Having really enjoyed The Gardens of Istanbul by Ahmet Umit, I was surprised to find myself somewhat ambivalent about this book, by the same author.

Practicalities first. It was originally published in 2012, but my German version, translated by Sabine Adatepe, did not appear until 2020. The title in the original (Bab-i Esrar) means the Gate of Mysteries. As a reflection of "the location where identities and mysteries merge", this -- as so often -- is a better title than what we have in the German (and English) translations.

The Dervish Gate rapidly became a bestseller in Turkey, and has been translated into a number of languages. It was the first of Umit's works to be published in English (a decision that stems from the wave of popularity enjoyed by Rumi in the western world).

Our key character is Karen Kimya Greenwood. She has an English mother (Susan); she was raised in England, and lives and works there still. She speaks good Turkish, which she learned from her father, a Turkish Sufi (named Poyraz, after the north wind, the noise of which alerted the people in the Mevlevi Order meeting house in Konya to the fact that a small baby, Karen's father, had been abandoned on their doorstep). But the Turkish side of Karen's life is still raw and painful, because Poyraz, in his turn, abandoned his wife and daughter (then 12) to follow Shah Nesim, his friend and spiritual teacher, to an unknown destination (later confirmed to be Pakistan).

Karen, an insurance investigator, has to travel to Konya to verify a large claim. She has been there before, with her father, but remembers little. Even before her arrival, strange and inexplicable events start to occur around her.


Alas, Konya remains on our to-be-visited list, so my photos are from our sojourn in Istanbul this year

The novel works on several levels. Firstly, it's a fraud investigation, which turns out to have links to a broader series of crimes. (This plot brings us fleetingly back into contact with Inspector Zeynep, from the previous novel. In her office, she has a picture of Chief Inspector Nevzat -- "the best man I know" -- and Inspector Ali, but there's no clue as to why she's in Konya, and they're not.) Secondly, it's a psychological study of Karen, who apparently suffered from mental-health problems as a younger person, obviously still finds the hiatus caused by paternal abandonment hard to come to terms with, and -- into the bargain -- is pregnant with a baby that her boyfriend wants to abort, but she is not sure about. We follow Karen through a series of encounters, both real and imaginary, that help her to come to terms with these issues in her life. And thirdly, the novel is a recreation of the lives and friendship of Shams al-Din Tabrizi and Jalal al-Din Rumi, particularly focusing on the death of Kimya (Karen's namesake, and the wife of Shams) and the disappearance of Shams himself (a loss that inspired much of Rumi's amazing poetry).

There's much here that is really interesting, even poignant. But these various strands are too disparate to really meld well, with the result that -- for me -- the novel ends up trying to do too much and not quite gelling.

I'm also not a fan of dream sequences -- and there were LOTS. Dreams from sleep, dreams from fainting fits, dreams from unconsciousness brought on by attacks or accidents... Then we have sleep-walking incidents, disembodied voices, and the reappearance of imaginary friends from childhood. People continually slip and slide between identities. At the end, Karen wonders: "Had everything that I'd experienced been fantasy, a long nightmare -- or reality? What was material and what was spiritual reality? Where did life begin, and dream and fantasy end? I didn't know any more." The author has a good reason for creating this uncertainly (more on this later), but it didn't sit that well with me.



The book does two things very successfully, however.

The first is that it tells us more about Sufism in general, and the form practised by the Mevlevi Order (founded by Rumi) in particular. In fact, Tufekcioglu regards this novel as "one of the most notable examples of how Sufism is represented in a popular text".

I, for example, had not really understood the overwhelming importance of the learner-master relationship. This helps to explain the deep bond that connected Rumi and Shams, and it also helps Karen figure out what was going on with her father. What she perceived as a child was this: "When Shah Nesim spoke, the world stood still. Poyraz concentrated exclusively on him; Karen and her mother didn't count any longer." When she arrives in Konya, she still can't really fathom the nature of the connection between them. What she starts to learn, though, through her experiences in Konya, is that the relationship between pupil and master is deeper than the greatest love. The idea is that even though we all carry God within us, our ego does its best to push this spiritual essence into the deepest corner of our soul. But when a person discovers its existence, and actively goes in search of it, he/she is seen as a "lover", and the search is "love". It is good to seek, but it is not enough to seek. We need a teacher, a master, a beloved, because the bridge that is love -- "narrower than a hair and sharper than a sword" -- can't be crossed by one person alone. Once you're across, you don't need a beloved, because then the lover and the beloved are a single being, just like God. Karen comes to realize that Shah Nesim was the beloved for her father -- the person who led him to God. No other relationship could be as important, painful though that was for her and her mother.

Then there's the idea of "dying before we die", which is shared by a number of contemplative practices. It basically means hanging loose to everything, avoiding attachments. At one point Karen is told the terrible story of the old man who leaves his family, and -- when he is eventually tracked down by his son -- says: "My God, I cannot share your love with anyone, take my life or his." And the son drops dead... Karen is utterly horrified by the injustice of this. But Izzet Efendi (a close friend of her father's while he was in Konya) says the story has nothing to do with how our life ends, but rather with how we live it.



The second thing that Umit excels at is not making his message in any way soft and fuzzy. Elif Shafak's The Forty Doors (or The Forty Rules of Love, as per the English title) was accused of perpetuating "processes of domestication, appropriation and Americanisation of the Rumi narrative", or at the very least of representing a "brand" of universal Sufism that "has been identified as essentially Western in orientation rather than traditionally Islamic". I certainly don't think the same accusations could be levelled at Umit.

