Understanding, friendship, compassion emerge from experience

By Victor Edwin

New Delhi: Marian Brehmer is an author, freelance journalist and academic researcher, focusing on Islamic spirituality and culture. Based in Istanbul, Turkey, he works for a wide range of magazines and newspapers and is the founder of the blog “Sacred Journalism” (www.sacredjournalism.org), which focuses on spiritual writing and transformative narratives for our times.

Together with his wife Aslınur, he has been hosting group pilgrimages to the Sufi sites of Turkey, named “Anar Journeys” (www.anarjourneys.com). On a visit to Delhi, he met Jesuit Father Joseph Victor Edwin, director of VIDIS (Vidyajyoti Institute, Department of Islamic Studies), Vidyajyoti College, Delhi. In this conversation with Edwin, Marian shares his journey into the world of Islam.

Matters India: Could you please share something about your family background?

Marian Brehmer: I grew up in a small town in Northern Germany. My father was born in 1935, so he experienced the turmoil of the Second World War as a young boy. My mother is the daughter of a Protestant minister. As one of seven children, she was brought up in Ethiopia, where my maternal grandfather worked at a mission station to teach the Bible to young children and seminarians. My father got interested in meditation and yoga in the sixties and became one of the pioneer meditation teachers of Germany, while my mother came in touch with Indian spirituality during her studies in Germany and the USA. Their common interest in Indian spiritual traditions made them meet, and thus I was born!

I grew up visiting India almost every year with my mother, particularly the ashram of the late Sathya Sai Baba in Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh. My encounters with Indian spirituality at an early age made me familiar with different expressions of the one truth (apart from my own German culture). Given my multi-spiritual family background, this idea that all authentic religions and spiritual paths are like mountain paths leading to one summit from different sides shaped me from an early age. I would easily feel at home in different sacred traditions; whether it be through singing Christmas carols at home in Germany, bhajans in India or praying in mosques during my later travels after high school.

Did the neighborhood where you were brought up have people from different religious backgrounds, or was it largely people from a single religious community?

The town I grew up was mostly populated by German middle-class with families of either Protestant or Catholic background. However, religious ties in Germany tend to be very loose. Sacred traditions are not alive in the sense they are in India or much of the Islamic World, which has several historical reasons—it would go beyond the scope of this interview to dive deeper into this. Many in Germany consider themselves atheists, or they are mere ‘cultural Christians’, which means going to church once a year on Christmas Eve and unwrapping gifts under the Christmas tree. But there exists no deeper understanding of the spiritual reality of Christ. During my school days, saying that you believe in God would inevitably lead to ridicule among other kids.

Growing up, did you have any friends from other religious backgrounds? If so, how do you think this impacted on your understanding of other religions and their followers?

As already mentioned, religion was simply not present at school or in the neighborhood. I did have Turkish and Arab classmates during primary school, but I didn’t have any knowledge about their religious backgrounds. There was also no one to foster that sort of interreligious curiosity and understanding.

Please share some significant events in your childhood involving people of other faiths which may have had a major impact on your way of relating to them.

In line with my mother’s affinity with Indian spirituality and our visits to ashrams, my parents and I used to gather with a local group of like-minded fellow German spiritual seekers once a week to pray, meditate and sing hymns from different faith traditions. That’s where I first came in contact with Sanskrit mantras, bhajans, and also chants from the Islamic tradition. It seemed very natural for me to praise the Divine with different names. It is only now, when I reflect deeper, that I see what immense gift my parents gave me by letting me experience unity in diversity at an early age. It is an experience that most young adults in the largely secularized German society never have.

Many—perhaps most—children are socialized in childhood itself into imbibing certain negative stereotypes about other religions and their adherents. Was this the case with you too, when you were a child? Were there some positive stereotypes that you imbibed at this stage?

I remember that in primary school there was some belittling of immigrant children from Turkish and Arab backgrounds—because they looked different, the food they brought to school was different, and they often spoke flawed German or had an accent. Our mathematics teacher, who was a very strict and patriarchal figure, often made fun of them which, as children, we never questioned, but later I understood how cruel it was.

