Sukunat

Sukunat is the third main composition of the album and perhaps the hardest to explain in words precisely because the song itself begins with the death of words. “Words have died - light remains.” In this line there is for me no hatred of language. I love words; the whole album is built on them. But there is a moment when a word stops leading further and begins to cover what it speaks of. Then it has to step aside.

I hear Sukunat not as music for relaxation and not as a promise of comfortable serenity. The silence here comes after a long road: after night, light, the heart, purification. It does not precede the meeting but arises as its trace. So “the world is still, only You remain” does not mean to me the literal disappearance of the world. Rather, what disappears is its demand to be constantly at the center of attention. Everything that a few minutes ago seemed urgent and loud steps back.

The Quran says that hearts find peace in the remembrance of God. It matters to me that peace here is connected not with emptiness but with memory. The word sukunat in itself means silence, stillness, calming, but in the song this silence is filled with address. It is not neutral. In it You remain. So for me Sukunat is not a technique of “switching off thoughts.” It is a state in which presence becomes more important than the inner commentary on presence.

The Naqshbandi tradition is especially interesting at this point for its love of silent dhikr. Baha al-Din Naqshband emphasized dhikr-e khafi - quiet remembrance that requires no outward display. And Jami later described the ideal of the path as “constant presence with God,” to which continuous silent dhikr leads. What is close to me is that silence here does not cancel memory but makes it subtler. The heart can be occupied with the Name even when the mouth is silent.

There is one more remarkable historical detail that rhymes almost perfectly with Sukunat for me. Nizam al-Din Khamush, a Naqshbandi master of the fifteenth century, received the nickname “the Silent.” The source notes that he considered silence better than speech, because speech easily arises from the ego and can interrupt the flow of grace. I do not turn this into a universal rule - silence too can be proud and cold. But the very caution before the word is very close to me. Sometimes to speak is not to open but to interfere.

“Eyes have closed - the secret has opened” continues the same inversion. In Nur open eyes could remain blind. Here closed eyes suddenly allow something to open. For me this is not a cult of the inner world against the outer. It is rather an acknowledgment that not everything important comes through the usual organs of control. There are moments when one has to stop looking so tensely in order to see.

The line “in the heart there is no one else” is very important. It can sound harsh if understood as a rejection of people. I hear it differently. This is a moment of undivided attention. The heart ceases to be a market of simultaneously competing demands. For a brief moment there is in it no social image, no worry about what others will think, no inner dialogue with imaginary interlocutors. One addressee remains.

Then the song becomes still more radical: “there is nothing - only Truth.” Here the future Haqiqat can already be heard. But it matters to me not to turn this line into an ontological slogan. In the context of the song it is the language of experience: everything secondary recedes so far that Truth occupies the whole horizon of consciousness. Sufi poetry often uses exactly such maximal language. It speaks so not because it wants to write a textbook of metaphysics, but because moderate grammar does not convey the intensity of experience.

“Peace is me. I am peace” is another dangerous and beautiful paradox. At the beginning of the album “the path is me”; here “peace is me.” I do not consider this a contradiction. The path has not ended, but its rhythm has changed. Before, I was a movement toward something; now for a moment I become a place in which there is nothing to catch up with. And that is exactly why “unity” sounds right after it. Not as a victory formula, but as the disappearance of inner fragmentation.

It seems to me that Sukunat is the “quietest” point of the album and at the same time one of its greatest inner explosions. Because the silence here is not emptiness but a limit beyond which one can no longer hide behind a beautiful explanation. After it Haqiqat has to sound almost inevitably. If words have died, the question remains: what exactly remains when both words and masks fall away?