قلْبي يُحدّثُني بأنّكَ مُتلِفي، روحي فداكَ عرفتَ أمْ لمْ تعرفِ

Right arm to heart, they bowed in and out of the mosque – as if sending their salam to a higher entity every time their foot would enter or leave the ground of the musalla.

When I first entered, the women told me not to pray alone, that soon they’ll all pray jama’ah, so I sat down and waited, watching from above the section below. There were two rooms, one – the musalla, and another which seemed more like a small lobby or  extended sitting room. There were men inside, a sea of white topis – the occasional black, and tens of dozens of leather socks. They sat in circles, waiting for something, speaking amongst themselves. The women too, they sat and waited – for an hour, two hours, reading, reciting, humming. I had no idea in the moment of it that I had maybe entered into a session of one of the oldest and most known Sufi orders in Istanbul. When my friend had invited me along, I was intrigued by the sound of a qasida gathering, assuming it were for show purposes – as most things are in the world today – realising not that it were real, it were local, it were intimate.

They qasa’id they sang to were Osmanli. I craned my untrained ear to try and pick up words – or tunes. Twice, they stopped for an Arabic poem, yet the man’s voice too far away I could decipher the language but not the exact words. In a moment of almost giving up on my curiosity to understand – the words, the rhythm, the beat to which everyone around me was immersed in, nodding and swaying – a piercing voice sounded amid the low chanting: “Ya Resul Allah, seni seviyorum, seni özlüyorum, seni düşünüyorum.”

What is there to understand? Other than the honing and watering, the long process of carving a rugged stone in hope that one day, it will become smooth, smooth enough to roll as easily into heaven as it does today into sin.