Emily O'Dell in Turkmenistan
Love is the essence of all stations and virtues…if you consider beauty and perfection to be confined to material forms and worldly things, know that you are imprisoned within the world of (corporeal) form and are deprived of observing the reality.
— Sheikh Najmuddin Kubra (d. 1220)
As I mention in my new Huffington Post article about Damascus, I’ve spent the past ten years wandering from Afghanistan to Mali–and many places in between–to visit as many Sufi shrines as possible. Many of those shrines, it turns out, were in Central Asia along the Silk Road.
Tonight, I was thinking about the shrine of Sheikh Najmuddin Kubra–the Persian founder of the Kubrawiyya Sufi Order–in Konye-Urgench in Turkmenistan. Since I had heard about him for many years before stepping on the Silk Road, I knew that I had to make my way to his shrine when I was finally living in Turkmenistan (which is one of my favorite places in the world). Sheikh Kubra is celebrated for his complex and profound treatises on spiritual visionary experiences and mystical dreams. Known as the “Pillar of the Age,” he was also reportedly referred to as the “maker of saints” because of the large number and quality of the Sufi students whom he guided.
When I teach Sufism, my students always enjoy reading the various stories produced from the Silk Road about his unfortunate death at the hands of the Mongols–a death which is still discussed, I found, by the Turkmen visiting his shrine–who think of him as a national hero…
