Why you should read: The Journeys of a Sufi Musican, Kudsi Erguner
By Iljas Baker
Journeys of a Sufi Musician is part memoir, part collection of essays. It was narrated in French by Kudsi Erguner to an amanuensis rather than written by Erguner and this gives the work a raw, unedited quality you might expect from someone whose musical and spiritual life is so deeply connected to the oral tradition. It does, however, lead to some ambiguity in the narratives, some confusion in terms of chronology, some inconsistent spellings, and a few minor errors. But these are all insignificant given the rich accounts of life in Istanbul in the early Fifties and of the changing fate of Sufism and traditional Turkish music, especially the music of the ney, in the country after the end of the Ottoman Empire. A number of essays offer Erguner’s deeper reflections on Sufism and traditional music.
Erguner, Turkey’s most respected and lauded traditional musician and a UNESCO Artist for Peace, was born in Diyarbakir in Eastern Turkey in 1952, a time when and place where traditional culture still framed most people’s lives. He comes from a long line of Sufi musicians whose lives revolved around the tekke (Sufi lodge) where the music was an integral part of the Sufi ceremonies performed there. When not performing the ceremonies, the musicians often met in each other’s homes just to enjoy the music. The Sufi ceremonies were forbidden by the government of the New Republic in 1925 and this seems to be the start of a profound cultural change in Turkey with traditional music and Sufism going into decline. However, although Sufism was banned and the tekke were confiscated by the state, according to Erguner, Sufism still managed to continue in secret to some extent. Those tekke that weren’t converted into museums, mosques with government-appointed imams or schools were registered by the Ministry of Historic Monuments but remained closed. The confiscated tekke weren’t well-supervised and Sufis rented them or parts of them and performed their music, zikr and sohbet [intimate spiritual conversations] ceremonies in secret. According to Erguner, at one time the whole of the Uzbek tekke was rented out and the sheikh of the Naqshbandi tarekat, Sheikh Necmeddin, continued to hold zikr sessions with several hundreds of men and the sheikh himself went on retreats there lasting several weeks.
Erguner is particularly informative concerning the Whirling Dervish ceremonies now held annually in Konya and a major tourist attraction in Turkey. The first performance was in 1956 as a result of a request of the wife of a visiting American diplomat to see some dervishes. In 1957, a ceremony was organized to commemorate Rumi’s passing and after that, it was decided that this should be an annual folklore performance initially held at the local basketball stadium. At that time Konya had no dervishes and they had to be brought in from Istanbul. They were strictly warned that an authentic Sufi spirit would not to be tolerated. Erguner claims that such a warning was ignored and that a large number of Sufi brotherhoods gathered in Konya from all over the country and a “golden age of the ceremonies” existed for a couple of years. However, after the military coup of 1960, military officers decided to attend the ceremonies and realizing what was happening ended the involvement of the Sufi community of Istanbul and replaced them by members of the Konya football and basketball teams who were taught how to perform the whirling ceremony.
Whereas in the Sixties many authentic Sufis from Istanbul and other parts of the country came to the ceremonies in Konya, in the Seventies the audience mainly consisted of Westerners. They tended to be well-informed about Sufism as many of them were drawn from the followers of Gurdjieff or were spiritual teachers who were familiar with Rumi’s teachings. This led to the paradox noted by Erguner that audience members from the West often knew more about the Mevlevi tradition than the so-called Mevlevi performers.
While the Festival of Konya was gaining in popularity, the first whirling dervish tours to Europe began in 1968. Erguner’s first performance in Europe, sponsored by the Turkish government, was in 1970 in Paris. Erguner tells how the Turkish Office of Tourism in Paris reluctantly arranged a reception in honour of the whirling dervish performers, but seeing them only as “ignorant peasants” and fearing embarrassment because of their lack of civilized manners made sure they arrived too late to eat.
