Dil ichra

Dil Ichra is the second of the three main centers of the album and perhaps the most personal composition in the whole cycle. If Tun teaches me not to fight the night, then here the question becomes even closer: to whom does my heart belong? Before this I walked, saw the light, breathed, entered the darkness. Now the path gathers in one point - dil ichra, within the heart.

The opening image, “my heart is a desert, You are the wind,” is very important to me precisely for its incompleteness. A desert can sound like absence, dryness, loneliness. But it is also a space without unnecessary walls. The wind asks nothing of the desert before passing through it. It lifts the sand, changes the pattern of the surface, brings movement. So in this line I hear not only longing but also a readiness to be touched.

In the Islamic and Sufi tradition qalb - the heart - is far more than a psychological center of feeling. Al-Ghazali speaks of it both as a physical organ and as a subtle spiritual faculty through which a person is capable of knowing God. This distinction matters to me because it returns to the heart the dignity of an organ of perception. The heart does not simply “feel” after the mind has understood everything. It has its own way of knowing.

At the same time, in the title I deliberately use not qalb but dil - a word that in the Persian and Turkic poetic world carries a very intimate shade of heart-soul. For me Dil Ichra sounds quieter than a theological term. It is not a treatise on the heart but almost a whisper from within it. It is there that “every breath of mine becomes dhikr,” and Nafas returns no longer as a separate step but as the natural rhythm of the heart.

The most important line for me is “the heart is no longer mine.” I listened to it for a long time, because it is easy to understand too harshly: as if spirituality demanded taking from a person their personality, feeling, freedom. I hear the opposite. Ownership here is not personality but a grip. As long as I say “my heart” as of an object that must confirm my desires, likes, fears and self-image, I close it on myself. The return of the heart is liberation from the need to appropriate everything.

In Sufi literature there is a famous saying, widely quoted by al-Ghazali, Suhrawardi, Ayn al-Qudat and Rumi: the heavens and the earth do not contain the Divine presence, while the humble heart of the believer becomes its special place. The history of the transmission of this saying is complicated, so I do not use it as an indisputable canonical hadith. But as a mystical image it helps me understand my own line: the heart stops being a small private room and opens to what is greater than it.

From here especially strongly sounds: “I lived searching for You. My roads were long. In a single moment I understood: You were always within me.” I do not read this as the primitive “God is physically located inside me.” The Islamic language of closeness is far subtler than a spatial scheme. For me what disappears here is the very habit of seeking closeness exclusively as distance. One can go very far, and then discover that what was sought was closer to me than my own idea of myself.

There is in this composition one more line that joins several previous tracks: “night and dawn have become indistinguishable.” After Tun and Nur this is almost inevitable. When night has ceased to be an enemy and light a simple opposite of darkness, in the heart their difference changes. I am not saying that night and day are literally the same. I am saying that closeness stops depending on which phase of the path I am in. Both the dark and the bright can be a place of presence.

“I passed beyond myself, burning with Your Name” - here the language grows hotter. The Sufi concepts of fanā and love help me, but even more the tradition of Persian mystical poetry, in which the earthly language of the Beloved became a way of speaking about Divine love. And in Ahmad Ghazali love in general becomes not an ornament of the path but its central force; human love for God is understood as an answer to God’s already existing love for the human being. This reciprocity is close to me: the search begins because there was already a call.

And finally: “love is to vanish and to be found in You.” For me this is perhaps the key to the whole album. To vanish does not mean to become emptiness. Rather, the form of self built around constant self-affirmation disappears. And only after this does the possibility appear of “being found” not as a closed thing but as a relation, an answer, a presence. In this sense Dil Ichra is a song not about the loss of personality but about the loss of the right to consider oneself one’s own final measure.

After this composition the heart can no longer remain small. That is why Ko‘ngil Shahri comes next - the city of the heart. What is lived here as an intimate meeting will there expand into a whole inner space. But for me the starting point will remain exactly here: the heart comes alive not when I master it better, but when I allow it to return.