‘Perhaps you wonder why we are speaking of mysteries like this, when we have infidels and wolves nearly at our door!’ he exclaimed. ‘There is only one mystery we need speak of at this moment, just before dawn. It is the mystery that Ali Pasha has guarded for us so well for so long. It is the mystery that itself has now placed our pasha here on this rock, the very mystery that brings the wolfish ones here. It is my duty to tell you what it is – and why it must be defended by all of us here, at any cost. Though those of us in this room may find different fates before this day is over – some of us may fight to the death or be captured by the Turks for a fate that may prove worse than death – there is only one person, here in this room, who is in a position to rescue this mystery. And thanks to our young fighter, Kauri, she has arrived here just in time.’
The Baba nodded with a smile at Haidée, as the others all turned to look at her. All but her mother, Vasiliki, that is – who was looking across at Ali Pasha with an expression that seemed to mingle love, trepidation, and fear.
‘I have something to tell you all,’ Shemimi Baba went on. ‘It is a mystery that has been handed down and protected for centuries. I am the last guide in the long, long chain of guides who have passed this mystery on to their successors. I must tell the story swiftly and succinctly, but tell it I must – before the sultan’s assassins arrive. You must all understand the importance of what we are fighting for, and why it must be protected, even unto our deaths.
‘You all know one of the famous hadis or reputed sayings of Muhammad,’ the Baba told them. ‘These famous lines are carved above the threshold of many Bektashi halls – words that are attributed to Allah Himself:
I was a Hidden Treasure, therefore was I fain to be known, therefore I created creation, in order that I should be known…
‘The tale that I am about to tell you involves another hidden treasure, a treasure of great value, but also great danger – a treasure that has been sought for more than one thousand years. Only the guides, over the years, have known the true source and meaning of this treasure. Now I share this with you.’
Everyone in the room nodded: They understood the importance of the message that the Baba was about to impart to them, the very importance of his being here. No one spoke as the old man removed the sacred elifi tac from his head, set it down in the pillows, and shed his long sheepskin cloak. He stood there amid the cushions dressed only in his simple woolen kaftan. And leaning upon his mulberry staff, the Baba began his tale…
The Tale of the Guide
In the year of the Hegira 138 – or by the Christian calendar, AD 755 – there lived, at Kufa, near Baghdad, the great Sufi mathematician and scientist, al-Jabir ibn Hayyan of Khurasan.
During Jabir’s long residence in Kufa, he wrote many scholarly scientific treatises. These included his work The Books of the Balance, the work that established Jabir’s great reputation as the father of Islamic alchemy.
Less known is the fact that our friend Jabir was also the dedicated disciple of another resident of Kufa, Ja’far al-Sadiq, the sixth imam of the Shi’a branch of Islam since the death of the Prophet and a direct descendant of Muhammad, through the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima.
The Shi’as of that sect did not then accept any more than they do today the legitimacy of the line of caliphs forming the Sunni Islamic sect – that is, those who were friends, companions, or relatives, but not direct descendants, of the Prophet.
The town of Kufa itself had remained, for hundreds of years since the Prophet’s death, a hotbed of unrest and rebellion against the two successive Sunni dynasties that had meanwhile conquered much of the world.
Despite the fact that the caliphs of nearby Baghdad themselves were all Sunnis, al-Jabir openly and fearlessly – some say foolishly – dedicated his mystical alchemical treatise, The Books of the Balance, to his famous guide: the sixth imam, Ja’far al-Sadiq. Jabir went even further than that! In the book’s dedication, he expressed that he was only a spokesperson for al-Sadiq’s wisdom – that he had learned from his Mürsit all the ta’wil – the spiritual hermeneutics involved in the symbolic interpretation of hidden meaning within the Qur’an.
This admission in itself was enough to have destroyed Jabir, in the eyes of the established orthodoxy of his day. But ten years later, in AD 765, something even more dangerous happened: the sixth imam, al-Sadiq, died. Jabir, as a noted scientist, was brought to the court at Baghdad to be official court chemist – first under the caliph al-Mansur, then his successors, al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid, famous for the role he played in The Thousand and One Nights.
The orthodox Sunni caliphate was noted for rounding up and destroying all texts of any sort that might ever suggest to anyone that there was another interpretation of the law – that there might be a separate, mystical descent of meaning or interpretation of the sayings of the Prophet and of the Qur’an.
As a scientist and Sufi, al-Jabir ibn Hayyan, from the moment of his arrival at Baghdad, lived in fear that his secret knowledge would vanish once he was no longer alive to protect and share it. He thrashed about for a more permanent solution – some impermeable way to pass on the ancient wisdom in a form that could neither be easily interpreted by the uninitiated nor easily destroyed.
The famous scientist soon found exactly what he was seeking – in a most uncanny and unexpected fashion.
The caliph al-Mansur had a favorite pastime: something that had been brought to the Arab world during the Islamic conquest of Persia a century earlier. It was the game of chess.
Al-Mansur called for his noted alchemist to create a chess service forged from uniquely created metals and compounds that could only be produced through the mysteries of alchemical science, and to fill this set with stones and symbols that would be meaningful to those acquainted with his art.
This command was like a gift to al-Jabir, directly from the archangel Gabriel himself – for it would permit him to fulfill the request of his caliph and at the same time to pass on the ancient and forbidden wisdom – right beneath the noses of the caliphate.
The chess service – which took ten years and the help of hundreds of skilled artisans to produce – was completed and presented to the caliph at the Festival of Bairam, in AH 158 – or AD 775, ten years after the death of the imam who had inspired its meaning.
The service was magnificent: It measured a full meter on each side, the squares comprised of what appeared to be a shimmering, untarnishable gold and silver, all studded with jewels, some the size of quails’ eggs. All those in the court of the ’Abbasid dynasty at Baghdad were astonished by the marvels before their eyes. But unknown to them, their court chemist had encoded a great secret – one that would remain secret, even down until today.
Among these mysteries that al-Jabir had encoded into the chess set, for example, were the sacred numbers thirty-two and twenty-eight.
Thirty-two represents the number of letters in the Persian alphabet – these were codes that Jabir had embedded in the thirty-two silver and gold pawns and pieces of the service. Twenty-eight, the number of letters in the Arabic alphabet, was represented by codes that were carved into the twenty-eight squares around the circumference of the board. These were two of the many keys used by the father of alchemy, to pass on to initiates in every subsequent age. And each such clue represented a key to a part of the mystery.
Al-Jabir gave his masterful creation a name: he called it the Service of the Tarik’at – that is, it was the key to the Secret Way.
The Baba seemed weary when he completed his story, but he was unbowed.
‘The chess set I have spoken of still exists today. The caliph al-Mansur soon realized that it contained some sort of mysterious power, for many battles broke out surrounding the service – some within the ’Abbasid court itself, at Baghdad. Over the next twenty years, it changed hands several times – but that is another, and longer, story. Its secret was at last protected –