95 HAFEZ—THE EARTHLY SKYWALKER

Building Our Space in a Shifting Universe

by Fatemeh Keshavarz

 

Hafez starts simple, builds brick by brick (word by word, if you like) and adds subjective layers along the way. This enables him to move between the inner and the outer worlds often and with ease. In the process, he constructs bridges and doors that connect the two in a rather matter-of-fact way:

My heart forgets the green landscape when it sees the moon of your face aglow.
For like a cypress, it [my heart] is bound to earth, and like a tulip’s red heart, it is filled with sorrow.

To make sure that we have noticed the co-existence of the inner and outer geographies, here reflected in the beloved’s beauty and the heart’s sorrow, he highlights the tension between the two, the deep interconnection that sometimes reveals itself in a confrontational manner:

The inner world of hermits does not owe anything to the physical world.
We do not bow, not even before the prayer niche of an arched eyebrow.

A claim easily refuted by its own central image—an arched eyebrow—not to mention the first verse: the earthbound heart forgetting its captivity with a glance at the beloved’s moon-like face. Then, we are outside again:

Look at the violet! It compares itself to her dark perfumed curls.
A simple servant and such extraordinary designs!
Come to the garden and see that next to the rose’s thrown
Tulip stands like a royal attendant holding a goblet of wine.

Although somewhat ambiguous, the parallel between the beautiful verses that our poet is giving us, his conversations with the divine, and the wine that revives the “inner faculties,” are unmistakable. Besides, in lyrically expressed true love, the longing never ends. He longs for the conversations and we long for hearing them. We will never truly know if he is the wine-seller who knows the divine mystery or not, but we take charge of our own journey as we read them.

 

PHOTO © MOHAMMAD REZA DOMIRI GANJI

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95 SUFISM, SACRED SPACE, AND SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY

by John L. Caughey

 

In the 1970s, the Sufi teacher, Syed Mumtaz Hussain Shah, Shah Jii, and his small band of followers spent most of their time at their mountain shrine in the Margalla Hills of Pakistan high above the Indus Plain. In this sacred space, the meditation place of the Sufi Saint Buri Imam (1617-1705), they pursued their mystical practices and received the pilgrims who came up to worship and to seek help or guidance.

One sunny day when many pilgrims, men, women, and children were visiting the mountain shrine, Shah Jii was sitting at his place in the shallow cave and receiving visitors. Some presented problems such as financial, health, and spiritual concerns. But some of the pilgrims came with invitations. One sunny day, a young pilgrim, a teenage girl in a colorful shalvar kameez, approached Shah Jii. She placed a dish of sweets down before him and smilingly said, “Shah Jii! My mother conveys her respects (salam) and says that now that the urs rituals are over you must come to visit our home.” Shah Jii reached out and gently and lovingly embraced her. Addressing her as if she were kin he said, “Daughter! I feel your sincerity. I will come whenever my murshid wishes that it be so.” This request stayed in Shah Jii’s mind both as a memory and as an anticipation, a future plan to make a visit to this family at their nearby home. This internal anticipation became another part of the array of current responsibilities he felt to his extended spiritual family including worldly followers (dunnia kii murriid) like this daughter and her mother who were living in the world, i.e., away from the shrine in the local villages and the city of Rawalpindi. As he indicated in this conversation however, he expected to be called to make this particular visit by his murshid , one of his no longer living teachers or the spirit of a saint. That is, he would only make this trip in reality when he received guidance from his murshid  through a spiritual intuition, an inclination or indication, or a waking dream. This mix of creative imagination and face-to-face relations with teachers, companions, and students was a pervasive and important aspect of this Sufi social world.

 

PHOTO © JOHN L. CAUGHEY

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95 THE JERRAHI PATH—ISTANBUL TO NEW YORK

by Matt Hanson

 

Multigenerational solidarity is at the heart of this oldest Jerrahi lodge in America, nestled deeply into the Mid-Atlantic countryside. A man in a white dervish cap is a common sight, next to a covered woman. Illumined under the front door lamp astride neatly hewn shrubs, children skip about the festive outdoor lighting. Leafy vines decorate the lodge sheltered in lush green trees all radiating the primary color of Islam. Inside, the decorative tiled walls are styled in the Iznik craft from the Aegean region of Turkey unmistakable in its floral viridescent patterns, commingling arboreal motifs with kernels of symbolic resonance. Calligraphic signatures, particularly of the letter waw to symbolize the sacred oath to Allah, are designed within intricate weavings of ultramarine hues reminiscent of the Turquoise Coast.

