A Woman's Spin On An Old Dervish

[Dover]

The dancing girls of Islam

Istanbul’s female dervishes are dividing Muslims.
Report and photos by iason athanasiadis

In a cultural centre in Istanbul's Fatih district, nine Mevlevi dervishes, clad in the distinctive long gowns of their mystical order, revolve rhythmically in a sacred dance.

It is a scene that has been repeated since the order was founded in Turkey's sacred city of Konya in the late 13th century. But there is one controversial innovation that would outrage most Islamists: no less than four of the participants are women.

"The Mevlevis are an exception," says Carole, a convert to Islam who has lived in Istanbul for the past 20 years. "They allowed the sexes to mingle even at a time when men and women were not allowed to be buried in adjoining tombs."

Male-female segregation continues to this day, notably in the cemeteries of the Islamic Republic of Iran. While Shia Muslim tradition allows men's representations to be drawn on their tombstones, the same does not apply for women. They are absent and invisible in death, as they were covered in life.

Mystical Muslims have always departed from orthodox Islam's stern script. In formerly Christian lands, suddenly Islamised, Sufism was the natural continuation of ascetic tradition. Placing an emphasis on spirituality over religious protocol, the men who came to be called dervishes developed a pantheon of saints, challenging Islam's strict monotheism.

In the secular republic of Turkey, at the heart of the old Ottoman empire, political Islam was dealt a death-blow by modernising leader Kemal Ataturk (right). In the 1920s he instituted the separation of mosque from state and abolished the Islamic Caliphate and its edict that the Sultan was also Allah's representative on earth. Sufi orders, including the Mevlevis, were terminated: the new state padlocked their lodges, razed them to the ground or reopened them as museums...>


Cont'd

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk:80/index.php?storyID=9260

[I Have A Dream]

1. This is wonderful. I hope that a fatwa is not issued against Dede. nt