The lights dim. Men dressed in black robes and tall headdress walk to the wooden center stage. They take a bow. The men with musical instruments step back and settle down with their instruments. The dervishes or the dancers settle down perpendicular to the players.
One dervish remains standing. Like the rest he has arms crossed across his chest inside the black robe. The black sleeves of the robe hang loosely around him.
He bows and recites a verse in Arabic. The ceremony has started.
The drums sound.Then it stops and the flute picks up where the drums fade. Every turn, every sound, every minute detail in this ritualistic ceremony has a meaning.
The nasal sounding Arabic verse is a eulogy praising the prophets for to praise them is to praise the God who created them. The drum calls order to creation and the strains of the flute represents the divine breath that gives life to everything.
Following a pause the dervishes stand. They then remove their black robes to reveal a white attire that clings to their upper torso and ends in a flowing skirt. They fold their black robe and drop them on the floor.They step onto the wooden floor. They bend low in greeting. I hold my breath for fear that they headdress might fall off. I needn’t have worried.
They greet each other three times. Then with arms crossed across their chest, they begin to turn. The whirling I have been waiting for has started.
The Mevlevi sema more commonly known has the whirling dervish is a religious rite that was influenced by Mevlana Jelaleddin Rumi. Rumi would whirl in the streets of Konya, Turkey on attaining a state of ecstasy. The Mevlevi sect was banned by Ataturk when Turkey became a republic. Today it is practiced more as a cultural ritual than a religious ceremony.
The Mevlevi or the dervishes believe that by whirling they attain harmony with all things in the universe.Everything in the universe is revolves, the neutron revolve in the atom, the earth revolves around the sun.
The discarding of the black robe at the start symbolizes the journey of the dervishes from the falsehood of this world into the spiritual truth. The headdress is the tombstone of his ego and the flowing skirt is his ego’s shroud. In the course of the whirling the dervish uncrosses his arms. He lifts his hands upwards. His right palm faces up receiving the blessing from the Almighty. His left palm face down, disbursing the blessings to all of mankind. Turning from right to left he covers mankind with the love of God.
The music pauses for a minute. The whirling stops not. In the silence all that is heard is the ‘swosh’ ‘swosh’ of the robes as they twirl with the dervish. The eyes of the dervish stare at their left hands. Through the soft yellow light I discern the features of the dancers. They are young men with handsome features. But the faces are calm and composed, blissful even. Every time their robes twirl I can see their legs move. It’s confusing. Somehow the lack of action on the face and the uninterrupted movement of the foot does not seem to belong to one person. They say the whirling brings together the mind, the heart and the body of the dervish and he passes on the peace to those who watch the sema. I can feel no peace. My head is spinning with all the whirling. Maybe I am a sinner beyond redemption.
I grow a little tired of all the circling. The music no longer sounds exotic and the motion is no longer spiritual to me. I feel like a hypocrite at the end of it. Surely when Rumi wrote
“Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair. come,
even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again , come , come.”
he was not calling out to me. I am a wanderer, I am a lover of leaving. But my spiritual bank is impoverished at the moment. No amount of whirling can save me from the falsehood of this world.
After an hour of whirling the dervishes stop. They don their black robes back on .
Someone reads a passage from the holy Koran. One last drum beat and the sema has concluded. The dervishes retire to their cells to pray for humanity. I am a little concerned about the dervishes that retired to pray. Surely they are way too young to be worried about encompassing humanity with love. Alas, world peace does come with a price.
We step out into an open courtyard. Hot apple tea is served.In the distance I can hear the calls to prayer from a nearby mosque. Next to me a girl complains about the length of the ‘show’. A strange thought crosses my mind. Was this Sema put up for us tourist or was this an actual attainment of spiritual ecstasy?
At that very moment a side door opens. Two young men dressed in jeans, boots and leather jackets walk out. One of them has a lit cigarette between his fingers. I smile.There goes a couple of dervishes who retired to pray for humanity.
And I think to myself “All is right with the world“.
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Lisa spends all her vacation days traveling to different corners of the world, seeking out adventures and finding stories waiting to be told. When not on vacation she is either planning for one or recouping from one.
Marie – who has written 5 posts on WAH Blog.
