The heart (KALB)

WHERE BODY, MEMORY AND IDENTITY MEET.

Social and cultural processes inscribe the body with meanings, and the body, which is always more than these meanings, projects its realities onto social spaces. We know the world through our bodies and we sometimes build a sense of self through our bodies. Western tradition has been described to carry an oculocentric bias in which vision and visual metaphors dominate the understanding. Whenever the body has emerged within this ocularcentric tradition, it has been the object-body : to be seen, to be observed and manipulated from the outside (Sampson, 1998). Sampson (1998) thinks that Western tradition's relationship to the body, centers on the ideas of danger and control. The bases of these concerns center on three related themes : (1) The body represents our continuing tie to the world of animals and so diminishes that which is distinctly human, (2) The body seems to be something that is always at the edge of our control and so threatens to take us places that we prefer not to go, (3) Once later Christianity separated soul from the body, the soul took precedence as something that served mortality in a way that the decaying body was incapable of achieving, thus elevating the soul to higher standing than body (Sampson, 1998). So, the Western tradition has been more body-negative than body-positive, especially viewing the body as a source of potential danger rather than as a source of knowledge and wisdom. With the growing importance of Christianity as a dominant culture within the West, there was an intensification of the ascetic attitude towards the body, since, as a consequence of the Christian theology of evil, the body became more central to the characterization of man as a fallen creature (Turner, 1997). Christian monastic tradition in particular gave the body a darker meaning, seeing the flesh as the metaphor of fallen man and the irrational rejection of God. This passionate body required the discipline of diet, meditation and constraint (Turner, 1997). In contrast to West which tends to see the body as interfering with mind's pursuit of genuine knowledge and understanding, the East gives the body and bodily practices a key role to achieve enlightenment than the mind alone can not achieve (Winter, 1995). The prayers performed involve rhythmical movements as well as the whirling and dancing of dervishes. All these bodily movements symbolize one's place in the universe, his relationship with divinity and sometimes his apirations to join the existential communion. Islam, far from being only a dogma based upon text, is a culture and civilization that is based upon the Quran and tradition of the prophet but develops far beyond these sources. It makes no distinction between the religious and the profane, neither in public life nor in private matters. Hence it regards the human body as it does all other things-in religious terms. Nothing is seen as secular or as religiously neutral. It accepts in a matter-of-fact manner all natural phenomena, including the human condition. The physical imperfections and weaknesses of human beings are rarely seen as a source of embarrassment or as a problem (Winter, 1995). Whereas in our times, in the words of Coakley (1997), '(the body) devoid now of religious meaning or the capacity for any fluidity into the divine, shorn of any expectation of new life beyond the grave, it has shrunk to the limits of individual fleshliness; hence our only hope seems to reside in keeping it alive, youthful, consuming, sexually active and jogging on, for as long as possible'.

In Islamic spirituality man, and consequently the human body, is 'made in the image of God', which means a priori that it manifests something absolute and for that reason something unlimited and perfect (Schuon, 1982). The Perfect Man is the sufi ideal to be attained, according to Jili, he as the copy of the God and the archetype of Nature, unites the creative and creaturely aspects of the Essence and manifests the oneness of Thought with things (Nicholson, 1980). According to the Persian mystic Fariduddin Attar, the body is the soul's cage. In the hereafter, the body will become the soul, and one must prepare for it in this world. In one of the fables told by Attar, the body and soul are two servants in a king's orchard, one blind and the other lame. The lame man climbs on blind man's back and steals some figs. The king is not deceived, however, both are punished. Likewise, God will punish both one's soul and one's body even if both try to cast blame on the other.

The heart (dil in Persian and kalb in Arabic) occupies a central role in sufi view of the psyche as well as the traditional conception of the human body. In Al-Farabi's formulation 'the heart is the ruling organ which is not ruled by any other organ of the body'(Walzer, 1985). At the beginning of the eleventh century, for example, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) in his Canon of Medicine integrated Aristotle's ideas within his largely Galenic physiology when he wrote: "[The heart is the] root of all faculties and gives the faculties of nutrition, life, apprehension, and movement to several other members." He believed that heart produced breath, the "vital power or innate heat" within the body; it was an intelligent organ that controlled and directed all others. He identified the pulse as "a movement in the heart and arteries which takes the form of alternate expansion and contraction, whereby the breath becomes subjected to the influence of the air inspired." (Avicenna, 1999).

