Turkey's Sufis hidden in plain sight

First published:
Friday 4 December 2015 1:51PM
Rachael Kohn


Eylem Kaftan stood out from the crowd of Turkish Muslim women who attended the G20 Interfaith Summit in Istanbul. While they wore hijabs and long skirts, Kaftan's long flowing hair was uncovered, and her tall, willowy figure was fashionably clad. The women, mostly students or lecturers at private universities, huddled together while Kaftan spoke with many of the male presenters.


Tolga Celikkanat, documentary filmmaker





Raised in a secular household, Kaftan found that her mild interest in religion intensified as she got older. When she met Sufis in their sanctuaries something happened to her.

'Entering and meeting with these most amazing people who are praying singing and sharing this experience, whirling, I realised something's happening to me,' she says.

'I felt really happy, I felt really connected to these people, and I felt the energy of love came from the heart of Mevlana [Rumi] from 800 years ago. It was a powerful force of love, and it really stayed with me.'

Finding Sufis among ordinary Turkish citizens is not easy, because most would not announce their affiliation to colleagues or employers. But the warmth that emanated from the broad smiling face of Tolga Celikkanat, also a documentary filmmaker, virtually beamed his Sufi faith. At the G20 Interfaith Summit, he was busy gathering signatures to ensure the participants stayed in touch to further the aims of interfaith dialogue and activism.

'I'm actually a Sunni Muslim, but I don't want to classify myself as a Sunni Muslim,' he says.


It was in America in 1993 that Celikkanat had his most profound introduction to Sufism, where it is practised with greater freedom and involvement by people from many religious backgrounds. The central practice is the zikr, a chant that means to hear or remember God.

'One of the things that is most important that I can still remember in my heart, from the States, is to be able to do a zikr among the Jews, the Buddhists, the Shiites, Alawites, Hindus,' Celikkanat says.

'We all do zikr together, we chant together, in the name of Allah, in the name of God ... we feel like we are "religionless" in a way that we are full of love of God, but in a way that we don't discriminate against each other in any way.'

In modern Turkey the ideal that Celikkanat describes seems a long way from reality. The remaining Christians are either Armenian, most of whom were driven out and killed in 1915, or Greek Orthodox. The Greek Orthodox Church's Patriarch Bartholomew is over 80, and his seminary, which was closed in the 1970s, has still not been reopened by the government authorities, despite his many petitions.

Jews who lived in Turkey for hundreds of years, and were protected by the Turkish government during the years of the Holocaust, have dwindled to 17,000 today, mostly in Istanbul. Last year, bombs ripped through two of the last active synagogues in Istanbul.

The once liberal city of Istanbul can look quite conservative to Western eyes, with rarely an uncovered woman's head seen in large sections of the city. A trend toward conservative Islam is growing in Turkey, with President Erdogan planning to build more mosques in Istanbul, which already has about 3,000.

Sufism, with its radically inclusive practice, on the other hand, is unlikely to gain much official support. Kaftan's documentary film on Sufism apparently left the Turkish TV commissioners 'speechless'. They told her its message would be confusing to ordinary Muslims. She countered that the film was about non-Turkish Muslims, including an Israeli, who embraced an aspect of Islam, and could be seen as a doorway to a greater appreciation of the faith.

Her more convincing argument, however, was that she saw it as a much needed antidote to the growing view of Islam as a religion not of peace but of violence.

'If this film is shown, those people who have fear of Islam and prejudice against Islam, I would love it if this film helps erode those kind of negative feelings and hatred against Islam and Muslim people,' she says.

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