Only on that Thursday could I at last thank Allah or my lucky stars, or whatever it was that had kept my lady from finding out how her love had ingratiated himself to our host, and just how many long evenings he had spent in the selamlik under the same roof as her harem.
I took relief in both body and spirit, and wandered through the city on my own, ending up at the Ala ud-Din Mosque. I remembered having been there before, but the reason escaped me. In the mad flurry over Ferhad, I had forgotten about my strange dream that had driven me to search for dervishes.
And now as I entered the holy building, such a feeling of well-being and calm came over me that I couldn’t ascribe it to the absence of the spahis alone. Seeking a rational explanation for my feeling, I began to enumerate the ways in which a mosque is different from and, at the moment, seemingly superior to a church. One has to remove one’s shoes. Like Moses: “For the ground on which thou standest is holy.”
I liked the great hollowness within, uncluttered by statuary, benches, and altars. I liked the feel of plush carpet beneath my bare feet and the breath of air made by the flight of an occasional pigeon which, like the people, had found sanctuary there. The Ala ud-Din Mosque is particularly blessed in the possession of an intricately carved pulpit of great antiquity and exquisite tile work along the wall facing Mecca. Thinking it was perhaps this feature that gave the building beneath that great dome such a holy feeling, I stepped closer to investigate it. Suddenly my progress was arrested by a low murmuring at my feet. There was a man whose presence I had not noticed because he blended so perfectly with the surroundings. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he had a lectern and a holy book before him from which he was quietly reading:
Love burns this icy clay with mystic fire,
And leaping mountains dance with quick desire.
Blest is the man that drowns in seas of love,
And finds life nourished by food from above.
They were verses from the Matsnavi Sharif of the Sufi Rumi, and their reader was dressed in the patchwork rags of the order of wandering dervishes.
My legs folded beneath me, and I sat, knee touching knee. “Tell me, my friend,” I said smiling, remembering that day so long ago when we’d set sail together. “Does the saint mean ‘sea’ to be male or female in that line?”
Husayn—for that’s who the emaciated dervish was—lifted a finger for silence and continued to read, only raising his voice a little so I should not miss a word.
He read the entire poem. His low, whistling tone and the mystical words and images soon drew me up with them until I thought the deep reds and blues of the mosque’s tiles and carpets had become like the colors shed by stained glass—wonderfully vibrant, yet of no substance one could hold—and this iridescent light moved as if with the cycle of the sun.
Husayn finished with a long pause. Then, at last, he answered my question. At least, he thought he was answering my question, and at the time, with my head still whirling from the rhythms of the poems I thought he was, too.
It was a verse from the Koran:
And He—may the majesty of our Lord be exalted—has taken no consort neither has He any offspring.
This was followed by another pause after which Husayn slowly closed the book and the lectern, packed them under his arm and returned them to the caretaker of the mosque.
Such a black wall off piety! I began to think. He has gone mad, and only the Turks in their own madness call it piety. This thought so grieved me that I decided I must take my leave of him as quickly as possible. I cleared my throat to speak, but it was drowned out by a sound right over our heads: the muezzin in his tower calling the faithful to evening prayers. I couldn’t very well run out of the mosque against all the men who would be coming in, so I dumbly followed my old friend to the fountain, copied him in making my ablutions, then returned to face Mecca, and to fall to my knees on the floor.
As I bent and straightened, knelt and prostrated like a drop of water in the vast sea of lapping Muslim waves, a memory came to my mind of the number of times I had watched Husayn eat pork and pray “Hail Mary” to hold his ducats intact. Now here I was, returning the pretense in kind. But where, a moment before in the midst of skepticism I might have chuckled at the thought, I now felt myself deeply touched. And by the time the prayers had finished, I was willing to stick by my friend’s side, silence or no. Once we had reached the courtyard of the mosque, he at last spoke words of his own. “The brethren meet tonight. Will you come?”
“Nothing,” I replied, “would flatter me more.”
Without another word, my friend led me away from the main streets, through a maze of alleys, monastic buildings, and rooms for the study of religion to the hall where Sufis of his order held their particular devotions.
At first I thought I would merely watch, but events proved otherwise. I did watch as first the sheikh and then the invisible spirit of their founder received obeisance from the congregation, and I watched the recitation of the first
