A Teacher Whose Clock Said Allah

There is the account of ʿAbdulazīz Bekkine, who as a young man searched for a teacher to complete his spiritual training. This was in the final years of the Ottoman state, before the Republic, and he had come from a good family among the righteous, from Turkic Kazakhstan, in Russia, seventeen years old. Asking after a guide, he was directed to a certain teacher in a particular zāwiyah, and went. He found that man seated facing the qiblah, absorbed in murāqabah, and, without approaching directly, took his place by the door, opening his heart toward him as one might open a connection. What reached him from that heart, in his own account, was the repeated word para, para, para — money, money, money. He left, deeply saddened.

Some months later he was directed to another teacher, found again seated near the miḥrāb of a small mosque, where a large grandfather clock — a recent introduction under Sultan ʿAbdülḥamīd, meant to accustom people to timekeeping — ticked quietly. Bekkine took his place by the door as before, opening his heart, and this time heard, not from the man before him but from the clock itself, the words Allah, Allah, Allah. At this the teacher turned and called him over, and Bekkine went and kissed his hand, saying that he had come to be trained under him. The answer given was that his portion, his naṣīb, was not to be found there, but would come to him in time, and that his spiritual formation lay elsewhere. As Bekkine was leaving, having received a duʿāʾ for the road, one further remark was added: that he should not himself become a teacher of this path, for it is a very difficult undertaking — which was, in effect, to say that he would indeed find his own teacher, and would in time become a guide, a murshid, himself. He did.