Wine and Divine
The Bektashi, a Sufi order in the Balkans, have a joke. A Bektashi man is praying at a mosque. While others pray for grace and faith, he prays for plenty of wine. The imam hears him and rebukes him for asking god for something sinful. The Bektashi replies, “Well, everyone asks for what they don’t have.”
Atop Albania’s Mount Tomorr last summer, I contemplated buying a bottle of wine labelled with the face of the early Muslim martyr Abbas ibn Ali. The bottle, which cost 700 lek—around four hundred and fifty rupees—seemed, to me, an incredible provocation, collapsing the sacred and the profane. It was late August, around 1 am on the second night of the annual Bektashi pilgrimage up the mountain. Almost two thousand metres above sea level, in a pop-up pilgrimage town strewn with makeshift sheds,
