With skullcaps on their heads, five students aged between 18 and 40 hunch over a text in Arabic. In front of them, legs folded like a yogi, a copy of the same leather-bound book open on a low wooden lectern, an elderly muderris, or teacher, declaims in singsong Kurdish.
Strictly speaking, this gathering is forbidden under Turkish law. Since the Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party, or AKP, came to power in 2002, however, restrictions on religious expression have relaxed slightly. This has opened the way to a minor local renaissance in one of the Muslim world's oldest institutions, the medrese, or theological school.
For half a century after 1880, the village of Norşin was arguably the most important center of religious learning in Kurdish areas of what is now Turkey and Iraq. Students called it the Al-Azhar of the East after Cairo's famous university, and came from hundreds of miles away to attend.
But the founding of the republic in 1923 dealt Norşin a double blow. First, medrese were closed in the name of centralized education. Then, in 1925, unnerved by a major Kurdish revolt led by the head of a religious brotherhood, Turkey's new rulers clamped down on Sufi lodges too.
A member of the same influential Nakşibendi brotherhood as the rebel leader, Norşin's sheikh had nothing to do with the rebellion. It didn't stop him from being sent into internal exile along with his family. By the late 1970s, after years spent struggling in semi-clandestinity, Norşin's medrese had closed its doors.
Three decades on, the village has three medrese capable of accommodating 60 students at any one time. Construction on a fourth is nearing completion as Norşin moves to catch a re-ignition of interest that has seen theological schools across the region becoming more active.
It is not just rural Kurds who are rediscovering the traditional Islam of the religious brotherhoods. A thousand miles to the West, in Istanbul, a very different sort of sufism is becoming increasingly popular among secular urban Turks.
Almost every television channel now has a program about Islamic mysticism. In bookshops in Istanbul's wealthier neighborhoods, only books peddling conspiracy theories outsell the sufi manuals and new translations of Ibn-i Arabi.
Interest peaked last summer, when the well-known novelist Elif Şafak's new book about an American Jewish woman's discovery of Celaluddin Rumi, the 13th century founder of the Mevlevi order of whirling dervishes, came out.
Brought out in the West this year, The 40 Rules of Love has sold more than any novel in Turkey's history. With sales mounting above 500,000, publishers even brought out a grey-jacketed version for male buyers too embarrassed to be seen holding the bright pink original edition.
So is there a link between the renaissance at Norşin and Ms Şafak's bestseller? At first sight, it is not easy to see one. For the average reader of The 40 Rules of Love, brought up on official Turkish propaganda that presents religious brotherhoods—or tarikat—as forces of "reaction," places like Norşin are the antithesis of republican modernity.
Some even argue that the growing interest in Rumi among urban Turks is a direct reaction against the orthodox Islam espoused by, among others, the Nakşibendi. "Islam in Turkey has long been presented as malign, dirty and primitive, and turning to religion is no easy affair for such people," says Seyit Erkal, a researcher on sufism. "What would you prefer? Beards, skull caps and dogmatism, or Rumi's slogan, ‘come, whoever you are'?"
For all the contradictions, however, analysts nonetheless see the two phenomena as facets of a similar process. A professor of theology at Istanbul's Marmara University, Mahmut Erol Kilic, sees it in part as a side effect of economic liberalism, with Islamic groups branding themselves like another product in an effort to increase market share. More importantly, though, he sees it as a reaction against the rational interpretation of Islam pushed by the Turkish state.
"Positivist attitudes are stronger in theology faculties and the Religious Affairs Directorate [responsible for maintaining Turkey's 80,000-odd mosques and training imams] than they are in this country's science departments," he says. "Our mosques are as cold as government offices, and as incapable of meeting people's spiritual needs."
But many also see the growing interest in sufism as a sign that the power of radical Islam, nourished by puritanical Salafi thought imported mainly from Egypt, is on the wane in Turkey.
