Aside from a prolific poetry career, Rumi founded the Mevlevi order (also of Arabic-Ottoman Turkish origin), which is better known in English as the Whirling Dervishes. To explain them better, I should explain a little bit about Sufism. Sufis are fairly diverse in their practice, but one of the most uniting things is Zikir (dhikr in Arabic), which is a ritual focusing on reciting the names of God, short prayers, or verses from the Quran. This can be accompanied by by a variety of different rituals, including singing, music, meditation, inducing trances, incense, etc. For the Mevlevis, this is dancing, the Whirling in Whirling Dervishes. It’s called Sama (you thought you were going to learn Turkish… surprise! it’s all Arabic today… for this word, lengthen the final vowel and add a voiced pharyngeal fricative to the end). The origins are somewhat mythic, but my favorite story is that Rumi was walking through the markets in Konya and heard the goldsmiths chanting the shahada [i.e. “there is no god but God,” but in Arabic] and the rhythm of the hammers combined with the shahada (which is oftentimes recited during zikir) caused him to spontaneously start twirling and dancing. This sparked the most notable practice. I’m not incredibly familiar with the teachings, but the current order claims to be somewhat unorthodox in Islam. The order was banned by Atatürk during the secularization of the early Turkish Republic, but it still persists to some extent and is actually a small tourist attraction in some parts of Turkey.
Mevlevi’s performing Sama
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