Fragments, moments and reflections from a lifetime in Turkey, on the question of shared values of the Abrahamic faiths.
The real question is, who are we letting into our country? I know the Australian people have had a gutful, and I think we need to narrow, very dramatically, those we let into the country. They need to support Australian values: faith, reason, inquiry, debate, persuasion. They need to support our country and our people. We have a problem with radical Islamic theology, and I think one of the areas that we really need to look at is immigration. Numbers are one thing, but I think who we bring into our country is really important. They have to sign up to Australian values, which are fundamentally Judeo-Christian values: equality, the law, consent, democratic traditions—all those things are fundamentally Judeo-Christian
Andrew Hastie, 17 December 2025, The Guardian.
In an increasingly authoritarian age, we are recipients of endless content propagation by the right-wing media ecosystem, organised by dark money think-tanks, capitalist media conglomerations and carefully calibrated social media algorithms. Optimised for cruelty, influencers set their sights on the uncommitted. In One Nation’s first years, it was ‘Asians’ who were denounced as un-Australian. Implicitly or explicitly, today, right-wing racist political movements and operatives claim that it is Muslims who are the greatest threat to the integrity of ‘our’ society. Tomorrow, they may target someone else: Indians, Palestinians, Africans.
Nastiness is particularly strong in this endless and repetitive talk about Muslims. By definition, Muslims are bad citizens, meriting the banality of re-migration. US Congressman Randy Fine proclaims that there should be a ‘Muslim travel ban, radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible’. US Senator Tommy Tuberville contends that Islam is a ‘cult’; that Muslims are ‘here to conquer’; and that ‘Islamophobia is a lie. Because fear of Islam is rational’. Old Liberal Party Leader Scott Morrison recommends more regulation of the Islamic faith in Australia. New Leader Angus Taylor recommends Australia’s immigration system should discriminate on ‘values’, not on nationality.
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How should those who do not believe the truth of such claims respond? Should we add to the cacophony by arguing back, offering an alternative narrative and providing rational counter opinions about migrants? Or would we be only preaching to the converted? Should we disengage, refusing to be emotionally perturbed by right-wing popularist prejudices and disdaining to give our attention to them? Better, should we not just continue to live our multicultural lives, grounded in our friendships and everyday relationships? In doing so, we show the emperor has no clothes.
First, today, non-right-wing talk about Muslims must be apophatic, involving an unsaying of current claims about Islam. Against its contemporary right-wing definers, knowers and encompassers, we can begin by simply negating assertions about the attributes of Muslims and Islam. Contrary to Andrew Hastie, Muslims are not anti-equality or lawless; they are not unfaithful, unreasonable or anti-inquiry. They are not undemocratic or anti-Judeo‒Christian‒Islamic values. They are not unplural.
But replying with only negative statements to racist discourse about Muslims is insufficient. Along with the necessary negation of right-wing ‘knowledge’ of Islam, can we not also assert something more insightful about the reality of Muslims’ lives and practices? Against those who proclaim both how utterly different and inferior the other is, we can show how partially similar the other is to ourselves, even as we hope that their difference holds potential for our own self-alteration.
Below I write some things I have learned from Muslims.
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Visiting the Istanbul grave of famous tanbur artist, music composer and calligrapher Mesud Cemil (1902‒1963) with friends, we discover the words of Mevlana Celaluddin Rumi inscribed in Turkish upon his headstone:
Ölümümden sonra kabrimi yeryüzünde aramayınız.
Arif olanların sinesi benim mezarımdır.
(After my death don’t search the earth for my tomb.
My grave is the heart of those who know.)
Know what? I wondered.
Was I encouraged to hope that, in my own engagements with the artistic and religious traditions that Cemil oriented his life towards, Rumi might dwell within me as well?
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Thirty kilos of rice. Fifteen kilos of carrots. Fifteen kilos of onions. Eight kilos of chestnuts. Twenty kilos of finely chopped lamb.
The Ottoman music and ney (Sufi reed flute) studio where I have been doing fieldwork on and off for the last few years in Istanbul is preparing a meal. Under the watchful eye of neyzen (ney virtuoso) Salih Bilgin, ten or fifteen students, men and women, cut up carrots, slice garlic, heat olive oil in the studio’s massive pots. The feast is to be served after the commemoration concert that its best musicians are giving that evening (17 December). The menu is carefully planned. Its main course is Üzbek or tekke pilavı (lodge rice), a rich butter-cooked rice laced with vegetables, garlic, meat, currents, and yellow chestnuts. Helva is the sweet dish made from semolina (coarsely milled durum wheat), sugar, butter, milk, vanilla and crushed walnuts. We cook for hours together, separating and combining elements, frying, stirring, pouring, talking and joking, players and non-players alike.
Five kilos of butter, fifteen of milk, ten of sugar, countless packets of vanilla.
The concert is to be held in the newly refurbished Kaşımpasa lodge (tekke) of the Mevlevi Sufi order, one of five in Ottoman Istanbul shut down by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his Turkish Republic in 1927 as part of their infamous laicisation of society. For a period, its salon was used as the ring of the Kaşımpasa Wrestling Club.
The Kemalists’ reform of religion did not really initiate a secularism that separated Islam from the fields of political order and discourse. Instead, the Turkish Kemalists concentrated authority for Islamic knowledge and resources in their own hands, constructing a Turkish‒Islamic synthesis that supported its ethnic state-building project through the institution in 1924 of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, or Diyanet. (A strange exception to Australian secularism, all Turkish mosques here are controlled by the Turkish state, serviced by religious functionaries who are salaried state employees, appointed by Ankara after completion of their state-approved qualifications. Imagine if the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney were selected by the government.)