In Sufi terminology the heart plays a large part, for it is viewed both as the man's source of good and evil aspirations and as the seat of learning or religious apprehension and of divine visitations. The role allotted to heart in the personality and understanding of man is in strict conformity with the Semitic tradition, and the Sufi 'science of hearts' is firmly based on Quran (Gardet, 1974). It is with his heart that man 'understands', just as he sees with his eyes and hears with his ears. Of those who neither understand nor hear it is said, 'it is not their eyes that are blind, but the hearts in their breasts'. Such blindness of the heart is a denial, the origin of ignorance. Massignon, a famous orientalist, writes : ' In sum, the Quran made the heart the source of knowledge and conscience; since he can in no way 'hold back' the irreversible and the irremediable dispersion of his resources (in movements and feelings) , man can regain possession of himself only within his own self, in his heart' (Quoted in Gardet, 1974). For Sufis, the seat of thought and awareness of self lay not in the brain but in the heart, a bodily organ, a morsel of flesh situated in the hollow of the breast whose beats both gave life and indicated the presence of life. There in the heart lies the secret and hidden home of the conscience, who's secrets will be revealed on Judgement day. The bodily organ of the heart ( and not the brain) is the seat of akl, the faculty of knowledge. Kalb is not only the faculty of knowing, it is also the seat of all moral impulses, both evil desires and instincts and the struggle to be free of them and attentive to divine teaching (Shafii, 1988).

For Rumi, the ultimate center of man's consciousness, his inmost reality, his 'meaning' as known by God, is called the heart. As for the lump of flesh within the breast, that is the shadow or outermost skin of the heart. Between this heart and that heart are infinite levels of consciousness and self-realization (Chittick, 1983). The heart is a catalyst between emotion, affect and thought processes, religious values and above all human being's constant drive and search for existential communion (Shafii, 1988). In Rumi's poetry intellect and love have been juxtaposed, intellect is necessary to give us information, but what the heart craves is direct vision (Schimmel, 2000). Intellect may be a Plato in his own right, but according to Rumi, when love comes, it hits him with a mace over the head. This is exemplified by a well-known parable in the Islamic world, the parable of the moth and the candle. The moth approaches the candle and first sees its light, then feels its warmth, and finally casts itself into the flames because it does not only want sight or feeling; it wants to become the flame itself and to be led to a new, higher life by burning itself in the candle (Schimmel, 2000). On the subject of the heart , Henry Corbin (1978) writes : " In Ibn Arabi as in Sufism in general, the heart (kalb), is the organ which produces true knowledge, comprehensive intuition, the gnosis of God and the divine mysteries, in short, the organ of everything connoted by the term 'esoteric science' (ilm al-Batin). It is the organ of a perception which is both experience and intimate taste." A saying of the Prophet indicates that 'One who knows himself knows his God'. This is a reflection of the motto 'know yourself', 'gnoti theuton' of Delfi. To know yourself means knowing the deep of your heart, to discover the place (throne) of God as a the meeting point of the Divine and human (Schimmel, 1975). Heart is a mirror where God and universe is reflected on according to traditional Sufi wisdom. The characteristic of the insan-i kamil (The Perfect Man) is the idea of a human being "who as a microcosmos of a higher order reflects not only the powers of nature but also the divine powers 'as in a mirror' ". Jili, who has a masterpiece on the Perfect Man, describes the heart as the 'Throne of God' and His Temple in man (Walzer, 1985). The Divine names and attributes are the heart's true nature, in which it was created. Some men are so blessed that they have little trouble to keep it pure, but most of us must undergo painful self-mortifications in order to wash out stains of the flesh. The heart reflects the world of attributes, or rather, as Jili holds, is itself reflected by the universe. God says, 'Earth and heaven do not contain Me, but the heart of my believing servant containeth Me' (Walzer, 1985). The heart remains the center of life and center of responsibility. According to an authentic saying of the Prophet, " inside the human body there is a morsel of flesh which, if healthy, the whole body is healthy and which, if diseased, the whole body is diseased." Then he pointed to his heart and said "this piece of flesh is this heart". These examples show that heart signifies something more than substance since the early days of Islam.

