Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi

i.The Saint of Konya

On the central Anatolian plateau, two hundred and fifty kilometres south of Ankara, the city of Konya rises out of a wide steppe of wheat fields and irrigation canals. Behind it the Taurus mountains catch the southern sky; in front of it the plain runs westward to the salt lake. The city is old — older than its Turkish name; older than the Seljuks who made it their capital in the twelfth century; older than the Greek Iconium of antique inscriptions. But what gives Konya its particular grain in the world today is Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi — known in the English-speaking world simply as "Rumi," and in Konya as Mevlana, "our master" — a man who arrived as a refugee child in the early thirteenth century, lived here all his adult life, and was buried in the city in December 1273 under what is now a turquoise-tiled dome the locals call the Kubbe-i Hadra, the Green Dome.

His full name was Mevlâna Celâleddin Muhammed ibn Muhammed. Mevlâna — Arabic for "our master" or "our lord" — is the honorific by which Turks have always known him. To the Persian-speaking world he is Mowlānā Jalāl al-Dīn; to the modern English-speaking one, simply Rumi — from Rûm, the medieval term for Anatolia, which itself preserved, even into the Seljuk centuries, the older idea of "Rome." He wrote a single short epitaph for his own tomb that the Mevlevî tradition has carried forward unchanged for seven hundred and fifty years:

When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth — but find it in the hearts of men.

What the writing he left behind makes plain — and what every disciple of his afterwards confirmed — is that he was, at his core, a teacher of love as a discipline. Not a sentimental love and not an idea, but love as a daily practice in which the self is gradually given up, not held; in which whoever comes is welcomed; in which God is found through other people, music, motion, and the patient yielding of vanity. The verses he composed for travellers arriving at the Konya lodge are still painted above the gate of the museum where he lies:

Come, come, come again, whoever you are.
Unbeliever, fire-worshipper, idolater — come.
Ours is no convent of despair.
Even if you have broken your vows a hundred times,
come, come again.

This is not a verse Mevlana wrote. The four-line invitation, beloved across the world and inscribed at his shrine in modern times, is found in a Persian collection by the slightly earlier mystic Abu Sa'id ibn Abi'l-Khayr; the popular attribution to Mevlana is a misprint that history has chosen to keep. Mevlevî tradition has always known this. The lines describe the spirit of the order so precisely that they have become Mevlana's by adoption — an honest example of how the cult around a saint can take in, and use, what it needs.

ii.From Balkh to Konya: A Refugee's Path

Mevlana was born on 30 September 1207, near the eastern edge of the Persian-speaking world. The traditional account, going back to the medieval hagiographers, names Balkh — in what is now northern Afghanistan — as his birthplace. Modern scholarship, working from the writings of his father, narrows the location more precisely to Vakhsh (also spelled Wakhsh), a small town on the Vakhsh River about sixty-five kilometres south-east of present-day Dushanbe, in Tajikistan. The two are not far apart. The family was Persian-speaking and learned, with deep roots in the Khorasanian Sufi tradition.

His father, Bahaeddin Veled (Bahā' al-Dīn Walad), was a respected jurist and preacher in the mystical mode, given by his admirers the title Sultânü'l-Ulemâ — "Sultan of the Scholars." When Mevlana was perhaps five years old the family left Khorasan; the immediate causes were a falling-out with local authorities, but the larger pressure was the gathering Mongol storm. Within a few years, Genghis Khan's armies would sack Balkh entirely. Bahaeddin Veled took his household westward by stages, in what became one of the great refugee journeys of the medieval Persian world: through Nishapur (where, a famous later story has it, the boy Mevlana was blessed by the elderly poet Farîduddîn Attar), then Baghdad, Mecca on pilgrimage, Damascus, and across Anatolia — Malatya, Erzincan, Sivas, Kayseri, Niğde — finally settling at Larende, modern Karaman, where Mevlana's mother died and his eldest son, the future Sultan Veled, was born in 1226.

In 1228, on the personal invitation of Sultan Alâeddin Keykubâd I — the great Anatolian Seljuk ruler under whose reign the sultanate reached its cultural and architectural zenith — Bahaeddin Veled brought his family to Konya. The Seljuk capital was at that moment one of the most cosmopolitan Persianate courts in the Islamic world. Persian was the language of high culture and chancery; Arabic, of religious scholarship; Turkish, of the army and the streets; and Greek and Armenian were spoken by the local Christian populations. Sufi orders, jurists, architects, calligraphers, and merchants from as far as Bukhara and Andalusia gathered in its medreses. Bahaeddin Veled was given a teaching chair; when he died in January 1231, his son inherited the post.