As attested by adherents, every last tile is sourced directly from Turkey. The people involved literally traveled halfway around the planet to bear the weight of the fired ceramic soil of the country that raised the founder of the order, Hazreti Pîr Muhammad Nureddin al-Jerrahi. In the years between 1678–1720, al-Jerrahi lived in the last imperial Ottoman capital of Istanbul, where he is buried in the original tekke lodge in his name that remains active in the Old City.

It was by a chance encounter with a woman named Munevver Hanim that Tosun Baba confronted his unforeseen attraction to the Jerrahi path, while traveling from Istanbul by train to Konya in the winter of 1968 to experience the whirling dervish ceremony celebrating Rumi. In those days, the spell of Kemalist reform had convinced Tosun Baba that sheikhs and dervishes were lost to the Turkish culture. Little did he know that the second half of his long life would be defined by that happenstance curiosity, leading ultimately to a deep search that formalized when he became a disciple under Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak Efendi, the man who extended the Jerrahi path to America.

 

PHOTO MONTAGE © DELIM 60 / BIGSTOCK.COM, RUDI 1976 / BIGSTOCK.COM

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95 TAPPING INTO THE SACRED—PLACES, PLANTS & ENERGY

Kim Lisson in Conversation with Nyoongar Elders  Richard Walley and Carol Pettersen

 

What makes a place sacred? And how is the sacred defined? For Aboriginal Australians, sacred spaces are both tangible and intangible—some visible, some intuited; sometimes physical, often metaphysical. Sacredness is intimately bound up with the natural world and people’s relationship to it—in this life and beyond. Sacred sites are places of respect, stewardship, kinship, communion, ritual, healing, and they are far from homogenous. Them Aboriginal population of Australia is made up of many tribes and nations, each with their own sacred places, animal totems and other landmarks in geographic areas known as their “country.” Sacred places are as much a matter of identity and belonging as they are about transcendence.

To understand more about Nyoongar spirituality, and their notion of “sacred space,” writer, consultant and coach Kim Lisson spoke to two Nyoongar Elders: artist Richard Walley and social advocate Carol Pettersen.

Kim Lisson: So, when it comes to sacred space, would you be reasonably confident there are some significant similarities between different Aboriginal communities, or would you say it’s more characterized by its differences?

Richard Walley: Well, on this subject there’s a lot of similarities. Similarities because nature itself is a part of the system, it’s not based purely on the unknown and supernatural. It’s a combination of spirituality and the physical form, both in the forms of people, but more importantly place and plant.

Kim Lisson: And that forms a common connection point for the Nyoongar people, the environment of the south-west of Western Australia as common “country”?

Richard Walley: Exactly. We didn’t have borderlines that divided us, we had borderlines that actually joined us, and we shared common responsibilities. I think that was a fantastic system that operated by sharing responsibilities, caring for country, caring for animals and plants that are in your zone, but also out of your zone, becomes it’s something that links us together as a people.

Carol Pettersen is a Justice of the Peace, cultural advisor and Elder belonging to the Minung-Gnudju people of the Nyoongar Nation in the southwest of Western Australia. She has lived and worked in Albany for most of her life and is well-known throughout the Nyoongar nation as a tireless worker for her people. As a Justice of the Peace, Carol is still actively working in the courts as an advocate for social justice for Nyoongar people, which she has done for over 40 years. She is also very active in helping to bring about social and economic changes for Nyoongar people through land claims and access to mining income. She was a principal adviser to the Premier of Western Australia on women´s issues, a counselor with the Council of Albany, and has served on state and Commonwealth committees on issues such as Indigenous health, welfare, education and training. She retired from the public service in 1998 but continues to work as a volunteer for the Nyoongar community.

Kim Lisson: Carol, what’s your cultural background?

Carol Pettersen: I identify myself as a Minang-Gnudju woman of the Nyoongar nation. We have this dual dialect culture as well as a dual culture background, meaning that although my mother was a tribal woman my father was a white man, and so we’ve grown up with those. two cultures. And there was a big family… Mum and Dad had eighteen children. We know our totem, which is a little bird from our neck of the woods, which is the coastal strip—we were coastal people. An anthropologist described our family as the ‘shell people of the South Coast’. We come from a matriarchal line, we identify with that, and our little totem is a little bird, and it’s the spirit of our grandmother. Women were given little birds (and trees and flowers) as a spiritual totem and the men, the patriarchal line, were given big birds.

