Is Izeth it?
During my first lesson in meditation, Uncle Izeth said,
“Imagine Sheik Nazim sitting next to you, picture his brown eyes, softened with thought, the wrinkles around them, his grey flecked beard, his rose lips, and in time you will hear his voice. First you will feel him, your mind will rest, and your heart will whisper. In your heart you will first hear him. He will know what you need to do, and he will speak to your heart. Listen not to me nor to anyone else. You must ask him. He speaks to you already, softly in your own mind. In time you will see him, as clear as you see me, and he will take you through the world, and through time, and he will show you what you were, are and will be, and the world was, is and will be. And when all has been cleaned of you, he will tear the final veil, and your lord you will see. And from then on, before He moves your world, your Lord will ask “Is this your will my love?”
He had a mirhab set in to the wall, and in this niche he had pasted photographs of the Kaaba, the golden dome of Karbala, the green dome above the Prophet’s tomb, the blue dome of Konya, and the sandy brown domes of Bukkhara. There were pictures of Sheik Nazim tending the garden, cooking, preaching, smiling and one of him almost spilling a cup of tea. Sheik Nazim Al-Haqqani was the head of the Sufi order. He had studied in Damascus, resisted the French, won the love of a venerated Naqshbandi teacher and become a teacher in turn.
To seek guidance from a living man, who lived in Cyprus, but would appear to me in a vision was new idea. I tried to follow the instructions, but I’m not too good that. My prayers never yielded Sheik Nazim, but rather a feeling that was something like this:
I imagined a great dome, tall and cavernous, surround me. Whenever I prayed the dome appeared, unfolding around me by thoughts squeezed out of a tight nozzle, a mind bound in repeated prayer.I wanted it to be green like the forest just after the rains, the air feeling rich and wet, the light gentle and the walls enveloping every direction. I wanted the dome to swirl with the smell the people, my grandmother who died the year before, my childhood kitchen, fresh mud by a stream, and a cool afternoon. But it never bought these things I wanted. The dome was always still, the air stern, heavy and odorless. The deeper I entered prayer, the heavier the dome grew, the safer I felt, and nothing could harm me here, and nothing was ever asked of me. Sheik Nazim never came, and it was just me and this dome.
After prayers, Uncle Izeth and I smoked a splif and listened to Plastic Ono Band. He said that I seemed rather worked up during prayers.
……
My feet were burning in spite of the soft river sand of the temple. I had walked around the shrine one hundred and three times, and I had five more to do. With this devotion, I asked Lord Karthikeya for a small favour. I asked him to show me my grandmother. I missed her. A clairvoyant told us that my grandmother, who taught me how to eat, write, read, walk through the village, sew a button, give for its exquisite pleasure and spot a greedy shopkeeper, had died and been born again as a handmaiden to her beloved lord, here where she had worshipped him all her life. My feet were sore and calloused and yet I walked round and round the temple, desperately muttering my prayer. I was somewhere close to end of my cyclical journey, and I like to think it was just when I had completed the ritual, an old man, with a long white beard, complete with turban and robe came up to me and smiled. We talked. He asked me why I was circling the temple. I told him. He said he couldn’t help with that, but if I wanted to see something I hadn’t before, I was welcome to join him for dzikr. I was well versed in folktales to know that you always listen to an old man who comes up to you in a temple. The old man was Moulana-Sheik Nazim Adil Al-Haqqani, from Lefke in Turkish Cyprus. He led dzikr that night in the dergah at the edge of temple.
Sheik Nazim lead dzikr. His voice was soft, and low, and a hall full of men and women chanted after him. I cannot remember what he said after prayers, or what I said to his disciples who surrounded me. But a peace came over me. Sheik Nazim would return to Turkey soon, I was informed, but if I was still interested I could reach out to his senior disciples. Someone gave me a card for Sheik Nazim’s representative: Mr. Izeth Nilar.
