Tuning the heart: Language attunement of master and student in an Islamic monastery.

Abstract

The relationship of "murshid" and "talib," or "spiritual master" and "seeker," is the basic relationship of the Islamic Sufi Orders. Among the Bektashis, a largely Turkic Sufi Order founded in the thirteenth century in Anatolia, talibs are understood to learn from their murshids through dialogues with the murshid in the "tekke"--the Bektashi "monastery." In this study I seek to underst and how a murshid teaches and a talib learns in such a dialogic situation. In particular I study the interaction in a seventy-minute "lesson" of a talib with a Bektashi murshid. The interaction is intriguing in that while there is no syllabus and the murshid never initiates a topic or overtly directs discussion, still there is a subtle drift to the language of "nefes"--the spiritual poems of the Bektashi Order. There is also a continual affirming of the bond between the murshid and talib. I describe the dynamic of the interaction as one of "language attunement" in which there is "an increasing coordination of murshid and talib through playful recollecting of dialogue with another." This recollected dialogue can be immediately preceding words, immediately preceding syntactic structure, or narratives from lessons that took place months, years, and even decades before. The study confirms the centrality of "nefes" in Bektashi discourse. The very organization of the study reflects this message in its movement toward an underst and ing of the context in which "nefes" are chanted, and of the relation of murshid-talib dialogues to this context. Overall, the basic analogy of the study is that the learning of the murshid-talib relationship is the learning of a language. Thus the study is a sort of language acquisition study among adults. It is also a linguistic discourse study in a developmental frame, in which development is traced toward the language of "nefes." Finally, as the dialogues examined are in Turkish, the study can be seen as a dialect study, with the murshid speaking a West Rumelian dialect of Turkish.