The Whirling Wind of God

The whirling wind of God

Dervishes and Sufi singers have long been revered in the West, even as their practices have come under threat across the Islamic world. Peter Culshaw reports on a series of revelatory encounters with different mystics

Sunday October 16, 2005
The Observer


It had taken me a week to track down the underground dervish scene in Istanbul - the only dervish contact I had in the city was a carpet-seller called Abdullah deep in the bazaar. As with all quests, the difficulty only added to the sense of occasion when I did manage to locate them. Finally I found myself at a zikr (a remembrance) among 80 or so dervishes in a hidden tekke (religious house), and they began to chant, rhythmically, the name of Allah. It was one of the most powerful sounds I have ever heard. In addition to a weaving violin and a zither that sends chills down your spine, there is a solo voice - similar to the muezzin's call from the minarets - that is full of heartbreaking longing. This is serious blues music, I thought. I was sitting in the middle of the group and, although I had permission to take photographs, I couldn't actually stand - pinned back by the weight of numbers but also by what seemed a spiritual force field.
When the tension was close to unbearable, 12 dervishes filed into the adjoining room and, in unison, took off their black cloaks - as if it were a holy fashion show - revealing white robes. Then they started spinning with incredible grace. This angelic whirling is a perfect counterpoint to the earthly chanting. Photographs can't prepare you for the disorienting feeling that the dervishes are defying gravity. It takes months of training for them to defy dizziness.

The dervishes are all Sufis, seekers on the mystical path to God, and are members of different Brotherhoods, chief among them Mevlevis, the school founded by the mystic poet Rumi 700 years ago. If the impression often given in the media is of Muslims as puritan fanatics, followers of this branch (and the words dervish and Sufi are interchangeable) have been responsible for much of the rich Islamic heritage of music, poetry and arts from Persia to Andalucia.

Nearly all the great musicians were Sufi disciples. From the 9th century, Sufi ascetics wandered the Islamic world, attracting followers to their gentle form of mystical Islam (the word Sufi is often thought to have come from suuf - wool - from the woollen garments the holy men wore). The shrines of the Sufi masters have become important places of pilgrimage. Their path is an attempt to transcend the ego and achieve unity with the divine, with the help of a sheikh (also called pir) and of prayer, meditation and, in the case of the whirling dervishes, dancing. Many European writers have been fascinated by Sufism - Richard Burton, the translator of the Kama Sutra, was initiated as a dervish, and Doris Lessing and Ted Hughes shared his interest ('the Sufis are the most sensible collection of people on the planet', Hughes once said).

Like much of Sufism, the performance of the whirling dervishes works on many levels and is charged with symbolism. The funereal black cloak represents a tomb. In casting this off the dervishes discard all worldly ties. They spin with the right arm extended to heaven and the left to the floor - grace is received from Allah and distributed to humanity. The dervishes are meditation in movement, prayer as dance.

Abdullah introduced me to the pir, and I asked him about the zikr. 'The purpose of life is to remember Allah,' he said. 'Every electron and proton is whirling round a nucleus, as the planets whirl round the sun - and all of them are chanting for Allah. Even your heartbeat' - he thumped his chest - 'is chanting All-lah, All-lah.' Then he reached deep into his robes, beamed a huge smile and offered me a sweet.

I became interested in Sufi music at one of the first Womad festivals in the early Eighties. People talk about an artist being a revelation, and that was exactly how it felt when Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan started singing his rhythmic qawwali music. He and his group - singers, harmonium and tabla players - were supposed to play an hour but went on for much longer. We were all supposed to go and catch the headliner - New Order or perhaps the Fall - but no one, as far as I could tell, moved from the tent, the audience transfixed by Nusrat's passion.

Nusrat's family (originally from Afghanistan, a traditional centre of Sufism) have an unbroken tradition of singing qawwali for 600 years, yet you felt, somehow, as if you were plugging into something utterly modern. Nusrat became known world-wide and by the time of his death, aged 49, in 1997, following a record 125 albums, there were plans for a duet with Pavorotti.