……
I have practiced with Uncle Izeth and his companions, a group of senior practitioners, mostly women, for the last couple of years. I still don’t know if Uncle Izeth is really my teacher. I still learn from him, but there is one glaring hole in his life that I cannot really understand. His wife, Aunty Saadiya, who he still seems to care for, and with whom he is raising four seemingly happy children, looks on at Uncle Izeth’s piety with utmost disdain. She cooks and cleans and keeps him house. He tends the garden, reads, makes an income from a few honest hustles, and spends his evenings preaching. However much I try, she avoids talking to me. She smiles and says hello, retreats to the kitchen, only coming out to serve coffee. I met her once at fabric shop. She was running her hands through layers of linen with a friend. We had a brief and cordial chat, and even though I had been to her home countless times, she treated me as a stranger. Why did she keep this world that her husband inhabited, in which he was a leader and a teacher, far from her own life? Did she, who had for so many years cared for uncle Izeth, and who had in turn needed his attention and love, see something in him that I could not? If she didn’t take his religious life seriously, maybe there was a crucial flaw, a slight off hand that I just couldn’t see.
In spite of the coldness in their marriage, I still keep uncle Izeth as a teacher. Mostly, because I need someone who can pay attention, look in and tell me that I’m either right or I’m wrong.
……….
Mr. Izeth Nilar, Uncle Izeth, Sheik Izeth Kalifa of Moulana-Sheik Nazim Adil Al-Haqqani Al-Naqqashabandi to the island of Serendip, drove a small grey Maruti Suzuki. It is the car of young middle class couples who can’t wait to replace it with a more dignified vehicle, and of retired couples who have settled into their limited means. It is so light that when you speed you can feel the car lift off the ground. In the case of an accident it would fold up like a loaf of bread. We would be the only casualties, and uncle Izeth drove like a maniac.
This was only my third meeting with Uncle Izeth. I was to join him at his home for a cup of coffee
and the Maghrib prayer, and we would drive to Dewatagaha Mosque for dzikr. His wife served us coffee. We prayed. He from a chair because he had injured his back, and I on a silk prayer mat handed down Uncle Izeth’s family.
We drove in to the city. Rush hour was easing up. Streams of cars gushed on, and on through our poor roads. A car jostled with a bus, and a motorcycle crawled between them for an inch of space, for an extra second, just to get home; have it all done with. There we were turning into a road, stopping to check traffic. And there we saw a bus, an enormous maroon casket of office workers on our left, and a car with a full fledged family of four dreaming of dinner coming at us from the right. You and I would have let them pass for how can one really be later for prayer? Uncle Izeth hit the gas. The car slipped forward and he veered left to avoid the sedan, and as I screamed like a dying mongoose, he swerved sharply to the right to slip in front the bus and hurtle on. The horns of furious drivers followed us. Uncle Izeth merely laughed at me.
It took me awhile to notice that Uncle Izeth’s driving never made me nauseaus. Not once did the car jolt, or slip, slide or bounce. Not once did he slam the breaks throwing me headfirst at the windscreen. He had prefect control. Every journey was single perfect stroke, and so he sought the slim spaces between a car, a bus and a motorcycle to shoot through. He knew the road, and it seemed he had faith. It was then, watching him drive, that I thought this was a man worth listening to at least for awhile.
Prof. Asani’s lecture on Sufism focused on the personal relationship between disciple and teacher. We discussed the role that Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba played as a both a teacher guiding students under the strains of his present world, French colonial Senegal, and as a mystical teacher, an object of devotion still remembered, addressed and supposedly accessed by his disciples. In the first few years of my twenties, I spent a lot of time with Naqshbandi Sufi order of Sri Lanka, and with its main spiritual guide for the island, Sheik Izeth Nilar. I reflect on the many things I sought in a religious teacher: long term guidance, a person to talk to about other ways of leading life, a person who you hope can take away of losing loved ones, a person who can embody a right way to be in the world, and the pitfalls of this search. Even as I developed a trust for Uncle Izeth, and tried to see what Imaan looks like in our age, I could see through the holes in his religious and personal life. The story is about trying to piece together the different elements that go into that search for religious guidance that is more than just the external, beautiful, trappings of a faith (which I all to easily get lost in.)