For roughly the next decade Mevlana was, by every account, a brilliant but conventional teacher of Islamic law and theology. He had studied for several years in Aleppo and Damascus, returned to Konya, taught hundreds of students, married, fathered children, and led a substantial congregation. There is no surviving poetry from this period of his life — he was a respectable scholar, not yet a poet, certainly not the figure later centuries would make of him. The transformation came in November 1244, with the arrival in Konya of an unknown wandering dervish from the north-west.

iii.Shams of Tabriz, and the Turn

The dervish was Şems-i Tebrizi — Shams al-Dīn of Tabriz — a man already in late middle age, with a reputation for searing severity in spiritual matters and for refusing the conventional pieties of the Sufi establishment. By the Mevlevî dating, the two men met on 15 November 1244 in Konya, near the Inn of the Sugar Merchants. Several versions of the encounter survive. In the most famous, Shams asked Mevlana a question about the relative spiritual ranks of the Prophet Muhammad and the earlier Sufi master Bayezid Bistami; the answer Mevlana gave was such that Shams immediately took him by the bridle of his horse and led him away. A formal disputation between scholars; a meeting on the street; a recognition. The accounts vary, but the consequence does not. Within weeks the two men were inseparable.

For perhaps three years Mevlana withdrew from his teaching, his congregation, and his family into a spiritual companionship with Shams that the medieval sources describe as a sohbet — a constant talking-with. In it, the older man took the role of master, and the younger man, already in his late thirties, became again a student. Disciples and city notables resented Shams. He was disruptive, plain in his contempt for the merely respectable, and, more than any of that, he had taken their sheikh away. By 1246 the resentment had hardened into open threats; Shams left for Damascus. Mevlana sent his son Sultan Veled to bring him back. He returned. The threats resumed. In 1247 Shams disappeared a second time, and this time was never seen again. Mevlevî tradition holds that he was murdered, perhaps with the involvement of Mevlana's own younger son. No body was ever found. Mevlana searched for years, twice travelling to Damascus, before accepting that what he had been looking for outside himself had become, finally, internal.

From this loss came the poetry that has carried his name into the modern world. Out of the years immediately after the disappearance, Mevlana composed the Dîvân-ı Şems-i Tebrizi — the "Collected Lyrics of Shams of Tabriz," a vast assembly of more than 40,000 verses in over three thousand ghazals and quatrains. Many of the poems are signed with Shams's name as if Shams himself had spoken them. They are wild, passionate, and unguarded — the Persian lyric tradition raised to an intensity it had not previously known. They were, by Mevlana's own admission, his way of keeping his lost master present.

Each atom dancing in the plain or on the air, behold it well — like us, insane, it spinneth there.

iv.The Mesnevî, the Dîvân, and the Discourses

Mevlana's second great work, the Mesnevî-i Mânevi (Persian Mathnawī-yi Maʿnawī, "Spiritual Couplets"), was begun some years after Shams's disappearance, at the request of his closest remaining disciple, Hüsameddin Çelebi. Hüsameddin held the pen; Mevlana dictated. The result, composed over more than a decade and finished in the last year of the master's life, runs to six books and roughly twenty-five thousand couplets — fifty thousand lines of verse in all. It is one of the longest sustained poems in any Islamic language and, in the consensus of the tradition, one of the supreme works of Persian literature, often called the Qur'ān in the Persian tongue. Each book opens with a prose preface and proceeds in linked couplets through stories, parables, beast fables, episodes from the Qur'an and the Bible, anecdotes from the lives of earlier Sufis, and meditations whose only common thread is a teacher's voice circling, returning, picking up the same theme from another angle. It is not a system. It is a long conversation in verse.

Beyond these two great verse works, three smaller prose books survive: Fîhi Mâ Fîh ("In It What Is in It"), seventy-one transcribed talks from the master's later years; the Mecâlis-i Sebʿa ("Seven Sessions"), formal sermons; and the Mektûbât, his collected letters to family, disciples, and rulers. All four works were composed in Persian. Mevlana knew Turkish — Konya was a polyglot city, and his children spoke it — but the language of high prose and serious poetry in his world was Persian, and that is the medium in which he chose to think.

