These days I am going through the proofs of De kern in de korrel once again. To have the book finished after the weekend, I had planned six reading sessions of about twenty pages each. Today I was reading pages 100 to 120.
At the same time, I have been working intensively on Closer to the Source?, my research into the reconstruction of the Mevlevi tradition. I was not reading the proofs with that research in mind. But somewhere in those twenty pages, something began to stand out. Several stories seemed to touch almost naturally on questions I had just been dealing with in that other piece: questions about teaching and trust, different forms of authority, and the difference between a sign and that to which it points.
Perhaps I noticed these connections precisely because those questions were still fresh in my mind.
The emir and the snake
In one of the stories, an emir sees a snake crawl into the mouth of a sleeping man. The man notices nothing. The emir beats him awake, forces him to eat rotten apples, and drives him on until at last he vomits. The snake comes out with everything else.
Only afterwards does the man understand why the emir treated him so harshly. Until then, all he experiences is pain and injustice. It is only when he sees the snake that he realizes the emir has saved his life.
The story says something that may not be so easy for us to say today: sometimes another person can see something that you yourself cannot yet see. A teacher or guide does not necessarily have the same knowledge at the same moment as the person being guided.
But that is precisely where the difficulty begins.
How do you know whether someone really does see more? When is trust justified, and when does it become a reason not to ask questions?
That question kept returning in my research. Authorization and trust can be meaningful parts of a tradition. But when someone claims to see more than you do, it remains legitimate to ask what that authority rests on and how it is limited.
The Sufi, the jurist and the sharif
A few stories later, a Sufi, a jurist and a sharif — a descendant of the Prophet — enter an orchard.
The gardener wants to get rid of them, but he cannot take on all three at once. So he follows the old principle of divide and rule.
First he turns the jurist and the sharif against the Sufi. Then he casts doubt on the sharif’s descent. In the end, the jurist is left alone. He too can then be dealt with easily.
In De kern in de korrel we added a short note to this story. The three men represent different recognized religious positions: the Sufi the inner path, the jurist religious law and learning, and the sharif genealogical inheritance.
What struck me again now is that Rumi does not merely distinguish these positions. They also depend on one another.
The gardener represents the force that creates division. He does not need to defeat the three men directly. It is enough to separate them and play their different positions off against one another.
That is something I recognize as a dynamic that can also become active within spiritual groups. Not necessarily as a deliberate strategy on the part of one person, but as a process in which status, recognition and the question of who stands closest to the source begin to damage mutual connectedness.
The Sufi cannot simply say: I have the inner experience, therefore the rest does not matter. The jurist cannot rely on knowledge and rules alone. And genealogical inheritance only has meaning when it remains connected with living practice and responsibility.
Perhaps something comes before all of that: community itself.
Kudsi Erguner describes the circle around the Özbekler Tekkesi as a kind of “second family.” He had been coming there since childhood, among musicians, older bearers of knowledge, friends of his father and people connected with the tekke. What he heard, saw and experienced there became, in his own account, the source of his later spiritual and artistic development.
That puts something else into focus. A tradition is not transmitted only through lessons, rituals or authorizations. It also lives because people remain together long enough to know one another deeply. Children grow up among adults, students gradually become bearers of responsibility, and people see over the course of years how someone develops and learns to carry responsibility.
Perhaps durable community is one of the first conditions for genuine transmission.
In my research I have tried to distinguish different kinds of authority. Descent is not the same as spiritual maturity. Knowledge of texts is not the same as institutional authority. Authorization is not the same as skill or wisdom.
But distinction is not the same as separation.
Rumi shows what happens when the three are persuaded that they no longer need one another. One by one, they become vulnerable.
And at the end the point becomes sharper still:
What sticks in your throat like straw
is love of rank and wealth.
That straw blocks the Water of Life.
The problem, then, is not the role, the knowledge or the ancestry itself. The problem begins when someone identifies with it and turns it into a claim to superiority.
The track and the deer
At the end of this sequence comes the story of the two thieves.
A man catches a thief in his house and gives chase. He has almost caught him when someone calls out from behind and tells him to come back. There are important clues and footprints that he should examine first.
The man is persuaded and gives up the pursuit.
Only afterwards does he realize what has happened. He almost had the thief in his hands, but let him escape because he turned back to look at the tracks.
Rumi begins the story with a beautiful image:
For a while the track of the deer is enough,
but after that the musk gland of the deer itself becomes the guide.
And when the man realizes he has been deceived, he says:
I had reality itself in my hands — and let it go because you had to call out.
That stayed with me.
A tradition, too, consists to a large extent of traces. Texts, rituals, music, stories, titles, lines of descent, silsilas and authorizations help preserve something that might otherwise be lost.
Those traces matter. Without them, we would recover very little.
But at some point, the track has to lead somewhere.
Otherwise we remain staring at footprints while the deer has long since disappeared.
What do the forms still point to?
Perhaps that is what struck me while reading these twenty pages.
Rumi does not say that we do not need teachers. The emir genuinely sees something that the other man cannot see. Nor does he say that knowledge, descent, community or inherited forms do not matter. In the story of the three men, different forms of religious legitimacy are in fact shown to be connected.
But the same question keeps returning: what does the form point to?
A title is not yet wisdom. Descent is not yet spiritual maturity. Pious language is not yet inner reality. And a track is not the deer.
That has changed the meaning of my own question about authenticity. Years ago, when I travelled to Turkey looking for “authentic Mevlevis,” I imagined the matter rather differently.
Not: who possesses the oldest title, the longest lineage or the correct form?
But: what brings that form to life? What human relationships and forms of community sustain it? What does it point to? And does it actually help us come closer?
Perhaps that is why these stories struck me today. I had just spent weeks trying to understand historically how forms of transmission and authority came into being. And then, in the proofs, I suddenly encountered Rumi asking, in his own way, many of the same questions.