His sojourns in the West led to meetings and collaborations with musicians such as Peter Gabriel and Jean-Michel Jarre as well as theatre and film director Peter Brook with whom he collaborated on Brook’s film on the early life of Gurdjieff “Meetings With Remarkable Men”. He also contributed to Gabriel’s soundtrack of Scorsese’s film “The Last Temptation of Christ”. His collaboration with Gabriel was probably the most significant as Gabriel is largely credited with “discovering” and popularizing the so-called “world music“ from which Erguner no doubt benefited in terms of concert bookings and recording contracts, although he never recorded a full album for Gabriel’s Real World label. But Erguner views the influence of world music as a two-edged sword: traditional musicians began to emphasise technique which made for a more exciting performance but the music itself became more Westernized so as to make it easier for a world audience to listen to.
Erguner’s first journey to the United States was in 1980 at the invitation of Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak of the Halveti-Jerrahi tarekat who persuaded Erguner to go on what he referred to as a “missionary tour” with him. What took place so disturbed Erguner that he cut his stay short and returned to Paris. According to Erguner, Dominique de Menil (an heiress of the Schlumbergers who had made their fortune providing services to the oil-industry) sponsored Ozak’s tours of the United States and “every year forty people from Istanbul were invited, accommodated and highly paid”. Muzaffer was given the use of a chauffeur-driven limousine and his close disciples, expensive cars. Dominique’s daughter Philippa de Menil took a deep interest in Muzaffer and was initiated into the Halveti-Jerrahi tarekat by Muzaffer. She adopted the Islamic name Fariha and became a sheikha two years later. It is likely that Dominique de Menil’s sponsoring of Ozak’s American tour was based on her well-known interest in ecumenism, but according to Erguner, Sheikh Muzaffer undertook the tour to enlarge the number of his followers. He may have been encouraged in this by Philippa/Fariha de Menil. Not only was anyone who expressed an interest in the tarekat immediately made a member but on one occasion a very wealthy young man was immediately made a sheikh and given permission to wear the clothes and headdress of a Sufi master. Erguner very controversially states that Muzaffer “appeared more interested in material comfort than spiritual teaching. The devotion with which he was surrounded made him lose all common sense.”
This American journey ends the memoir of Erguner’s life and travels and there follows an essay The Place of The Traditional Musician Today in which he argues that traditional music has an important role not only in offering consolation to humans in their earthly prison but reminding them of freedom. Music whose main purpose is entertainment helps people forget their prison but nothing more, he says. This is followed by a short essay titled Transmission which relates his experience of teaching the ney to others and his pleasure at seeing how his recordings have stimulated people even from outside Turkey to learn to play the ney. A very brief chapter, The Fountain of Separation follows this and is an exquisite parable about fate and destiny. The original French edition of the book was called La Fontaine de la Separation: Voyages d’un Musicien Soufi clearly indicating the true place of this parable in Erguner’s book and life. Another essay titled Islam, Sufism, and The Modern World expresses his disappointment at how Islam and Sufism have been distorted by both modernists and fundamentalists to serve political purposes. He is also particularly critical of inauthentic Sufism which he criticizes for being a product of mass culture. In Erguner’s view, Sufism, because of its focus on “naughting the self” (to use a phrase of Rumi), is a matter for an elite and must be practise ed in the context of Islam.
There follows two appendixes both worth reflecting on especially because they offer some original insights. The first, The Ney in the Mevlevi Tradition, contains an insightful commentary by Erguner on the first eighteen couplets (often referred to as The Song of the Ney) of Rumi’s Mesnevi. The second, The Ceremony of the Whirling Dervishes, describes the ceremony in detail and explains the real significance of the recitation of the Qur’an, the singing of Rumi’s poems and the role of the music. To emphasise this significance, Erguner eschews the usual Orientalist symbolic interpretations of the ceremony found in books by Shems Friedlander and Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch.
This short book is essential reading for those interested in Turkey’s transition to a secular republic, Turkish Sufism, especially Mevlevi Sufism, traditional Turkish music, the music of the ney and of course Erguner himself. This is a book to read again and again and, above all, to contemplate.
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Iljas Baker was born in Scotland and is a graduate of the universities of Strathclyde, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He now lives in Nonthaburi, Thailand and teaches at Mahidol University International College in the Division of Social Science. He writes poems, essays and book reviews usually on Islamic themes.
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