Two threads run through everything he wrote. The first is that the human being's deepest condition is one of separation: the soul is a reed that has been cut from the reed-bed and is crying for its return. The opening eighteen couplets of the Mesnevî, the so-called Song of the Reed, are the most-quoted lines of Persian poetry; the reed, hollowed and made into a flute, is the human being who has known and been parted. The second is that the cure for this separation is aşk — passionate love — for God, for the master who points toward God, and for the world as God's mirror. The two threads draw together in the figure of the lover (âşık) who, in pursuing the beloved, becomes the beloved.

v.The Mevlevî Order

Mevlana himself founded no order. He gave initiations sparingly, kept no formal rule, and seems to have considered the daily fact of teaching, listening, and devotional dance enough. The institution that bears his name was built after his death, principally by his elder son Sultan Veled (1226–1312) and the disciple Hüsameddin Çelebi, who in turn was succeeded by Sultan Veled's son Ulu Ârif Çelebi. Sultan Veled wrote, in Persian and to a lesser extent in early Anatolian Turkish, the verse autobiography Ibtidânâme (or Velednâme), which preserves much of what we know about Mevlana's life and the order's first generation. He also formalised the rules of admission, the sequence of the Sema, the dervish dress, and the cycle of training that became known as the Çile — the 1,001 Days of Penitence. By the early fourteenth century the Mevlevî tariqat existed, with its mother lodge (the Asitâne) at Konya and a senior Çelebi always drawn from Mevlana's own descent.

By the Ottoman centuries, the order was deeply woven into Anatolian high culture. It was urban — the lodges were in the cities of the empire, not the villages — sophisticated, and patronised by court and merchants alike. Several of the greatest composers of Ottoman classical music belonged to it, or composed for it: Kuhi Mustafa Dede (c. 1610–1675), Buhûrîzâde Mustafa Itrî (c. 1640–1711), Hammâmîzâde İsmail Dede Efendi (1778–1846), and the composer-sultan Selim III (1761–1808), whose own Sema-âyîn in Suzidilârâ is still performed. The Mevlevî kept branches in Aleppo, Damascus, Tripoli, Cairo, and across the European provinces of the empire, with an especially active centre at Salonika. Where the rural Bektâşî order was the spiritual home of the Janissaries and the Anatolian villages, the Mevlevî was the order of the city, the court, and the conservatory.

The 1925 ban and the Konya museum

On 13 December 1925, the Republic of Türkiye, three years after its founding, passed Law No. 677. The law closed every tekke (dervish lodge) and zâviye (smaller lodge) in the country — Istanbul alone had more than two hundred and fifty — banned mystical titles and costumes, prohibited tomb-keeping as a profession, and forbade the public ceremonies of the orders. The Mevlevî suite of buildings in Konya, like the rest, was shut. Two years later, in March 1927, by separate decree, the central Konya complex was reopened as a museum — first as the Konya Asar-ı Atika Museum, renamed the Mevlana Müzesi in 1954. The tomb-chamber, the dance hall, the sema-hane, and the dervish cells were preserved as exhibits. The order, as a religious institution, remained illegal.

In 1953, after Türkiye's transition to multi-party democracy, a single annual Sema ceremony was permitted in Konya in mid-December, presented as a cultural commemoration rather than as a continuing religious practice. The arrangement has held, in essence, ever since. In 2008, UNESCO inscribed the Mevlevî Sema Ceremony on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, after an initial 2005 proclamation. It was the formal international recognition of a tradition the modern Turkish state still does not, on paper, recognise as a legal religious order.

vi.Sema: Music, Ecstasy, Remembrance

To explain the ceremony, two old words must be set out. Sema, in Sufi usage, means listening — listening to music, song, and chanted verse, to the point at which the listener is drawn into a state of religious feeling, then of ecstasy. The word does not strictly mean "dance." (The Persian word for dance is raks.) But the dancing is what Sema produces, and over the centuries the two have become inseparable; in a Mevlevî context "sema" alone means the whole devotional act, music and motion together. The dancer is the semâzen.

The second word is zikr — Arabic dhikr, "remembrance." Zikr is the repeated, rhythmic invocation of one of the names of God, alone or in chorus, until the speaker is no longer aware of speaking. Different orders practise different zikrs; in the Mevlevî, the zikr is more interior than vocal — held by the breath and the body's motion rather than shouted aloud. Both Sema and zikr aim at the same destination: the temporary suspension of will and self-consciousness, an emptying that allows what the order calls the fenâ — passing-away of the self — to give place to the presence of God.

