The Sufis wear robes of wool as a sign of their turn­ing away from the world, and their very name comes from the Arab­ic word suf, wool. I myself met a mas­ter who made felt dervish caps.

A battered gate­way, flak­ing paint, no one in the court­yard, but we do not even stop, and already we are climb­ing the nar­row stairs to the upper floor. Nobody any­where. To the right, the work­shop – a big table, sacks, a swel­ter­ing heat in high sum­mer, in the midst of the felt man­u­fact­ory. A few unre­mark­able pieces of fur­niture, a table, chairs around it, and we take our seats.

After a short, silent wait the host comes in – an oily-skinned Sufi mas­ter, who is also the cap-maker. Intro­duc­tions are unne­ces­sary, we do not take in each other's names, nor is there any need to, for from the start the con­ver­sa­tion did not open on the worldly plane but radi­ated some­thing time­less.

– Outer change is good; with it, inner change begins… – he says, and there is no dis­put­ing it, for some­times a change of place, a reshap­ing of cir­cum­stances, sets an inner trans­form­a­tion going as well, and we are jol­ted out of the rut. – If water stands still, it stag­nates and turns to mud, but if it moves, then as it flows on it reaches ever new places, sees fair land­scapes and gath­ers many things into itself. It grows ever wider…

There it is, the fig­ur­at­ive speech of the Sufis – the teach­ing has begun. He talks of water, but it is human exist­ence he speaks of. It is as if this were an ordin­ary, every­day con­ver­sa­tion, but no, it is about some­thing else entirely.

– Yes, I am a felt-maker – with that he raises to his lips the sim­pler dervish head­dress, the col­our of milky cof­fee, and kisses it ten­derly. – We kiss everything we have. Wool is a spe­cial mater­i­al. The Sufi wears wool; if you wear it, you will be warm, but you are pro­tec­ted too. No snake or scor­pi­on can get through a wool­len robe.

– To work wool, three things are needed: warmth – at this he ges­tures around him with a broad smile – water and soap. That is what it takes to turn wool into felt. And since the work­ing of wool is a sym­bol of the soul, the warmth is the tekke, the mon­as­tery, the water is pur­ity, and the soap is man's med­it­a­tion.

– And this other cap? – I ask inno­cently. I sensed that the dark­ish grey, enorm­ous, branch­ing head­dress was a ritu­al object, some­thing other than every­day wear.

– That?! That is Shams! – he lifts this cap too, and kisses it. There is no talk­ing around it. He does not say that yes, this is like Shams's cap, he does not say that this is the Shams-cap, no, he states it out­right – this is Shams. Here, then, is one of the ele­ment­ary examples of Sufi mys­ti­cism – a strik­ing expres­sion of the unity of things: how, in an object that is dis­tinct­ive and yet mater­i­al, he dis­cov­ers and names some­thing quite dif­fer­ent. Not even Shams, the mys­ter­i­ous mas­ter dead these eight hun­dred years yet for that very reas­on ever-liv­ing, but the arche­type of the teach­er-mas­ter, of which Shams too was an embod­i­ment.

– Every­one has his own Shams. An outer teach­er, an inner Shams… every­one has his own teach­er. And the cap is on the table so that you can lay the inner thought you cher­ish about the teach­er on the table!

An over­power­ing teach­ing, with seem­ing room for inter­jec­tion, but in truth none for objec­tion.

– Every­one has his own Shams… Rumi was all but driv­en mad by the depar­ture of Shams. The sep­ar­a­tion tor­men­ted him so much that he came even closer to his adored mas­ter, all but became one with him. He pub­lished his late poems under the very name of Shams, and held that in his own per­son the moon, and in the per­son of Shams the Sun, had met. Rumi locked away in his heart the mas­ter-friend he so ardently adored. And where was Shams mean­while? Out­wardly, per­haps, in the Syr­i­an wil­der­ness, or in the sev­enth heav­en, but in spir­it he surely lived in Rumi's heart. Self-sur­render, for­get­ting ourselves, is pos­sible in love…