Some background here: There are more than three million people of Turkish background living in Germany, who mostly came during the sixties of the previous century, when the country needed cheap labour. For many years, very little efforts were made to really understand their ways of living and integrate them into society. At the same time, many of them remained closed-off in ghettoized communities. Although there has been some considerable progress in this regard now, the shadows of decades’-long misunderstandings and lack of intercultural and interfaith outreach still remain, especially now, when right-wing polarization and anti-immigrant propaganda are on the rise worldwide, with Germany certainly being no exception, unfortunately.

There are two very different ways of seeking to address inter-community conflict and to promote inter-community harmony. One is to seek to critique, oppose, denounce and combat what is called ‘communalism’. Another, very different, approach, seeks to promote inter-community bridge-building and understanding through inner transformation and interpersonal interaction. As a means for seeking to improve inter-community relations, how do you look at these two distinct approaches? Which of these two approaches do you think is more effective in changing people’s hearts, transforming their minds and promoting genuine regard and respect for people from diverse faith backgrounds?

Without any doubt, it is only through creating authentic heart-to-heart connections between individuals of different faiths and backgrounds that the barriers in our mind can be brought down. “A mountain cannot reach out to another mountain, but a human being can reach out to another human being”, as a famous Persian proverb goes. We always have a choice whether we want to focus on what is different or if we instead try to discover the common denominators of our faiths. Even those who consider themselves “faithless” surely adhere to some human values that are similar to the main tenets of every major religion. Tapping into that common ground, acknowledging what is fundamentally human and meeting each other from that place is the way to peace. So, I believe that peace is not made in large conference halls to the same extent that it is made in human hearts—one friendship at a time, one human connection at a time. If we can only get better at feeling and live with our centre being our heart, such connections to other humans will become our natural way of interacting with each other. How can it be otherwise, given that we all carry that essential Divine spark in us?

How do you think people who claim to follow this or that religion can live together in harmony despite their religious differences, and, beyond that, seek to learn and benefit from each other and their faiths? Could you please reflect on this in the light of your personal experience?

I have learnt tremendously by immersing myself into different faith traditions. My first encounters with Islam were during a research on interfaith relations in Syria in 2009, two years before the terrible civil war in that country broke out. Just two weeks before reaching Aleppo, I had turned 18. A year short of my high school graduation, this trip was an initiation. It was both a journey of maturing and the discovery of a culture that deeply fascinated me. As a grantee of a German travel foundation, I set off with my own research project. I wanted to study how the three Abrahamic religions coexisted in Syria. I had drafted a route and studied the basics of Syrian history.

I met Ali, who came to fetch me in the courtyard of Aleppo’s Grand Mosque. Ali had short black hair and a tiny chin beard. He was a smart and soft-mannered 24-year-old student of English literature. We left the Grand Mosque through a back door and entered the maze of the souq (traditional market). Ali knew the alleys like the yard of his own home. This was ancient Aleppo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth. We turned behind a row of spice shops and walked along a stone wall that had witnessed centuries of change. Then, we stepped through a gate and climbed a flight of stairs. Had I been on my own, I probably wouldn’t have found my way there.

We entered the courtyard of yet another mosque. It was more modest than the Great Mosque and marked by age, serenely tucked away from the busy souq. Al-Adiliyah was a worship site built in the mid-16th century, one of the oldest monuments of the Ottoman period.

We sat down in the mosque’s reception hall. Ali told me he was responsible for receiving foreigners at the mosque. Before I could explain him why I had come to Syria, he had already produced a breakfast of flat bread, hummus, cheese, olives, cucumbers and tomatoes for me. I said I was there to speak with Syrians of different religious backgrounds. I mentioned that I felt particularly drawn to Sufism, having experienced a Sufi ceremony at an interfaith gathering in Germany earlier that year.

“This mosque belongs to a Sufi community, didn’t you know that?” Ali exclaimed. My heart leaped. I realized I had come to the right place. How things align when you search for something with a pure intent!