According to Rumi, for the spiritual traveler, the goal is to reestablish the human connection with the Gentleness, Love, and Mercy that brought man into existence. In cosmological terms, the contrast between the lower and the upper worlds, or material and spiritual existence, is expressed in such pairings as body and spirit, form and meaning, outward and inward, dust and air, foam and ocean (Chittick, 1991). According to the spiritual psychology of Rumi we must escape from the ego (our illusory selfhood) and dwell in the heart. Pain and suffering, then, are the necessary concomitants of the life of ego. They can not be overcome on this level of existence, but must be transformed inwardly into the joy that lies at the center of the heart. 'Whoever is more awake has greater pain' he writes, the greatest misfortune is not to feel the pain of seperation (from God) and to acquire thirst and pain, we must realize our own imperfection and inadequacy (Chittick, 1991). According to Rumi, Love is a divine power that brings the universe into existence, motivates the activity of every creature and wells up in the human heart to establish unity in the midst of multiplicity (Chittick, 1991). Ultimately, Love is God as creator, Sustainer and Goal of the universe; it is the One Reality that reveals itself in infinite forms. For Rumi, love, along with the beauty and joy that it implies; is the heart and marrow of religion, the central theme of all spirituality. When reading Rumi, one is constantly pulled toward the experiences of love as the central reality beyond any possible conceptualization. Above all, he wants to ignite the fire of love in the heart of man : ' The worst of all deaths is to live without love'. He says : 'How long this talk, these figures of speech, these metaphors? I want burning, burning-accustom yourself to that burning. Ignite the fire of love in your spirit and burn away all thoughts and concepts'. In the beginning of Mathnawi, he says that hundreds have said before and after him, that when the pen comes to write the word 'love', it breaks into pieces (Chittick, 1991).

The heart is also defined as the 'throne of God' so according to Ibn Al-Arabi, to the extent a person verifies the nature of the things by means of his heart, he can understand God and cosmos. But to the extent that he follows the way of his reason and rational faculty (intellect) he will remain in constant constriction and binding (Chittick, 1989). The great scholar Ghazali is a well-known example of a seeker who wanted to go from intellect to heart. An unexpected loss of his ability to speak persuaded him that he no longer truly believed in what he was teaching. Leaving his position, he went in search of certitude, inquiring after it among various groups of intellectual seekers: philosophers, theologians, mathematicians. At length he became convinced, through a revelatory event that only the sufi emphasis on intensely interiorized spiritual experience or taste could lead to knowledge without doubt (Shafii, 1988; Arasteh & Sheikh, 1989).

