3.
While filming in Istanbul, we visited one beautiful old Ottoman tekke, by the Mevlana gate of the old walls: since 1925 it had been used as an orphanage and warehouse, before its priceless library was finally destroyed in a fire in the 1980s. It has now fallen into ruins and lies locked and abandoned. All one can do is peer through the barbed wire at the domes and semi-domes and the overgrown panels of Ottoman calligraphy half covered with vines and creepers. Other Mevlevi centres, like the magnificent Galata tekke in the centre of Istanbul, have become museums.
As far as the Turkish state is con-cerned, the Mevlevis are little more than a museum culture to be exploited as a tourist attraction. This process began in the mid-60s when the wife of a senior US army officer came to Konya and asked her government escorts about the dervishes. The officials were thrown into a panic. The local mayor eventually found an old dervish and forced him to teach the local basketball team how to turn; soon a "folkloric" festival began to be mounted in the Konya sports hall every year to attract foreign tourists. For a while there was even a brief attempt made to replace the Sufi musicians who accompanied the dancers with the town's brass band, which was judged to be more modern and republican.
One man whose life has been shaped by this official Turkish hostility to Sufism is the great Turkish ney player, Kudsi Erguner. Erguner, who has for years lived in Paris working with Peter Brook, Didier Lockwood and Peter Gabriel, was born into a family of hereditary ney players of the Istanbul Mevlevi brotherhood. His recent autobiography, Journeys of a Sufi Musician, gives a wonderful picture of the trials of being a Sufi devotee in the early years of the Turkish Republic after the Sufi orders were banned. He describes the strict secrecy in which his father and the other Mevlevis were forced to organise their spiritual life: "Though I must have been hardly five years old, I remember those old men with luminous faces whose eyes always appeared moist as if they had just wiped away a tear at the sound of the ney, or the recitation of a Rumi poem."
Every time the brotherhood had a musical gathering (sama), members of the brotherhood would be posted at each end of the street as lookouts to give warnings of a police raid. It was not dissimilar to the US during Prohibition - except that in the case of the Sufis, bottles of raki were kept in a fridge as a cover: "This alcohol was practically considered a symbol of the republic, so it was unthinkable for the authorities to believe that it could be drunk by 'religious fanatics'. If the police came in, the sheikh could always bring out the bottle and say they were only having a little party among friends."
All his professional life, Erguner found both his music and its Sufi inspiration blocked by Turkish officialdom, so that even his sell-out tours in Paris and London were disapproved of by the respective Turkish embassies, which accused him of "projecting a retrogressive image of Turkey abroad". More shocking still is the description Erguner gives of the government's refusal to conserve Turkey's Sufi heritage. On one occasion he found a priceless stash of Ottoman Sufi music and instruments in the cellar of the Istanbul mosque of Yeni Cami, where they had been dumped in the 1920s after being confiscated from various tekkes. Despite all his efforts, Erguner could not get permission to conserve any of the material: "In this damp underground vault these venerable relics, including flags, books, clothes and musical instruments were left to rot. My begging was of no avail, and none of it could be saved."
We filmed Erguner playing his ney after hours in one of Sinan's great mosques in Istanbul. It is one of the most elegiac sounds in all world music, and for Rumi the supreme symbol for man's separation from God. As the opening lines of The Masnavi puts it: "Listen to the song of the ney, how it laments its separation from the reed bed." Afterwards I accompanied Erguner to the south-east of the country to visit the marshy reed beds where he, and his father before him, have always found the reeds which they turn into neys. As we walked through the reeds, looking down at the Mediterranean sparkling far below us, he talked sadly of all that had been lost.
"In Turkish culture," he said, "Sufism has always provided the religious justification for the fine arts. It is like the sea and a boat: one cannot exist without the other. All our fine arts found themselves in Sufism. In Istanbul alone there were 700 tekkes. This is where the arts of poetry, music and calligraphy were all developed and passed down."
Erguner selected a fine reed of the right length and width and got out his knife: "When you look at the history of classical music in the Ottoman empire," he said, "there is not a single composer who was not a follower of Rumi. That is why in Turkey you cannot distinguish classical music from religious music. So what happened [under Atatürk] in the 1920s was like a cultural revolution: it turned everything upside down."
We walked on through the reeds, Erguner expertly fingering them in search of the perfect ney: "The buildings and the foundations disappeared," he said, "and the poets and musicians found themselves out on the streets. Successive generations of children were taught to look west, were told that civilisation lay elsewhere. So the deep continuity, the exchange between human beings, the continuity of teaching, all that was utterly lost."
He shook his head: "Once such a tradition is broken," he said, "it can never really be recovered. Today people in Turkey are beginning to understand that western civilisation is not the only answer, that our own civilisation had great worth. But in so many ways it is too late now: too much has already been lost, and can never be recovered."
· William Dalrymple's film Sufi Soul: The Mystic Music of Islam will be broadcast on Channel 4 at 11.30pm tomorrow. There will be a special screening at the Barbican earlier in the day at 4.15pm, followed by a Q&A with Dalrymple and the director Simon Broughton. This will coincide with a Barbican festival of Sufi music featuring many of the musicians in the film.
www.barbican.org.uk/contemporary and
http://www.williamdalrymple.com/
Copyright. Saturday November 5, 2005
The Guardian. All rights reserved
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