Until friends of mine Ajay P Mangadu and Auswaf Ahsan suggested him to me, Mesa Selimovic was an author I had hardly known about. But there was gradualism in my absorbed reading of Death and the Dervish. It was just as I developed my love for my senorita: from indifference to expedient acceptance and from blunt refusal to whole-souled devotion. There was such pervasive sadness in the novel that I cold-shouldered it in the beginning. But somehow, the book refused to stay away. The whirling dervish on the cover was a magnet. As my reading faltered ahead, the novel formed around me a whirlpool that pulled me into it.
DandD is all about a Kafkaesque world set in a Bosnian Kasaba (town). The novel subtly illustrates how the political grand narrative snakes its way into the mindscape of a dervish named Ahmad Nuruddin. Power has invisible tentacles and allurement that even a mystic's mind conditioned by irja (which in Islamic theology means 'withdrawal' brought about by leaving judgement to God) can't escape it. Just like the vortex the novel formed around me, politics metamorphosed into a whirlpool that begins to whirl so violently around Ahmad Nuruddin, a Dervish who finds ecstasy in whirling, as to shatter his identity.
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Each chapter of the novel begins with a verse from the Quran, which is again echoed in the narration of the chapter. The novel is full of Quranic symbolism. Though a traditional Quranic scholar finds it disturbing to read her holy text retexualised (sometimes, detexualised), she can only console herself by the assurance that it's Mesa's reading of the Quran in the context of Bosnia where individual self is by and large hemmed in by political manoeuvres.
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One sentence in the novel remains engraved in my mind:
' More lives have been ruined in attempts to prevent sin than because of sin itself.'
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Thanks Ajay and Auswaf for a month of worthy reading.