Only over the last few decades have the music and arts of the Mevlevi Ottoman Sufis, who named themselves after the teaching and poetry of Mevlana Celaluddin Rumi, and who for hundreds of years sought to interpret his way for themselves, been resuscitated in Türkiye. Today, governments and civil society alike give their own contested meanings to his life and poetry.
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Four hundred tubs of ayran. Four hundred bottles of water. Five hundred serviettes, forks and paper plates.
Tonight, the concert commemorates the life of Niyazi Sayın, Salih Bilgin’s own teacher at the Ottoman Music Conservatorium in Türkiye—only established in 1978—and the country’s most famous ney player. Niyazi Sayın (1927‒2025) was known by his peers as insan-i kamil, an Islamic honorific meaning a ‘complete person’, partly referencing his skill in a large array of craft practices: from water marbling to carving wood, from bookbinding to making prayer beads, from growing roses to photography, from inlaying pearl shells to caring for pigeons.
The concert and meal are free to whosoever comes, a reflection of the admiration the studio holds for Neyazi Sayın’s life and works. Neyzen Salih Hoca (teacher) tells me that the event will make his teacher live in his heart again. Indeed, the music workshop has adopted many of Neyazi Sayın’s pedagogical practices. Group lessons unfold not only through music but also through sohbet (intimate conversation), in the cooking of communal meals, through instruction in toolmaking and instrument crafting, and via daylong expeditions around the city.
Until his death in September 2025, students regularly delivered freshly prepared food from the studio to the housebound 98-year-old Sayın, who lived alone in Üsküdar in a ramshackle tekke, surrounded by his books, calligraphy, doves, and hens. Taking him eggplant stew one evening, I told him I was from Australia. Having lost the power of speech, he placed his hand on his heart and then mimicked a tennis serve.
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The music for the concert is a Mevlevi ayin (mass), a complex and long liturgical piece featuring both a choir and an ensemble of Ottoman instruments, led by the reed flute. Salih Hoca has selected the ayin, chosen the musicians, vocalists and soloists, and directed the months of rehearsals. Mevlevi ayin accompany and structure the spiritual ritual of mukabele, better known as the religious ceremony of the Mevlevi whirling dervishes. They are complex compositions, structured into six parts, including four central selam sections of varying tempo, each of which features distinct music and words that direct and support the semazens’ (dervish) movements and mood.
Nearly always, the lyrics for the ceremony are taken from the Mesnevi, Rumi’s famous collection of poems.
Listen to the song of the reed,
how it wails with the pain of separation.
Ever since I was taken from my reed bed,
my woeful song has caused men and women to weep.
I seek out those whose hearts are torn by separation,
for only they understand the pain of this longing.
Together, the structured music, the design of cloaks and hats, the stylised movements of the dervishes—spinning with one hand pointed upwards, the other earthwards—and the sung words express a radical theology of a human being’s relationship to God. Awakened, surrendered, raptured, transformed, love-annihilated, returned. Friend of God.
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Like all Ottoman music, Mevlevi ayins are written in makam or melodic modes. There are hundreds of makam in Ottoman music. Transcribed in microtones, they are less like scales and more melodic pathways and tonal relationships. In the ney lessons in the studio, makams are taught progressively as students learn to perceive what Salih Hoca describes as their various flavours. For those familiar with them, makam are felt to induce different clusters of emotions. It is for this reason that the call to prayer (ezan) is sung in a different makam at different times of day, in accordance with the tempo of life activities.
Following in the way of his teacher, for the concert, Salih Hoca has chosen an ayin rediscovered by Niyazi Sayın himself, one that Sayın never had the opportunity to play. In keeping with his iconoclastic character, the ayin is controversial. Composed by Hasim Bey in the suzinak mode in the late Ottoman period in 1860, the ayin was performed only once in Istanbul before being banned by the head of the Mevlevi order in Konya. The reason for its prohibition was clear—Hasim Bey arranged its lyrics not from the poetry of Mevlana but by selecting poems written by his own sheikh from the Besiktas Mevlevi lodge where the ayin was first performed.
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The date 17 December has always been a historically significant date for Muslims in Istanbul. It is the night that the Mevlevi order celebrated Seb-i Arus, the time of Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi’s ‘marriage’ to God. Like a reed cut from the riverbed to be played by the breath of the Divine, Rumi’s ‘wedding night’ commemorates his death and union with God. For this reason, the concert is not a wake but a festival, a celebration of Niyazi Sayın’s and Rumi’s continuing spiritual life.
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The Mevlevi order is still officially prohibited in Türkiye. Today, it is mainly the authoritarian Justice and Development Party (AKP) government through its Ministry of Culture and Tourism that sponsors the Seb-i Arus celebrations, particularly in Konya, where Rumi’s tomb is found. A spokesman for the Ministry noted they ‘attached great importance to the ceremonies held in memory of Mevlana…as they saw it as a core responsibility to introduce, protect and pass on all cultural values and heritage elements that shape the spiritual fabric of the land on which people live and that “make us who we are”’. That poet Rumi defines Turkish identity as a claim in keeping with the neo-Ottomanist cultural politics of the AKP.
The music studio posits no such relationship. It does not seek to capture Mevlana for Turkishness. Nor does it wish to Muslimise Türkiye by proclaiming that this variety of Islam should be central to people’s identity. It performs Mevlevi ayins each year because they pose a high musical challenge and because the event holds spiritual significance meaningful to its members. It paid for, prepared, and served food to its supporters and friends out of the students’ love for Niyazi Sayın.
Judeo‒Christian‒Islamic values…should we sign up to such a thing?