Bab-i Esrar

Bab-ı Esrar (The Gate of Mysteries) follows Karen Kimya, the British-raised daughter of an English mother and a Turkish father, sent to Konya on a routine assignment: investigating whether a fire at the city's Yakut Hotel was an accident or arson. What begins as an insurance inquiry becomes something stranger as Karen finds herself drawn into Konya's centuries-old Sufi undercurrents.

As she works through her own unresolved personal and professional troubles, Karen is pulled by a mysterious dervish figure — modeled on Shams-i Tabrizi — into a narrative that moves between the present day and the thirteenth century, toward the unsolved murder of Shams and the extraordinary bond between Shams and the poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi that his death interrupted.

Ahmet Ümit, better known for police procedurals set in Istanbul, uses the historical mystery of Shams's disappearance to explore the relationship between faith and love, treating Rumi and Shams's story as a lens on Karen's own present-day search for meaning.