The Sufism he portrays is attractive, but also disturbing. It demands sacrifices that most of us wouldn't be ready to make -- or to inflict on others. Karen, finding herself on the receiving end of one of these sacrifices, is still profoundly afflicted by it. There is a disorienting harshness to some of the stories told to Karen, who is as conflicted by them as we would be. And this is as it should be, of course. Nothing is supposed to be easy in any spiritual search worth its salt.



The central figure of Shams is also highly ambivalent (much more so than in Shafak's work). It's important to emphasize here that Umit's use of dream sequences casts a shadow of doubt on everything that is conveyed; we only ever see someone else's Shams, mediated by ancient biographers or by Karen's wild dreams. Nevertheless, the picture that is built up is an unsettling one. Shams says that while Rumi is purely beautiful, he himself is beautiful and ugly at the same time; he believes that only people who deserve it have a right to love; he is known as the Sword of God; he never forgives anyone who behaves in an unseemly fashion to him or to those he loves; there are many stories about his power; and he believes in a God who is all-merciful but also all-powerful, who -- where necessary -- can be more merciless than any other. At one point he says: "The real art lies in not only being able to be good for the sake of your religion, but also bad. To run the risk of being damned like the devil... In love evil is no longer evil, good no longer good. There is only one single truth, and that is unconditional love, which makes miracles happen... You don't always know which is useful: good or bad. The day comes when one bad thing is more useful than a thousand good things." Hmmm...

And running through the story like a black thread is the implication that Shams -- in some way -- caused the death of his wife, Kimya. The book opens with a ghostly evocation of the dead Kimya, apparently relieved at Shams's assassination. When Karen, in her visionary state, assumes the guise of Shams, she does indeed find herself killing someone. But later, when -- back in her own being -- she challenges Shams, he says: "It wasn't I who killed Kimya; what ended her life was her sin... I didn't want her to die, I didn't want to lose her, didn't want her light to be extinguished, but God decided it would be so."

We don't actually know what happened to the historical Kimya, except that Shams, who was much older, showed jealousy and anger towards her, and she died young. It is tempting, from a feminist perspective, to extrapolate from that, and see her life and death "as yet another female destiny crushed at the hands of patriarchy, be that mystical or not". Franklin Lewis, however, not only sums up the slight sources we have on Kimya's life, but also warns that the fictions that have built up around her respond to contemporary concerns and mindsets, rather than making a good mirror for understanding the Konya of the mid-1200s.

Umit is not actually asserting anything, remember. He does present us with the known sources. But the rest is all in Karen's head, and I'm sure a psychologist would have a field day explaining why the death of this young woman centuries ago keeps cutting across Karen's attempts to understand her father's motivations.

However that may be, the undercurrent of violence in Umit's narrative certainly disrupts any sweet, cosy, new-age picture of the light and love of Sufism.

This is where Umit's broad range of characters is useful in articulating various reactions. Izzet Efendi is a believer and practitioner; in his view, the old sources slandered Shams, and certainly, difficult people make easy targets for slander. Mennan, Karen's Konya-based insurance colleague, is devout, and initially a little credulous, although he later comes round to a more critical viewpoint on the Shams stories.



The guarded way the novel is related -- all smoke and mirrors -- also facilitates its political message. According to Tufekcioglu, Umit himself has drawn parallels between the killing of Shams and the 2007 murder of Hrant Dink (a journalist of Armenian descent, who worked for Turkish–Armenian reconciliation): "Umit claims that the nature of Shams’ murder is a reflection upon contemporary Turkey, where political crimes arise from intolerance. Moreover, like the murder of Dink, Shams is also killed by state officials of the Seljuk Dynasty and in both cases the real criminals are not revealed or properly judged. In this respect, Shams is not merely a religious or literary figure but also a political one, and serves as a tool for recovering contemporary political counter-memories in Turkey."

More generally, the characters' reactions lead us away from the idea of any one truth, and into a landscape where everything is pretty fluid. Karen's activist mother, for example, resents the way religious people "despise our way of life", and focus only on the larger life they believe to be hidden behind a "veil", representing the obstacles on the path to God and true reality. Nigel, meanwhile, Karen's British boyfriend, finds himself superficially captivated by Rumi, very much in line with the popular trend.

Karen herself is just groping her way towards some sort of understanding, doing her best to make sense of things, but aware that no two people will answer her questions and interpret her Konya experiences in the same way. By the end, by means of another visionary encounter, she is reconciled with her father (who she later finds has died in Pakistan), and is looking forward to bringing her child into the world.

I, on the other hand, finished the book unsure of what I thought about the Sufi spiritual search, at least as it's represented here. On the one hand, it is heart-felt, and beautiful, and moving; and it resonates with the perennial tradition that I set much store by. On the other hand, it seems cold, even cruel. At the end of the day, was Karen's father remotely justified in leaving her and her mother? Was that not so supremely selfish as to be incompatible with any kind of love-based religion? Or is it simply unreasonable to decree that a mistake -- in this case, the decision to leave the order for the sake of a human relationship -- needs to constitute a life-long cage that can never be escaped from?

In sum, even though I found The Dervish Gate frustrating at times, I learned a lot from it -- including the lesson that I know very little of the different contexts, past and present, that produced it.