Nur

After Tun the light returns, but for me it is already an entirely different light. If Yo‘ldagi Nur was a spark on the path, something that led me through the darkness, then Nur begins with a paradox: “there is no sun, yet everything is bright.” The source of the familiar light disappears, and the radiance remains. I perceive this as the moment when the outer metaphor finally becomes an inner one.

The Quranic Verse of Light is important here again, but I hear it differently than in the second composition. There I was interested in the call and the guidance. Here it is the ability of the heart to see at all. In the history of Muslim mysticism the image of the niche and the lamp was repeatedly linked with the heart of the believer, with the inner light of faith and knowledge. What is close to me is the very caution of this image: light does not belong to the lamp as its property. The lamp becomes a place through which the light shows itself.

That is why I write: “my eyes are open, yet I am blind.” Outer sight may work perfectly and still not give the main thing. Sufi texts use the language of kashf - unveiling, the lifting of the veil - and shuhud - witnessing. I do not want to turn the song into a scheme of these concepts, but they help me explain why ordinary “seeing” proves insufficient here. Sometimes to see more means to stop fully trusting one’s own gaze as the last authority.

The line “within the light, I disappear” continues for me the fanā of Yo‘ldagi Nur, but now this disappearance is almost stripped of drama. There the light called and deprived me of my former center. Here I am already inside the light. It is not directed at me from outside. I am in it. So the difference between “the light that I see” and “the light in which I see” becomes essential.

In the early Sufi tradition, for example in Najm al-Din Kubra, there is a remarkable language of ascending and descending lights, of the heart and the Divine Throne, of “light upon light.” I do not want to transfer this mystical phenomenology literally onto my composition, but it shows how seriously light was perceived not as an ornament but as a language of inner experience. Light could mean the state of the heart, the degree of its aliveness, the opening of perception.

The hardest line of the track is “light and darkness - the same, the same.” For me this is neither a cancelling of moral discernment nor a declaration that good and evil are equal. After Tun the meaning is different: I can no longer consider darkness a place where closeness is automatically absent, and light a place where everything is automatically clear. Sometimes light blinds, sometimes night teaches one to see. In this sense opposites cease to be simple.

Nur is needed by the album also because it for the first time pronounces the word Haqiqat next to light: “Truth is the pure essence.” For now it is only a flash of a future composition. But dramaturgically it is already clear to me: light leads to the heart, and the heart to Truth. Before Truth becomes a separate theme, I must pass through Dil Ichra and Ko‘ngil Shahri. Light without the heart would have remained too abstract.