Khalwat dar Anjuman

I knew loneliness among people long before I found a name for it. In a classroom you can sit next to others and feel an invisible wall: indifference, mockery, the impossibility of sharing your thoughts with anyone. A child does not grow wiser because there was no place for him among others. He simply learns to endure what he did not choose.

That is how I learned to be alone with myself everywhere: at home, at school, later at work, in any company. Over time this place became an inner sky where I could think and grow. And later what I call spiritual experience grew out of it too.

The wish to run away always came: to the mountains, to the forest, to any silence where the noise switches off even for a second. It is not always possible, and then you have to learn to find solitude within yourself - where no one can reach you, touch you or humiliate you. Where nothing sticks, and you take none of it with you.

My hands measure, mark out, assemble the frame of a ceiling, level the surface. In such work a mistake cannot be hidden by beautiful words. And between the movements a musical phrase is sometimes born, one I will return to in the evening. “Khalwat dar anjuman” - “solitude in the assembly”: to be with people outwardly and with the Truth in the heart. This is the name of one of the rules of the Khwajagan line. Next to it stands the saying “Dast ba kār, dil ba yār” - “Hands at work, heart with the Beloved”. The Qur’an speaks of people whom neither trade nor buying and selling distracts from the remembrance of God, from prayer and from zakat.

In the Khwajagan tradition this means constant, quiet remembrance. My personal reading is different: creative work sometimes becomes for me a way of not forgetting what matters most. If a human being was created by the Creator, then he too is called to create: music, a house, a garden, it does not matter what, but not only to consume. I know that Baha al-Din Naqshband himself did not accept music as a means of the path, and I do not ask anyone to regard my music as a continuation of his practice. I am only saying how I hear these words.

“Shovqin o‘tar, sukunat qolar” - “The noise passes, the silence remains”. I have not become invulnerable. Words still wound, worries still tire me, irritation still distracts me. But I no longer need to prove that I can do without people. I stay among them, do my work, and keep a place inside for You.