with pencil and paper. A bit later, the king came and asked them what they were doing there.

“The door is open,” he said, “and the religious singer is my prime minister.” The two men were stunned. They had not even noticed that man had left.

As it turned out, the religious singer had sat down and thought about the door and how the king might have simply been trying to fool them. He turned the knob and walked out of the room.

The moral of the story, and the crux of our learning is that not everything is meant to be puzzled out and sometimes when we are deep in our machinations, we can not see that we can simply walk through the open door.

Sufi wisdom is simple and clear. “The secret of the light is hidden in simplicity.”