Rumi's Dance
Observations in the field (Turkey, 8 August 2014)
The sun is setting behind Rumi’s tomb, scorching the clouds on its descent, giving them fired coloured edges. The students exit the museum housing Rumi’s tomb and make their way to the side of the building, where a mini colosseum is constructed. There are other tourists present and students walk between them within the rows of each level to find a seat. As they settle in, Hamza Yusuf offers a brief introduction to the event and what they will see.
Many Muslims consider the performance of the whirling dervishes an innovation, circumventing the normative practices of worshipping God. Zaid Shakir later comments that “it may be bid’a (an innovation) but you had young children here who grow up with this, this recitation of Allah, instead of Madonna.” He tries to emphasise that such a relationship with God is less blameworthy than a relationship with pop culture.
The samaʿ is a performance practiced in some Sufi orders to portray one’s remembrance of God. The twelve Sufi disciples slowly walk into the circle one behind another, ten dervishes, one master, and one melvi, each garbed in dust coloured turbans and a black cloak covering their white clothing – a top reaching the waist and an expansive skirt. The headdress is meant to symbolise the tombstone of the ego, and the skirt, the ego's shroud.
While the strings of music, a mix of drum and flute and the voices of two men mingle in the air, the disciples shed their black cloaks to make way for a spiritual reencounter with truth. Arms crossed over their chests and hands at their shoulders, they move along to the centre of the coliseum. One by one they begin to whirl from right to left, their skirts flapping around them in waves. Their hands slowly glide down the sides of their torso and then continue back up until they are raised in the air, one held palm faced open to the sky and the other loosely held with fingers pointing to the ground. The movement of hands and fabric is dizzying and even more hypnotic is the foot movement that keeps them perfectly balanced.
When the dervishes finish and return to their starting line, a young man ends the event with a recitation of verses from the Qur’an:
The East and the West belong to God: wherever you turn, there is His Face. God is all pervading and all knowing. They have asserted, ‘God has a child.’ May He be exalted! No! Everything in the heavens and earth belongs to Him, everything devoutly obeys His will. He is the Originator of the heavens and the earth, and when He decrees something, He says only, ‘Be,’ and it is. Those who have no knowledge also say, ‘If only God would speak to us!’ or ‘If only a miraculous sign would come to us!’ People before them said the same things: their hearts are all alike. We have made Our signs clear enough to those who have solid faith. We have sent you [Prophet] with the truth, bearing good news and warning. You will not be responsible for the inhabitants of the Blaze.
Whilst the legal permissibility of the practice within Sunni orthodoxy is often disputed, it exemplifies one of the points of orientation of the Rihla; remembrance of God, and in this case, overcoming the nafs (ego), to draw closer to God. As one of the teachers affirms through evoking a line in Rumi’s Mathnawi,
“There’s no remedy in the Mathnawi to change the world. He talks about if you want to change the world you have to change yourself. But changing yourself is very hard. The reason why is because Allah has put a universe inside of you.The entire cosmos is inside of you. And changing that is hard” (Class lecture, 9 August 2014).
