Bism Allah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem

I just came back from a 10-day trip to visit two “mawlana’s” that have captured the hearts of millions of people, just as much in the West as in the East: Mawlana Jalaluddin ar-Rumi, and Shaykh Nazim al-Qubrusi. Two of my friends were going to fly to Cyprus to shaykh Nazim’s town of Lefke, and I wanted to meet them there. We all wanted to see Shaykh Nazim in person, not through the internet and all its hujub. I decided to go by land and sea instead of the skies, so I set off to Damascus from Amman and stayed a night there with my friend, before taking a bus to Antioch (aka Hatay) just across the Syrian-Turkish borders. The bus left at 10 pm and arrived in Hatay at 4 am. Stayed a couple hours in the bus station and prayed Fajr there, then took a 6 am Bus to the large city of Adana.

The first thing that struck me after crossing the Syrian-Turkish borders was the beauty and blessedness of this land. The second was the grace of the slender Ottoman-style pencil-shaped minarets. I had always hated them in Cairo, but now I realize that it is because they were taken out of their intended landscape and put where they do not belong. Usually on top of Mamluk minarets whose tops had fallen off. But now that I see them in their natural home, built not with the large stones of Cairo, but with material that befits them, attached to mosques with very high domes, I see their beauty. And as my bus journeys took me across the plains and mountains of southern Turkey, my heart would smile every time I spotted one of these minarets in the distance, in some tiny village in the middle of nowhere. “Allahu akbar!” my heart would rejoice. How beautiful is the minaret- this sign of the spread of Islam. It makes you feel that there is no acre of land in the vast territories of Islam that is not blessed by the takbir of the muaddhin. “Allahu akbar!”

In Adana I bought a bus ticket to Konya, waiting only one hour there. There happened to be a man working there who could speak some English, so he helped me buy my ticket from the Bus company. I remember him putting his two index fingers next to each other and saying the Turkish word for “brothers.” “We are brothers,” he repeated in English. “Muslims. Now there are no more visas between Turkey and Lebanon, and inshaAllah soon also Jordan will be the same. Then we will be brothers again, like 100 years ago.”

Turkey and Jordan did agree to drop the visa between the two countries by the 1st of January this year, but the implementation of this decision seems to have been delayed. I had gotten a visa from the embassy in Jordan a month ago for a trip that never happened, and ended up using it on this trip.

Konya

Konya is in many ways the heart of Turkey. It is deep within Turkish territory, in the middle of Turkish plains and deserts. It is also one of the largest cities in Turkey, with a massive industrial portion of the city, the “Konya Sina’i” (Sina’i is Arabic for industrial).

It is also a religious heart of the city. One not very religious Turk complained to me that the people there are too strict and uptight about religion. Alhamdulillah, I thought, that religion there was strong. Konya was the capital of the Seljuk Turks, and I visited the beautiful Alaeddin Hill, on top of which were the ruins of the main Seljuk Palace, and the intact mosque of the rulers (which was surprisingly plain and simple). Its courtyard housed the tombs of all the Sultans.

But more than anything, Konya is known as the city of mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi. So when I arrived there, I took a taxi and asked him to take me to “mawlana.” To find a hotel next to the Mevlana Museum, which was the shaykh’s Zawiya complex and burial place, now turned into a Museum. I found a perfect little hotel called Hotel Rumi right next to the museum. (Yes, the rooms were quite roomy).

Konya is full of amazing mosques and sites, but I only visited one mosque adjacent to the Museum, and then paid 2 Turkish Liras to get in. How beautiful is that place! How serene! Mawlana Jalaluddin was buried inside his zawiya, and the bodies of his son and many of his closest followers surround him. Inside the same structure there are his personal clothes, tasbeehs, and many fascinating things on display. It seems he also owned a beautiful little box in which was a noble hair  from the blessed beard of the Messenger of Allah, salla Allahu alayhi wa Alihi wa sallam.