Radicals saw the relationship between sheikh and follower in sufism as idolatrous, says Ismail Kara, professor of Turkish Islamic thought at Marmara University. Like earlier generations of Islamist modernizers, they also saw religious brotherhoods as one of the chief reasons why the Islamic world had fallen behind the West. "Islamism was a critique of Islamic history," says Kara. "Islamists made a deliberate attempt to cut themselves off from traditions and the past. They saw tarikat as obstructing their efforts to go back to the sources and start again."
A prominent sociologist of Islam who studied at Norşin, Mufit Yuksel makes a similar diagnosis, describing the renaissance at his alma mater as a sign of a general return to "traditional Islam." With the end of the Cold War, he argues, "the whole Islamic world has understood that religion is... not an ideology."
In Norşin itself, members of the family that has provided sheikhs for the local sufi brotherhood for over 150 years take a more stubborn view of things. In the past, says Baha Mutlu, nephew of the current family head, the village used to boast of educating future religious teachers "knowledgeable in the twelve sciences," a term used to describe everything from natural philosophy through logic to Shari’a, or religious law. Today, few students get beyond learning Arabic and a good grounding in the Koran.
"The Republican period brought great trauma to the functioning of the medrese," Mutlu explains. "With the risk of a military police raid at any moment, you have to pare the syllabus down, cut it down to its bare minimum. 'Necessity is the mother of invention,' as Engels put it."
"Bring unity to your heart and you create a temple of Allah, do that and you feel an irrepressible desire to dance," one of them, his arms held up like a whirling dervish, clicking his fingers, tells a dozen or so disciples sitting around a well-stocked table in a garden on the Prince's Islands, a popular haunt for wealthy Istanbuliots.
As the sun drops below the Marmara Sea, the owner of the garden comes out carrying a bottle of Doluca Moskado, a pricy local white wine. The sufi, who has been talking for four hours, stops and holds up a wine glass. "The squalid life is not for the sufi," he says. "The sufi is a gourmet, a master of the art of living."
Several Muslim intellectuals accused Elif Şafak of a similarly lax depiction of sufi doctrine in her best-selling book. The 40 Rules of Love does not "just hollow out our shared values, but dumps modernity's crudest and most specious beliefs into the hole," Ducane Cundioglu complained in the moderate Islamic daily Yeni Şafak, pointing out that the book had been written first in English and only then translated into Turkish. "This sufi literature is... New Age kitsch."
Researcher Seyit Erkal thinks Cundioglu has a point. Secular Turks' interest in sufism, he says, really only took off after UNESCO proclaimed the Mevlevi sema, or whirling ceremony, a World Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2005. In honor of Rumi's 800th birthday, UNESCO also declared 2007 the Year of Mevlana and Tolerance. "This is sufism that comes from the West," Erkal says. "It is like a Turk drinking their first Turkish coffee in America," he adds.
Head of one of two branches of the Rifa'i brotherhood, and Turkey's only female sheikh, Cemalnur Sargut is adamant that there can be no Islamic mysticism without an acceptance of the foundations of Islam, the Koran, the sunna and religious law. But she is quick to leap to the defense of Elif Şafak.
After The 40 Rules of Love came out, she says, she received hundreds of telephone calls from people saying that they wanted to know more about Rumi's companion, Shams-i Tabrizi, one of the main characters in the novel. "The mere fact of mentioning Shams' name in this world is an act of grace," Sargut says.
Elderly and mild-mannered, sitting outside Norşin's original medrese building, a simple white turban on his head and what looks like kohl under his eyes, Sheikh Nurettin has no cause for complaint either. He gestures behind him at cherry trees blossoming early after an unusually mild winter. "This past winter has been so beautiful that we have forgotten the bitter winters of the past," he says.
Nicholas Birch – Worked as a freelance reporter in Turkey for eight years. His work has appeared in a broad range of publications, including Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London.