In Sufi literature, the heart is often defined and considered as a divine subtlety attached to the physical organ of the heart, and it is that subtlety which holds the truth within man. Heart is defined as the whole power behind the human being, both of the self and the spirit. In this point of view, the heart is equated with both the self and the spirit. Another view prefers to relate and connect all cognisances and understanding to the heart, implying that the brain relates to the heart (Haeri,1988). The brain is only a further means or auxiliary by which comprehension takes place. In describing the heart Ghazali uses the following metaphor : ' ..the body is like a country. The artisans are like the hands, feet and various parts of the body. Passion is like the tax collector. Anger or rage is likethe sheriff. The heart is the king. Intellect is like the vazir. Passion, like a tax collector, tries to extract everything. Rage and anger are severe, harsh and punishing like a sheriff and want to destroy or kill. The king not only needs to control passion and rage but also the intellect and must keep a balance between all of these forces. If the intellect becomes enslaved by passion and anger, the country will be in ruin and the king will be destroyed' (Shafii, 1988). As heart is juxtaposed to intellect, so is love. Throughout the history of classical sufism there are stories contradicting love and intellect. In the Mathnawi, Rumi portrays a family argument, intellect being the father and nafs, the lower soul, the mother. The mother wants to spoil the child , the human being, by keeping him at home, close to her bosom, in order to avoid all kinds of hardships in life; but intellect, the father, teaches her to send the boy to school in order to prepare him for a decent life. This scene is typical of the way most Sufis would talk about the relationship between intellect and nafs, the lower natural faculties. Though intellect has a very important role in human development, Rumi says that it does not have the right to enter the bridal chamber of love (Schimmel, 2000). He writes : "Intellect says, 'This world, this universe, has six borders which you can not transgress. Love says, 'There is a way, and I have gone over it very frequently' ". What we can understand from these formulations is that there has not been a very obvious mind-body split in Sufi psychocosmology, heart is the locus for knowledge as well as sentiments and feelings. It at the same time represents an upper level of consciousness that transcends intellect. According to Shafii (1988), 'the heart is the core of the unconscious. It is the integrative force which harnesses the animal nafs from within and guides the energies of the body and mind toward the path of knowledge beyond the boundaries of intellect and outward sciences'. The focus on heart has its reflections in the daily practice of psychiatrists in the Islamic world. The classic study by Good et al. (1985) in Iranian Azarbaijan portraying heart as the locus of expression for interpersonal difficulties and the chest-tightness reported in Turkish migrant women by Mirdal (1986) point towards the significance of heart in the symbolic expression of psychosocial stress. These studies along with others document that the traditional view of heart as locus of human spiritual life is still valid in popular culture. That is to say, at least in Islamic societies who have not been exposed to rapid modernization, heart is still a collection of body, memory and identity.

Depression is an interpreted disorder as any other disease as well as it is a disorder of the interpretive process. An interpretive account of depression begins with the recognition that culture provides the means of responding to and interpreting 'reality'. Walking on this line, Good et al. (1985) conclude that labeled popular illness categories do not map directly onto specific depressive or anxiety disorders, as defined by psychiatric nosology; they describe specific symptoms of distress. Narahati-e kalb (distress of the heart) labels a condition associated with physical sensations of the heart palpitations, pressure on the chest, and a sensation of the heart being squeezed. The heart is popularly conceived as both a central physiological organ and the center of emotion and complaints of heart distress are often associated with feelings of sadness or dysphoria as well as anxiety. Heart distress is associated causally and semantically with problems of female sexuality and disorders of womanhood and with interpersonal problems and poverty. It is most prevalent among middle-aged women, and rates are higher in the lower social classes (Good et al., 1985). In a similar vein, Turkish writer Mustafa Ozel (1997) describes his visit to fatherland and remembers a different complaint by sick people: "After twenty years one sentence is echoing in my mind as I wander in the streets of Karakose. 'The head of my heart is aching'. Our home was 200 meters away from the state hospital and it served as a guest house for relatives and acquaintances coming from villages to see a doctor. The complaint of all the sick people were the same: 'Sere dılemin dese'. This meant as 'the head of my heart is aching, but I still wonder why they used to utter this sentence moving their hands over their abdomen". In a group of Turkish migrant women Mirdal (1986) has reported chest tightness as a prevalent problem. The bodily expressions of tightness in the sample were : Muscular pains, headache, heartache, 'ring around the chest', tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat, shortness of breath, and choking sensations. But the interviewees were able to talk about sorrow, regrets, guilt, nostalgia, longing, worrying, anguish, and the like in reference to the 'conditions of tightness'. The body is a legitimate locus for protesting against oppressive conditions for these women. The illness becomes an idiom through which psychosocial distress is communicated in a culturally comprehensible way (Mirdal, 1986). But we must ask the question that why most of the complaints are focused on the heart and chest, than other parts of the body? I think the popular belief in Islamic societies which places the heart to the center of emotions is still influencing the way people perceive their illness. The heart is the source of vitality so any possible danger to vitality or self-esteem should be responded by the symptoms of the heart. In everyday Turkish culture distress is conveyed with reference to the heart : 'My chest is narrowing', 'My heart is squeezed' are very common folk idioms of distress. In a dictionary you can find plenty of idioms referring to anxiety and despair which use the heart as a metaphor. There has been numerous studies displaying somatic symptoms as major part of clinical depression in Turkish patients. In studies comparing Turkish depressed patients with German and British ones, Turkish paints showed more somatic symptoms (Diefenbacher & Heim, 1995; Uluşahin et al.,1992). With modernization and the advance of educational facilities, somatic complaints might change. Uneducated, poor and rural origin patients might express heart problems, whereas more educated might have references to brain. Baarnhielm & Ekblad (2000) , in a qualitative Swedish study with Turkish migrant women write : " Talking about heart problems and palpitations was common among the study participants. The way in which the heart was used as an expression of distress differed between participants, from directly presenting heart symptoms to actively describing how they had avoided talking about the heart so as not to be misunderstood by health professionals in Sweden. Sevgi responded by telling the interviewer about how this was expressed in Turkey :