Ali invited me to stay as a guest in the mosque which—as I learnt later—was associated with a branch of the Shadhiliyya order, a Sufi movement with North African origins. I was overjoyed! This was the kind of experience I was looking for! “I can hardly believe it. I just exchanged my hotel for a mosque! What would happen if a Syrian wanted to spend the night in a German church?”, I wrote into my diary that evening.

For a whole week, I got to sleep on a balcony overlooking the mosque’s domed prayer hall and facing the prayer niche that indicated the direction of Mecca. At Al-Adiliyah, I experienced the best of Syrian hospitality. I was fed and taken care of like a brother. Whomever Ali introduced me to, I was received with kind smiles and words of appreciation. There was so much warmth and heartfelt connection in the way community members treated each other. Soon, I felt like one of them. When time came to say goodbye to Ali…we looked into each other’s eyes and I was close to shedding tears of joy. ‘In only a month we forged a friendship, but it seems to me like a year’, Ali said to me. I handed him an envelope with three photos of the time we spent together and a postcard from my hometown. I felt so grateful for having met this man. I was convinced that this journey could lead to a lifelong friendship.

I learnt that real peace between faiths requires an understanding of the fundamental unity of all existence, a concept known in Arabic as Wahdat ul-Wujud. It implies that differences in form are desired by God/Allah/The Divine Source and that all those expressions are in fact manifestations of one underlying Source. Until we grasp that fundamental truth, human beings are always likely to get stuck in intellectual arguments over differences in their traditions or, worse, fall into communalist hostilities.

While understanding unity from a mental level is one thing, actually experiencing it is a whole different story altogether. When unity—through spiritual practice—becomes a felt individual experience, tolerance, understanding, friendship, compassion emerge quite naturally from within. I also believe that those “spiritual muscles” of virtue can be deliberately trained, just like one can train the muscles of the physical body.

Please share something about your academic background, especially your training in Sufi spirituality and some glimpses of your pilgrimage?

My interest in Sufism came about as a natural extension to my childhood explorations in Indian spirituality. Having traveled by airplane from Germany to India so many times, I realized I had crossed Islamic lands such as Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan time and again from the air. After high school, I got increasingly curious to explore the spiritual cultures in those four countries; which I have been doing on a personal and academic level during the past ten years.

I first came across Sufism in Syria, as I mentioned above, and felt a natural affinity towards Islamic spirituality. This made me explore Islamic mysticism in depth in the years that followed. It is still an ongoing exploration, a deep personal quest that eventually also made me meet my wife, who comes from a family of Sufis in Western Turkey. As Sufi researchers and seekers, we’ve been hosting journeys for Westerners into the Sufi landscapes of Turkey (www.anarjourneys.com).

As for my academic career, I did a BA degree in Iranian Studies from the Free University of Berlin, studied Persian Language and Literature in Tehran and then graduated with an MA degree in Civilization Studies from Ibn Khaldun University, Istanbul (which is where I have been living for the past five years). I also conducted a 3-month fieldwork on the “Inner Experiences of Modern Iranians with Sufi Poetry” in Iran in 2017.

I would point at the importance of experiencing unity and of building friendships from that vantage point. When hearts are open and we see the Divine in each other, true understanding can happen—by the way, not only between individuals of different faith backgrounds, but even with people within our own communities. Along with this, I believe that interfaith dialogue on the level of intellectual enquiry and exchange is also very important.

What do you see as the purpose of human life? How do you think working for better relations between people from diverse faith backgrounds might fit into this purpose?

The purpose of this precious life is to realize our full potential as human beings by living and acting from our essential divine Essence. Bringing that quality of presence and love into all human interactions is the path of any realized mystic, no matter if s/he is a Sufi, Christian gnostic, Kabbalistic Jew, from the Advaita-Vedanta path or Buddhist. As I expressed above, living in tune with our divine nature naturally leads to deep respect and appreciation for all spiritual paths. A path that sets out to criticize or negate other paths is not a spiritual path.