Ney can be regarded as the official instrument of Sufism in Turkey. As this way of life is all about refining the soul to become the perfect human on God's way, ney takes a highly symbolic part.
Anectodes about this instrument in history dates back to Prophet Mohammad's time. But the most famous ones are originated in Rumi's Masnavi. This book begins with eighteen verses that tell the story of a certain reed which would become a ney. For the reed, it is a painful process to be reaped and transformed into a ney. This is why the sound, or let's say the voice, of the ney is always sentimental and soulful. So, the production of ney is a metaphor for the perfect human that can only find itself after an agonizing personal journey.
Although reed is the original raw material to produce a ney, just like it has been in the distant past for a pen, still, it is not indispensable.
Neyzen Tevfik, the most famous ney performer in the history of modern Turkey, had once spontaneously produced a ney in a pub out of a wine bottle. After succesfully playing a song that another famous ney performer couldn't manage to do there, Tevfik had told that "if you blow it with love, you can get that sound even from a stove pipe."
Funnily, modern Turkish performer Mercan Dede, who converged the ney with electronic music, claims that his first instrument was a stove pipe.
We know that humans give their best during and after the hardest times. External pressure and stress solidify the character of certain individuals: Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, Schubert, Poe... According to Nassem Talib, whom I'm reading nowadays, they can be regarded as anti-fragile people.
An individual with an anti-fragile character can be a good or bad person, but it's not the main point here. What I will suggest is that anti-fragility is a feature of Turkish culture in general and "the ney philosophy" in particular.
For example, Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan had been despised and repressed by now-obsolete elites in Turkey and he had even been jailed for reciting a poem. But the iron rule of oligarchy was at work again. So, after he came to power exactly ten years ago, Erdogan started to repress his own critics. Even today, a local prosecutor has demanded two years in jail for two university students for allegedly throwing darts at a board covered with Erdogan's photo. However, just like Erdogan's character was not broken down in prison, it is more likely that those rebellious students, like their peers, will also leave there even stronger, if they would be jailed.
All in all, you don't have to be a Sufi to be anti-fragile in Turkey. The culture evolves everyone in this way. Take the following video, which was one of the most popular in the Turkish social media today, and watch how a not-so-Sufi-looking man turns a barricade into a ney, as if it is done as a symbol, in spite of the ongoing police brutality in Turkey:
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