10 December 2005

BEIRUT: The first time ney virtuoso Kudsi Erguner traveled from Istanbul to Paris to perform a concert of Sufi dervish music, the Turkish Embassy in France gave him and his fellow musicians an ambivalent welcome. The Office of Tourism held a reception in their honor but advised the musicians to turn up at an uncharacteristically late hour. Presuming Erguner and his ilk would be a band of ignorant peasants, uncouth and likely to eat with their hands, the organizers wanted to ensure they arrived only when dinner was done.

With its shades of pride and shame, this story illustrates the many vexing issues Erguner has confronted in his career, devoted to a musical tradition repressed by a nascent Turkish state eager to be modern and secular, revived as tourist-friendly folklore, and then thrown into a tailspin by the effects of globalization and the commercial popularity of world music.

It is one among many such anecdotes, all loaded with meaning, which pace Erguner's memoir, "Journeys of a Sufi Musician," published last month by Saqi Books.

"Through the story of my life," he writes in the introduction, "I want to recount the last moments of the Sufi tradition in Turkey."

While the book succeeds in doing just that, at the same time it offers a surprisingly complex social and political history of Istanbul, a moving account of the relationship between father and son (Erguner's late father Ulvi was considered the last great ney master), a nuanced essay on religion and modernity, a patient argument on the need to preserve cultural heritage, a curious reflection of the sometimes splintering spread of Sufism to Europe and the United States, and a modest proposal for

living through contemporary

times in a just and humane way.

"Journeys of a Sufi Musician" opens in Diyarbakir, the town in eastern Turkey where Erguner was born. According to custom, his mother kept the bud of a lotus flower next to her bed. It burst open the moment her son was born.

From there, Erguner traces his story to Ankara and then to Istanbul, where his childhood friends found new and inventive playthings among the rubble of construction sites, themselves emblems of a small city populated by wooden houses transforming into a sprawling, concrete metropolis of 15 million people.

Erguner's account of his early schooling is both damning and uproarious. Everything in the state system was uniform, from the morning pledge of "I am Turkish, I am honest, I work hard" to the clothes and hairstyles of the students, so Erguner and his friends used to tickle each other with their buzz cuts. But otherwise, he remembers learning no more than the alphabet. More memorable were the thrashings, including the time a teacher banged his head into a wall so hard he had to get a vein in his nose cauterized.

Education for Erguner took place outside school, in the tekkes (dervish lodges or gathering places) where he attended secret Sufi meetings and slowly learned to play the ney.

Another anecdote: For 10 years between 1950 and 1960, the Turkish regime loosened its prohibition on traditional music (until then considered a retrograde and potentially dangerous attachment to the past at the expense of a more progressive future) and tried to popularize and update it.

Erguner's father was allowed to perform live at Istanbul's Broadcasting House. Erguner accompanied him and eventually he was chosen to play the ney in a special radio show for children.

At the very last minute, as he was set to begin, a man came into the studio and shut down the show. The argument was that it was one thing for an old man to play traditional music, but it was quite another to initiate a younger generation that had otherwise escaped the perils of the past.

Erguner recalls the incident with sadness. "It made me understand that I lived in two different worlds: the world of everyday life in which they ney had no place, and a world represented by the micro-society of traditional culture." Realizing that he needed to live in both and couldn't seek refuge in one or the other, he asked his father to buy him a more politically correct accordion. His father complied, with what one can imagine must have been a faint grimace.

In 1973, Erguner traveled to Paris and stayed. He first studied architecture and then began researching music more seriously and more academically, learning to transcribe and translate various forms of notation. His career took off as he began recording for France Musique, the label Ocora, and UNESCO. In the late 1980s, he collaborated with the director Peter Brook and the pop musician Peter Gabriel, with whom he created the film score for Martin Scorcese's "The Last Temptation of Christ."

Throughout "Journeys of a Sufi Musician" Erguner relates revealing, often unintentionally amusing, stories about the Sufi sects he comes across in Europe and the U.S. He notes the "constipated" attitude of G.I. Gurdjieff's second generation of followers. He relates the inane questions slung in his direction by various students of Carl Jung. He slams the proselytism of Sheikh Muzaffar's brand of Sufism in the U.S.

Far worse, however, are the orientalists and ethno-musicologists who want to interpret the structure and form of Erguner's music but don't want to hear him contradict their theories.

At the same time, Erguner laments the commercial cheese that corrupts whirling dervish companies throughout Turkey, slated to perform at weddings and for busloads of tourists. And he works through serious questions about cultural Euro-centrism and conflating the entirety of the non-European world (from Turkey to India to China) into a single, monolithic "other."

Throughout the book, Erguner puzzles somewhat patiently over the fact that while many people all over the world have picked up on various elements of Sufi music, they have often, as it were, missed the point. The formal elements of music and dance at a dervish ceremony are a means rather than an end, meant to coax viewers and participants alike into a state of spiritual ecstasy.

"What counted above all," writes Erguner, "was what each one was experiencing in the depth of his being."

To that end, Erguner's book contains precious few passages about music per se. He writes with pared-down, unadorned prose about performing with friends and colleagues, about the transmission rather than the teaching of musical knowledge, and about improvisation versus classical training.

He tends to leave the music itself alone, offering instead a CD (packaged inside the book) of archival recordings from the tekke of Istanbul. That way, readers can take a moment's pause and listen for themselves.

Kudsi Erguner's "Journeys of a Sufi Musician" is out now from Saqi Books and available in bookstores throughout Beirut.