Nusrat was devoted to spreading his music and its message of peace. His tour manager, Adam Nayyar, told me that once in Japan, Nusrat spent the entire evening watching TV, concentrating on the commercials. When Nayyar asked what he was doing, he said he figured that the clever Japanese must have worked out the most effective music to reach the maximum number of people in their ads. At the concert the next day, Nayyar spotted melodies from TV ads in Nusrat's improvisations.

After his death, his nephew, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, took over his qawwali group. Although no one could compare to Nusrat, the group remain formidable, and can be seen next month as part of the Barbican Centre's Ramadan Nights, which also features Sufi street singer Sain Zahoor, a more classical Arabic Sufi group, the al-Kindi Ensemble with Sheikh Habboush, and whirling dervishes from Syria. The founder of al-Kindi, Jalaluddin Weiss, is a Frenchman whose fascination with Sufi music has led him to become a leading exponent of the oriental zither (qanun).

The Barbican season coincides with a fascinating Channel 4 documentary. Sufi Soul is presented by writer William Dalrymple and features extraordinary scenes from Pakistan, such as a festival at the shrine of a Sufi saint (Shah Abdul Latif), which evokes a subcontinental Las Vegas.

More impressive still, perhaps, is the transcendental voice of Abida Parveen. She claims that, on a good night, she reaches 'a high level of ecstasy - very close to God'. I've seen people weeping in the aisles at her concerts - and when she played in New York's Central Park scores of people fainted.

Tempting though it is to dismiss Parveen's claims that she can see Sufi saints among the audience, Sufism has a tradition of female mystics, notably the eighth century's Rabia al-Basri, who ran through the streets of Basra in Iraq with a blazing torch in one hand and a container of water in the other. Asked what she was doing, she is reported to have said: 'The water is to extinguish the fires of hell, the torch to set fire to paradise - so no one worships God for fear of hell or greed for Paradise.'

As for the al-Kindi Ensemble, I saw them at the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music. Set up in response to 1991's Gulf war, the festival is a courageous and inspiring attempt to bring together differing spiritual traditions. Here you can see everything from gospel to Jewish music, from Indian classical to all kinds of Sufi sounds. It is the brainchild of Sufi scholar Faouzi Skali, who wanted to counter 'the stereotypical view Muslims have of the West and vice versa', and to celebrate the fact that 'the world is not uniform; there's a richness of spiritual traditions it's important to know and preserve. Or we will have a world without soul and that would be terrible.'

It's the kind of sentiment echoed by most students of Sufism, such as Coleman Barks, whose translations of Rumi propelled the 13th century mystic into, bizarrely, becoming the bestselling poet in America in the Nineties (Madonna was a fan). Rumi, insists Barks, 'had followers of different faiths in his lifetime. I see him as someone who kicked free of doctrinal confinement'.

From the beginning, Sufi has been a pluralistic faith. The early ascetics were influenced by the Byzantine Christian desert mystics and even now it has elements of animism and paganism. Once, a businessman sitting next to me on a plane to Tangiers told me his wife's mother had the ability, after going into a music-induced trance, to drink boiling water, and to spit it out again a few seconds later ice cold. His current problem was that his daughter had been put under a spell by a frog. Frogs, he explained, as if discussing VAT, are prone to being possessed by 'devils'. The difficulty was you never knew if it was a good or a bad devil. He probably was translating the word djiin which, through fairy tales of Arabic origin, we know as 'genie' (they are mentioned in the Koran, so are not automatically heretical). Not only frogs, he told me, but cats and dogs must be treated with due respect as they may be djiin in disguise.

