Memories of the Mihrab Gallery
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It was January 1999. I had just returned to Glasgow
University in September, after an earlier false start and a three-year
incursion into Buddhism, including highland retreats, life in communal houses
and theatrical exploits. Looking for books in the university library on Sufism,
which I had begun to explore the previous year, I found Shems Friedlander’s The
Whirling Dervishes with its darkly evocative pictures of dervishes in white
against black backgrounds, and I found a website – searching the internet was
still quite a novel experience back then! - for the Threshold Society in the
USA, a sufi organisation connected to the Persian mystic and poet Jelaluddin
Rumi. They offered a distance learning introduction to sufi thought and
practice called the 99 Day Program, which I wrote off to join, and in writing I
happened to ask if they knew of anyone in Scotland also practicing. The
Threshold secretary, David, wrote back and told me there was a man, also called
David, a teacher in the same tradition, who ran an oriental carpet shop in
Edinburgh. “Aha!”, I thought - because I knew the very place.
Four years earlier I had lived in the centre of Edinburgh,
renting a room in an apartment beside the Assembly Rooms on George Street. I
worked for a while in a shoe shop on Princes Street, then temporarily found telemarketing
work further out of the city centre, cold calling on behalf of a double-glazing
firm. I used to run to work to get fit, and my run took me along the Royal Mile
and past Holyrood Palace. Along the way was a small oriental carpet shop which
fascinated me – I sometimes stopped outside and felt drawn to go in. I had no
reason though to actually go in, and I only ever saw one or two people inside,
so my shyness won out and I kept running.
There was something about the shop though. For the past few years I had worked on and off as an experimental theatre director, involved with student theatre at Queens University in Belfast, then setting up my own company in Derry. My inspiration was the British theatre director Peter Brook, who I learned later was a dedicated student of the spiritual teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, the Russian-Armenian mystic. Something about the carpet shop on the Royal Mile gave me a strong sense of Peter Brook’s work. This turned out to be an uncanny coincidence, because the David J. Bellak who ran it had strong connections not only to Sufism, but to the Gurdjieff teachings too!
It’s hard for me now to separate out the different layers of
memories of visiting David’s shop, the Mihrab Gallery, over many years. Through
it all, the memories evoke a tangible sense of spiritual beauty. The rugs
hanging on the walls, some laced through with silken thread, woven in bright
colours, subdued colours, simple or ornate, small or immense, each with
geometric patterns radiating out from a central motif that seemed to say “The Many
proceeds from the One”, all diversity of shape and hue brought into harmony and
coherence through that central point. And in the window – had I noticed it
subliminally four years earlier? – a small porcelain Whirling Dervish, arms outstretched
to the heavens.
It was as if the interior of the gallery awoke and mirrored
the interior of my being, reawakening me to a light and structure within me,
the tangible presence of spiritual handiwork. The human inwardness is a mirror
of the Divine Attributes, if we can but get ourselves out of our own way, stop
standing in our own light. Love, Beauty, Compassion, Wisdom, Strength and Grace
– all shine through our heart if we clear away the dust obscuring its shining
face.
I have no memory of how I introduced myself to David, whether
I had phoned through in advance or decided just to bravely walk in and say,
“Hello! I’m told you’re connected to Sufism…” What I do remember is asking him,
on one of my first visits, how exactly he ended up involved with the spiritual
path. His answer was indirect and mysterious, framed as it was by the intricately
patterned carpets on the walls and floor, yet also simple and honest. “How does one
end up anywhere?”, he responded. Although we can give explanations, accounts of
our journey, in the end it is a mystery, we are brought to where we are
supposed to be.
On another of those first visits, David took me out of the
shop and a little further back up the road in the direction of the Castle. We
went into a small, dimly lit traditional Scottish pub on the same side as the
gallery, where he offered to buy me a drink. I asked for a pint of Guinness. He
spoke of Rumi’s Way as being less concerned with religious externals and
formalities compared with some other Sufi schools, such as the Naqshbandi, who
he said were known in Turkey as “The Keepers of the Law”. It was the only time
he ever did such a thing – take me to a pub and buy me a beer– but it was
enough to make a point and prevent me ever developing a rigidly religious
persona as I was drawn deeper into Sufism and the worlds of Islam.
Two other things about the shop I should mention. First,
there was a CD player by one wall not far from the entrance, and I remember
hearing the Arabic instrument called the oud for the first time on one of the
CDs – ‘Barzakh’ by Anouar Brahim. Second, that in one of the drawers of David’s
desk, he kept a copy of the Discourses of Rumi by A.J. Arberry, a
translation of the conversations of Rumi as recorded by his students.
David knew I was studying the Threshold Society’s 99 Day
Program, and in fact he had visited the founders of Threshold, Kabir and
Camille Helminski, in the USA the previous year. This was a very painful period
in David’s life, having just divorced and seen his wife and children leave the
UK to live in the US. He was to have little contact with them for many years.
He told me how he had sat in tears in the home of the Helminskis, overwhelmed
by grief. When I mentioned that the 99 Day Program had introduced the
recitation of “Estaghfirullah” – ‘May God forgive’ - he sighed with genuine
pathos, “Ah, Estaghfirullah!”
One day, I don’t remember how many times I had visited by
then, David invited me down into the spacious store room beneath the gallery
floor, and there he recited with me for the first time the Mevlevi zikr as he
had received it from Suleyman Hayati Dede in Konya. It is such a simple zikr,
yet with such depth and with subtlety in the rhythm and recitation. How
wondrous and mysterious that this zikr has come down to us, down through
centuries of Seljuk and Ottoman rule, and through the decades of Sufism’s
suppression in modern Turkey in the Twentieth Century.
What is zikr, though? At that time I experienced it simply,
without complication. It was a recitation of words in Arabic that served to
connect me to the heart. David spoke sometimes of “coming”, of “bringing the
heart to the Kaaba”, when evoking the intention for gathering in community and
practicing zikr. It’s something we actively choose to do, or at least we
consent to be drawn, as I was to the gallery. You might say, this is the very
heart of “the Work” in Sufism and in Gurdjieff’s teaching: we make the simple,
naked effort to show up, to be present, to be conscious with what unfolds. There
is no compulsion in religion – we tread the way freely with each conscious step.
The fruit of the Work comes not through our own efforts, but through the grace
of God.
I found then, as I still find now, that practicing zikr
seems to bring about an orientation within me, like the pattern on the oriental
rugs organised around a central point. With zikr, I am more whole, more
coherent, more centred, more rooted, and the outer life around me seems that
way too. Without it, I become fragmented, lost in anxiety and a hopeless quest
to understand life conceptually. In my experience, the Mihrab Gallery formed a
central point in the pattern of my life, reminding me of Divine Unity and of my
true self.
CS
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