Interviewer : Is the heart getting bigger? Is that what you say in Turkey?
Sevgi : Well it is like, one says 'heart worry', not bigger but fear
Later on the interviewer asks Sevgi when the word 'heart worry' (yürek kalkınması in Turkish), is used :
Sevgi : Mainly in connection with situations where one is going to hear something bad by telephone or something bad is going to happen.

Sevgi voices her fear of being labelled with a psychiatric diagnosis and how she actively avoids expressing herself in terms of heart symptoms to doctors in Sweden in order not to be misunderstood. She has noticed that talking about the heart has another meaning for Swedes. She thinks she would use the expression with a doctor in Turkey. She would expect him to understand." In this study participants were hesitant with regard to psychiatric attribution which was connected with shame and loss of self-control as well as bad behavior towards others. Psychiatric attributions and assessments were mostly not experienced as tools for recovery or as helpful in linking bodily symptoms to emotional distress (Baarnhielm & Ekblad, 2000).

One other word for heart in Turkish is gonul, the meaning of this word is given as heart, and then as mind in the dictionary. Given the fact that language itself is embodied we could translate this word as the mindful heart. This word also implies a spiritual level for one's emotional being in the world. In some rural areas of Turkey people describe their low moods as gonul yorgunlugu (the heart exhaustion). This word implies that one's being is not only interpersonal but also between himself and God. So the heart is permeable as is the self : It is open to change both at the interpersonal level and at the relationship with the Deity. The Arabic word for heart (kalb) is derived from the root qalaba, which is to turn around or to revolve. This implies that the heart is functioning normally if it turns. Now I present a case of heart exhaustion from Trabzon, the Eastern Blacksea region of Turkey:

Mrs.A is a middle-aged lady consulting to the psychiatry department of a hospital with symptoms of depression and with occassional fainting spells. In the interview she talks about gonul yorgunlugu. In one of the later interviews she expresses her grief with a 'lost' husband. The husband is having an extramarital affair with a Russian woman and constantly humiliating his wife (who is our patient) for not being a 'real woman'. During intercourse he wants her to behave like his other partner and wants her to 'be a woman finally'. Our patient regards her husband's wish as morally implausible since she regards the other woman as a 'bad woman' and an immoral. So behaving like her in the bed means that to be as immoral as her. She suffers from gonul yorgunlugu, since the man she loved and always served has betrayed her blaming her to be incomplete in her womanness.

What I am assuming is that the classical/historical sufi view of the heart as the locus of emotions as well as the source of vitality and knowledge is still inherent in Turkish popular culture. This is displayed by many idioms still used in the language. Somatic symptoms of depression, anxiety and psychic distress mosty refer to heart and chest. That is to say that our hearts are part of our bodies but also shape our identities and collective memory as well. To have a heart is to be able to remember and identify who you are. In traditional poetry the heart is seen as the seat of the memory of love. The memory is identical with love. Little distinction is made between memory and the image of the lady which resides in a heart that can contain no other object. As R.D.Laing (1967) has said many years ago, 'orientation is to know where the Orient is', let us say that in the Orient, your heart reveals who you are, where you belong to and what you aspire to without hiding anything, with no secrecy at all. Let us finish with Rumi; during the years of burning pain after Shams had disappeared, he learned the lover's (that is to say a person with a heart) task is "..to become blood, to drink one's own blood, to sit with the dogs at the door of faithfulness".

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Acknowledgement : Translations from Rumi are from his Mathnawi and Diwan and belong to Schimmel, Chittick or Nicholson.