Tomorrow, 17 December, is the 749th anniversary of the death of the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi. Followers call this day ‘the wedding’, honouring the fact that he conceived of death as a reunion with god. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here; we really want to talk about the whirling dervishes.
Rumi, aka Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (where the last bit means from Rum, i.e. Byzantine Anatolia), aka Mevlana (our Master), is the favourite poet of one of us. He was born in 1207 in Greater Iran (now Afghanistan, or maybe Tajikistan). He is part of a long line of Sufi mystics and also poets writing in Persian, and probably the most famous of them. Upon his death in Konya (Turkey), his brothers founded the order of whirling dervishes there. Dervishes are sufi mystics, and those that whirl are a subset of the larger group.
His poetry mourns the death of his ‘mystical friend’, a wandering dervish named Shams-e Tabrisi, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1248. Rumi’s greatest work is the Masnavi in six volumes. And his most famous belief, probably, is that music, poetry, and dance aid in union with the divine.
And thus we come to the whirling dervishes. Their sema (moving meditation) involves a group of dervishes turning about rapidly in a circle. Each bit of the ritual has a specific meaning, and musicians accompany them. We’ve been to see these ceremonies several times since we’ve been here, and we find them utterly mesmerising. If you have ever seen it before, you know exactly what we mean. And if you haven’t, it will be a highlight of your visit to Turkey.
So what happens? Music plays. Whirling dervishes come out, clad in black robes; one has a red rug which symbolises birth. They remove their robes, bow to the leader, and then they whirl, counter- (anti-)clockwise on their right foot. The entire ceremony takes about an hour, with several individual stages. The dervishes are in a deep state of meditation. Their right hand points to heaven, the left to earth, to symbolise their gathering of divine wisdom and bringing it back for the rest of us.
Also – because we got curious – we’ve gathered information about their training, which happened in lodges; we went to the dervish lodge, now a museum, in Galata. The process of whirling begins barefoot, on a one-metre (three foot) board with a nail in the middle of it. That nail goes between the big toe and the second toe, and it’s how you learn to stay in one place. Much skin wears away in the process; acolytes dedicate that first skin. ‘Nuff said here, we think: clearly these guys (some of them women, as of recently) are hardcore.
Atatürk formally banned dervishes, along with other religious figures, in 1925. But within about twenty-five years they were once again allowed to practice.
