Death and the Dervish
“I am forty years old, an ugly age: one is still young enough to have dreams, but already too old to fulfill any of them.”
I don’t often read books set in the Ottoman world, Sufi orders, or 18th century Bosnia. So naturally, I was drawn to Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović for a different setting for a change. It can be a dense and slow book but it was ultimately rewarding in the way books you have to work for tend to be.
Ahmed Nuruddin and the observer’s trap
Ahmed Nuruddin’s name means “Light of Faith,” which feels increasingly ironic as the book goes on. He’s forty, a sheikh at a Mevlevi Sufi tekke, and has built his life around cultivated detachment. He watches. He analyzes. He reasons. But there’s arrogance buried in that detachment. He’ll sit and dissect someone’s every movement, feeling superior in his observation, until the shame hits him for paying too much attention. Then he’ll analyze the shame. Then feel something about that. The mental gymnastics are astonishing to watch as Nuruddin acts and thinks with supreme logic from the safety of his mind.
“It was man’s ancient desire to be invisible.”
The plot centers around his brother Harun’s arrest, seemingly with no explanation. Nuruddin has to navigate the Ottoman bureaucratic machinery trying to find answers from a system that is confusing and sometimes illogical.
A faceless, conniving bureaucracy
Every official Nuruddin encounters is a different kind of wall. One speaks only in Quranic verses, using religion as a shield. Another denies Harun ever existed, erasing the problem rather than facing it. Nobody engages honestly or transparently.
I found this confusing, not always being able to piece together the clockwork of what was happening politically. I think that confusion is the point, as a reader you experience the same opacity Nuruddin does. The bureaucracy isn’t meant to be understood, it’s meant to be endured. Perhaps to some it would feel familiar, not just as Ottoman history, but as any large institution today that protects itself through indirection and denial. Selimović was writing under Yugoslav communism, so there’s a double layer: he’s writing about one empire while clearly talking about another.
The detached observer
Running through the novel are embedded parables and stories where readers go through Nuruddin’s thought experiments that he uses to process the world without having to act in it. They’re one of the more interesting parts of the book, as they are a peek into his logic and where its sourced from. For instance, a story about Alexander the Great receiving beautiful glass dishes and smashing them immediately, he would rather lose them now than be sorrier later when they inevitably break. Or, the story of a man whose wife is cheating on him, and everyone involved is happy, the husband in his ignorance and the wife and her lover in their arrangement. Revealing the truth would destroy all three. So why reveal it?
Nuruddin doesn’t live by the logic in these parables, but they guide and haunt him.
Detachment → Complicity
Nuruddin’s detachment doesn’t fail him in any dramatic moment. He just gets pulled in slowly and incrementally, until he becomes the Kadi (the judge), representing a part of the very system that swallowed his brother. The moment that crystallised this for me was when he’s pressured to arrest Hassan, his closest friend and opposite in every way. Where Nuruddin agonizes over everything, Hassan is carefree, living without overthinking. Arresting Hassan completes the transformation of Nuruddin, he becomes what he spent the whole novel navigating around.
Overall thoughts
Death and the Dervish can seem daunting with its density and obscurity. But the story is worth it, and I’m glad I ran into it.
If you’ve read Kafka, but want some more flavor and a different cultural lens, then this is definitely for you. 4 out of 5 — a must-read, even if it’s not one you’ll return to.