A minority of Sufi sects go in for extreme practices while under trance, including lacerating themselves with knives, and eating live scorpions and snakes. Some of these rituals have now been outlawed. The music of the Aissawa sect is fabulously rhythmic, with long horns 'to wake the faithful', literally and figuratively. René Brunel, who wrote about the Aissawa in the 1920s, described his experience of 'the furious tempest of drums and oboes', saying the spectators were 'in the grip of the terrifying staccato music seized by this contagious madness and ecstatic frenzy which none can resist'. The best exponents of this music, like Said Guissi, produce some of the most exciting music in the world.

Sufis have occasionally dispensed with the traditional observances of Islam, such as the haj to Mecca, although most have observed the customary rules. In any case, it is not surprising that Sufis and dervishes have had a tough time in many Islamic countries. When I was in Pakistan, qawwali singer Qari Saaed Chisti was shot, apparently for singing a song about how there are many ways up the mountain to God. There is only one - according to the puritan Islamicists. Strict fundamentalists oppose music in any form as a sensual distraction - the Taliban, of course, banned music in Afghanistan. William Dalrymple puts it in stark terms: 'The real clash of civilisations is not between the West and Islam, it's a clash within Islam between the Sufis, who believe in tolerance, and the intolerance of the fundamentalists.'

Certainly, that's something I've seen in my travels across the Muslim world - from India and Pakistan, to Yemen, Morocco, Senegal, Central Asia and Indonesia. After seeing Abida Parveen in Morocco, I was so impressed I felt impelled to seek her out in her homeland of Pakistan. I flew in on 9 September 2001, spent a couple of days with Abida and then went to a hotel, only to see the Twin Towers collapsing on TV. It wasn't the most sensible time to be in Islamabad. But Parveen and the other Sufi musicians were deeply troubled and prayed for peace.

While travelling in Yemen in search of Sufi music, I was told (by the tourism minister) that I was the only tourist and I should have armed protection. At my hotel, owned by the bin Laden family, Hamas held a press conference celebrating suicide bombers. My guard told me if he hadn't got to like me he would have killed me - this would have guaranteed his passage to Paradise. 'If I go to Paradise I will have an eternity of women, drink, drugs - anything I like,' he confided. My Wahabi guide, Sayeed, tried to tell me that hardly anyone followed Sufism any more. The landscape was littered with Sufi shrines, many now destroyed. But at the town of Seyun, I saw a library full of Sufi poetry and met a music group led by Shukkri Hassan Baraji. Listening to their mix of East African drumming and Swahili and Arabic lyrics, I felt, at least for one night, divisions between cultures melting away.

Back in Istanbul, a city half in Europe and half in Asia, a pivotal point between East and West, an Islamic country with a secular state, I met a Sufi pharmacist, whose library of books was above his shop. He believed that only by going to the core of the truth that we have in common, rather than trusting in the divisive man-made institutions of religion, can there be hope for the future. In Turkey too, Sufism is frowned upon - although in the city of Konya, there are celebrations on the anniversary of Rumi's death every year. This is a state-sanctioned occasion, and it is a stately spectacle with many whirlers and a semi-classical orchestra staged in a basketball stadium in front of coachloads of Japanese tourists. There was none of the passion I'd seen among the Istanbul dervishes.

The pharmacist said Sufis 'tap into the river from which all streams flow' and the West's increasing interest in Sufi music and poetry could be a source of a new understanding between East and West. Walking in the night air along the Bosphorus where the city light scintillated on the water, I envied the dervishes their passion, their longing and their faith. On my way back to my hotel I walked past the devastated British Council, recently bombed by Islamic extremists, and I hoped he was right.

One, two, sufi...


204 --The number of countries in which Sufism is practised

1.3 --The number, in billions, of Muslims worldwide

20 --The percentage of Muslims who class themselves as Sufis

10 --The number of Sufi adherents, in millions, in Turkey

10 --Number of Sufi adherents, in thousands, in Germany

195 --Number of practising Sufis in New Zealand

125 --Number of albums recorded by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

· Ramadam Nights, featuring the al-Kindi Ensemble, is at the Barbican, London EC1 from 4 November. Sufi Soul is on C4 on 6 November at 11.30pm