Religion: A Touch of the Dervish

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What voice in this world To my ear has come Save the voice of Love Was a tapped drum. Yet for that drumtap From the world of All Into this perishing land I did fall . . .

So Persia's great poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73), wrote of the union of the soul with God, its banishment to the world, and the impossibility of putting into words directions for finding the way back. But words were not all the great Rumi had; he taught his followers a way to dance themselves into a state of mystical union with the Divine. They became the famed sect of Mevlevi dervishes, who carried on their mystical method for seven centuries in monasteries throughout the Middle East. Known as the whirling dervishes, they are popularly confused with the Rifais or "howling" dervishes, who inflicted wounds upon themselves and were sometimes ritually trampled under horses' hoofs. In contarst, the Mevlevi dervishes were no holy-rolling orgiasts. With serenity and calm, dressed in tall, conical hats and flowing black robes, they spun round and round, some fast, some slow, rapt in concentration, some of them murmuring "Allah, Allah" over and over again, whirling themselves into ecstasy. The pattern of their dance was said to represent outwardly the movements of the planets and inwardly the movement of the soul.

In westernizing Turkey in the 1920s, Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk prohibited "astrologers, fortunetellers and dervishes," and the Mevlevi order went underground. Now the ban is being lifted quietly by the Turkish government; in addition to its monastic members, the order has some half million lay members in Turkey. That Founder Jalal al-Din Rumi and his teachings are still a living force was demonstrated last week in Istanbul when 200 policemen turned out to cope with 4,000 enthusiasts who broke the windows and smashed the counter of the city's main post office. Cause of the riot: a scramble to buy a new series of stamps commemorating the 750th anniversary of the birth of Jalal al-Din Rumi.