The museum inside also contained beautiful ancients manuscripts of the Qur’an, popular Sufi works, and especially mawlana’s own poetry collections. But what struck me the most was seeing a little old manuscript of the shaykh’s Wird collection. So I took out As-Salawat al-Arba’eeniyya of sayyidna wa mawlana Shaykh Saleh al-Ja’fari,  a short 40-salawat wird for times of travel and when very busy. I asked for permission from the museum workers to sit near the maqam, and they allowed me to, so I sat there and read them.

Now, despite being a museum, packed with tourists, it was still such a powerful spiritual place. The feeling I got, standing in front of the maqam, cannot be described. Almost brought me to tears right away. What made me really happy as well was that almost all tourists were Turks. The maqam was constantly being visited by young Turks, old Turks, families, individuals. There happened to be quite a large group of Japanese tourists when I went in, but beside them, everyone else was a Turk. It was beautiful to see them stand in awe and reverence for a very long time in front of the maqam, making du’as. Then seeing them greet the hair of Rasool Allah and kiss its wooden stand and the glass surrounding it. At one point, a museum security guard saw us honoring the hair, so he himself decided to come near and make duas there. It was beautiful to see him willing to step out of his role, to put Heavens before Earth, and to come show the noble hair its due respect.

While I was sitting reading my wird next to the maqam, I noticed two legs come and stand next to me for a very long time. I finished my wird just as the museum was being closed, and the man who was making du’as next to me helped me stand up, and we both went and prayed Maghreb. Then I went and bought the wird of mawlana Jalaluddin.

The next morning I went back into the museum, greeted the hair, and went back and sat down next to the maqam again. This time I read the wird of mawlana Jalaluddin, which is one of the most beautiful wirds I have seen. The Threshold Society has published it (the Arabic text), with transliteration and an English translation. For those who would like a taste of mawlana’s daily spiritual sustenance, they can get it from here (www.sufism.org/).

Interestingly, the same man who had come to visit mawlana before Maghreb the day before, and saw me reading my wird, came back the next morning as well, this time with a wird of his own in hand. Perhaps it was mawlana’s wird as well. And he stood next to me again, reading.

After that I went to visit the mashhad of Sham at-Tabrizi. It cannot be his actual tomb, as the Sun of Tabriz left Konya and disappeared.

There are two theories about the fate of that great spiritual master. The first is that he left town in December 1247 and never returned, and the second is that he was called outside the room where he had been talking in privacy with Rumi, and then assassinated. This latter theory comes from later sources, like Aflaki’s biography of Rumi, but Rumi’s own son says that that Shams left and disappeared forever, so that is the more accurate source.

Second, as Dr. Erkan Turkmen states in Teachings of Shams-i Tabrezi, Rumi went to Damascus twice in search of his master and failed to find him, “which leads us to believe that Shams really disappeared because Rumi could not be so naive as to remain unaware of the fate of his master.

Finally, Rumi gave up looking for Shams and found him within himself:

‘Since I am him then why am I looking for him? I am just like him and I shall speak on my own.’”

Shams himself had once said to the people around Rumi:

“If I were to speak the truth, all of you in this madrasah would aim for my life. But you would not be able to do anything. The harm of that would fall back on you. If you want, try.”

There are tombs attributed to mawlana Sham at-Tabrizi in Iran, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Muslim world. We know of another great disciple of Shams, Hasan al-Bulghari (d. 1299), who settled in Kirman in Iran and taught and guided people there. He received his khirqa from Shams at-Tabrizi, and he was one of the spiritual guides and of the great Alauddawla as-Simnani.

For a short time, this great sun appeared in the world, and set it aflame. But it was not usual for a master of that caliber to appear so obviously back in that age. Back then, the greatest spiritual masters remained hidden. He said to Rumi:

“We’ve turned out to be two marvelous people. It’s been a long time since two people like us have fallen together. We are extremely open and obvious. The awliya didn’t use to be obvious.”

It seems that after a while, Allah covered His beloved once again with His curtains, and kept him hidden, out of the view of public.

After Konya, I set off on a trip to visit one of the descendants of mawlana Jalaluddin, mawlana shaykh Nazim al-Qubrusi, whose mother traced her lineage to that great master whose tomb now is the heart of Konya, or rather, the heart of Turkey itself.