Should I? Or shouldn’t I buy it? I scratched my head. The elongated wooden frame held two pictures, one rather faded, the other glowing like yesterday’s muted sunlight, a little soft, suffused with gentle colours that caressed the eyes. I knew I had to look closer. The pictures were old. They depicted vistas of the far-off Sea of Galilee at the northern tip of the great Rift-Valley as it meanders through the Holy Land of ancient Palestine. The limpid sea reflects the surrounding hills, palms, a mosque and a distant fortress. Tiny figures dot the foreground lending measure to the epic landscape. It was gourmet-art to savour slowly.

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The green fluted edifice jutting from the roof of Sufi Jalaludin Rumi’s mausoleum in Konya, Turkey, is crowned with a green tiled cone; it is from the hand of the greatest architect of the Ottoman Empire, Mimar Sinan. Never-ending crowds stream past Rumi’s tomb, ornately housed, but intimately attached to the very house that Rumi lived in and practiced his ethos of the Divine and the self synergistically entwined. Controversial? Yes, even in his living days he was clothed in absolute adoration and bitter acrimony. Legendary Sufi and judge, Nasrudin Hoça, who lived close by in Akşerhir, detested him.

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