Abstract:

Man is surrounded/ besieged, broadly speaking, by moral values of the society he lives in but in the strict sense by his close circle and his family values. However, he gains an identity through his own efforts of quest. These efforts of search for an identity, usually overlap with the values of his social circle but they sometimes do not and turn to a completely opposite direction. One of the phenomena that people who are in need of the search for identity encounter is Sufism. Sufism, is one of the subjects that has always keeps its position in the history of Islamic philosophy. It promises a mental tranquillity towards the individual during the pursuit of self. Besides, Sufism aims to turn its followers’ lives into a focus of some set of values by surrounding them with life styles which have their own forms. In addition, Islamic mysticism and ‘dergah’ life, possessing a thousand-year-old tradition in Islamic societies with different names and perceptions also become a subject of literature. Şanzelize Düğün Salonu (2015) is a novel about people who belong to a dervish convent in Istanbul. It narrates the story of a character receiving the values of mysticism from his ‘sheikh’ father and his fallacies meeting the outer space. The hero of the novel, who is endowed with traditional dervish culture, begins to question both his tradition and his past owing to modern life in the outer world. In this study, the elements and the stages of identity construction of the character, who has initially been destroyed but then cured psychologically by love, in Şanzelize Düğün Salonu will be analysed with an analytical approach.

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