 

PHOTO © H L PHOTO / BIGSTOCK.COM

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95 MATERIALIZING SPIRITUALITY

Tadao Ando interviewed by Rana Habibi

 

 

Born in 1941 in Osaka, Japan, Tadao Ando is one of the world’s most celebrated architects. Ando is a self-taught architect who became fascinated by architecture during his first over-land journey from Japan to the West, traveling through different places such as Ivory Coast, Cape Town, Madagascar and India. While he learned much from his contemporaries, including Le Corbusier and Frank LIoyd Wright, travel was his main Master in architecture. Visiting diverse and somehow antithetical territories brought the young Ando closest to the meaning of life and the sense of “place” in architecture.

Japanese traditional architecture is also a profound source of inspiration for Ando. Through traditional architecture, he found the importance of natural materials, sensitively used, to create the sense of beauty in built space.

Ando’s search for the meaning of life brought him to create a meaningful architecture —a qualified place for being. Among his worldwide and diverse projects, his spiritual buildings are more representative of Ando’s philosophy of life.

 

Tadao Ando: When one perceives concrete to be something cold and hard, then one must recognize the body as something warm and soft. The dichotomy of body and world forms shintai. When I stand on an empty site, I can sometimes hear the land voice the need for a building. I believe anthropomorphic ideas of the genius loci were a recognition of that phenomenon. The distance between the self and the object must be altered to perceive space in all of its diversity. Not only the movement of shintai  but natural movements such as that of light, wind, or rain can change the phenomenal, as opposed to the physical distance between the self and the object. Architecture is the art of articulating the world through geometry. By introducing nature and human movement into simple volumes, I attempt to create complex spaces. Order is reconstructed within the shintai  through the recognition of differences between the total image inscribed on the shintai by the superimposition and what is immediately and visually apprehended. Since the beginning of my career, I have sought to create spiritual spaces which connect to the mind and body of the visitor.

 

PHOTO © TADAO ANDO ARCHITECT & ASSOCIATES

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95 OF OTHER SPACES

A film review of Wild Wild Country reviewed by Jairan Gahan

 

 

The grand experiment of the controversial Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, to build a self-sustained spiritual commune in the 1980s in the United States is a contentious but almost forgotten part of contemporary American history. This thought-provoking and gripping account of the wild life and the subsequent fall of Rajneeshpuram, a utopian city that was built from scratch on remote rugged heaths of Wasco County, Oregon, will keep you on the edge of your seat for six hours.

The documentary (directed by the Way Brothers ) moves against the grains of the archives of collective memories of Americans, and demands the audience to confront their own prejudice. Critics see the series as a timely production, as it exposes the limits of freedom of religion on American soil, and reveals how the fear of the Other drives Americans and their politics.

Rajneeshees arrived in Oregon during the height of cult hysteria, just a few years after the Jonestown incident and before the Waco tragedy. The 1980s and the 1990s mark an important phase in late formations of American secularism as a mode of governance that increasingly attempts to shape, regulate, and monitor religion on the basis of racialized Christian values. In a way, Rajneeshpuram became the space through which secularism in the United States realized, exercised, and revealed its Xenophobic nature. The very genealogy of the emergence of the cult-religion dichotomy surfaces in extensive interviews with Antelopeans who legitimize their hostility towards the Rajneeshees through branding them as a sex-crazed Indian cult. Once the conflict snowballs into a massive battle at the national level, with FBI agents at its centerpiece, the series raises broader questions about the role of the state in constituting and policing religion. But there are more layers to the story of the fate of this commune.

The film tells the story of how a dreamscape turned into a nightmare when materialized. The revisionist touch of the Ways perceives the commune at its best as a failed utopia, leaving the viewer without an alternative way to comprehend the phenomenon of this experiment. But “Utopias are sites with no real space,” the philosopher Michel Foucault reminds us. Rajneeshpuram however, could also be understood as a lived heterotopia, a multiple place of experience and becoming, a site of transformation where not only the Rajneeshees, but also the Antelopeans, and the U.S. government officials discovered and realized their longings, core desires, and aptitudes—both dark and light, good and evil. “The master’s work was to put you on a path,” says Swami Prem Niren.

A more radical approach to Rajneeshpuram would entail a serious exploration and an intellectual engagement with this path. Only then would it be possible to fully push back against the cult-religion dichotomy, and explore new ways of thinking about alternative assemblies that are not graspable by political structures of the modern nation-state.

 

PHOTO © PUBLIC DOMAIN

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