Mevlana himself wrote of Sema as a daily practice. In his lifetime there was no fixed choreography. He is reported to have danced in the streets, in his teaching room, beside the goldsmiths' hammers in the Konya bazaar — once, the story goes, beside a single hammer whose rhythm took him so completely that the goldsmith was drawn in to dance with him. The institutional Sema — the form danced in Konya every December and shown to visitors at lodges across modern Türkiye — was developed over the two centuries after Mevlana's death by Sultan Veled and the early Çelebis. It took its present settled shape during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it has been performed, with very little variation, ever since. Mevlana described the practice in his own words:

The Sema is the soul's adornment which helps it to discover love, to feel the shudder of the encounter, to take off the veils, and to be in the presence of God.

vii.The Ceremony in Detail

The Mevlevî Sema is danced in a hall, the semâhâne, traditionally octagonal. At one end of the hall is the mihrâb, the niche pointing toward Mecca; in front of it lies the post, a red sheepskin mat which is the seat of the şeyh, the master of the lodge. The hall is divided in half by an invisible line called the hatt-ı istivâ — the equator — running from the post to the entrance; the dervishes never step on it. The orchestra sits opposite the mihrâb. Visitors sit, unobtrusively, against the walls.

The ceremony proper falls into two parts. The first is preparatory: a recitation from the Mesnevî; the Post Duâsı, the master's seated prayer; and the Naat-ı Şerîf, a hymn of praise to the Prophet, performed without rhythm, by tradition Itrî's seventeenth-century composition. The whole congregation listens in silence, eyes closed. After the Naat the kudümzenbaşı, the chief of the small twin kettledrums, strikes four notes; the chief reed-piper answers with an instrumental improvisation, the taksim, ending in the mode chosen for that night.

Now begins the peşrev, an instrumental prelude in the long fourteen-beat Devr-i Kebîr rhythm. The dervishes rise and walk three times slowly around the hall, behind the şeyh, in an anticlockwise circle. As each pair passes the post, they salute one another, head and heart bowed, with the right toe placed precisely over the left in the gesture called ayak mühürlemek — sealing the foot. The three slow circuits represent the three stages of mystical knowledge: knowledge by hearing, by sight, and by direct being.

The second part is the Sema itself, structured as four salutations — the Dört Selâm. The dervishes lay aside their black outer cloaks (the hırka), revealing the long white skirts (tennûre) that will fly out to a circle as they spin. They cross their arms over their chests, take their stations, and kiss the şeyh's hand for the blessing. Then they begin to whirl. As the speed rises the arms unfold to horizontal, right palm turned upward to receive from heaven, left palm turned downward to give to earth. The head is inclined slightly to one side, the eyes downcast or closed. The pivoting is on the left foot — the direk, the rod — with the right foot crossing over the instep, paddle-like, to drive the rotation. They spin around themselves, and at the same time travel in a wider anticlockwise orbit around the hall, never colliding, with the regularity of clockwork.

Between each of the four selâms the music pauses; the dervishes still themselves, salute the şeyh, and resume. In the fourth and final selâm the şeyh himself enters the centre of the hall — the kutb, the pole — and turns slowly while the others whirl around him. As he returns to the post, the music ends, abruptly, in the middle of a phrase. The dervishes draw back on their cloaks. A reciter chants from the Qur'an, the dancers seated again, and the Dua-gû Duâsı, the closing prayer, dismisses the company. The whole ceremony takes about an hour and twenty minutes.

viii.Attire and Instruments

The dervish's costume is, by old design, an enacted symbol. The tall conical felt cap — the sikke — represents his own gravestone. The black cloak draped over his shoulders before the dance — the hırka, also called cübbe — is his coffin. The white skirt and undergarment beneath — tennûre and the short jacket open at the front — are his shroud. To enter the Sema, he sheds his coffin and dances in his shroud, and when the music ends he returns to the coffin: the symbolism is plain. Senior dervishes wind a turban around the sikke (destâr), and may wear a wide woven girdle, the elifî nemed, knotted at the waist.

The orchestra — the mutrıb — is small. Its predominant instrument is the ney, a long open-ended reed flute whose breathy, plaintive tone is, in the Mevlevî reading, the voice of the soul cut from its source and crying for return; the eighteen-couplet opening of the Mesnevî is a poem about exactly this reed. Beside the ney is the kudüm, a small twin kettledrum of copper bowls covered in camel- or sheepskin and struck with a pair of light sticks called zahme. A rebâb — a bowed spike-fiddle, a Turkic instrument long predating its Arab and Persian relatives — provides a sustained second line. To these may be added the kanun (a 72-stringed plucked zither), the tanbûr (a long-necked lute), and the ud. Singers complete the ensemble.

ix.The Symbolism

Like every mature mystical tradition, the Sema has been read symbolically by its own commentators since at least the fifteenth century. The hall is the year; the post is the sun; the dervishes are the planets, turning on themselves and orbiting the master in the same instant, as the planets do. The four salutations are the four seasons, born of twelve months — the twelve modes of classical Turkish music — and themselves giving rise to four ages of human life and four elemental natures.

The half of the hall to the right of the equator is the visible world; the half to the left is the unseen, the world of the angels. The end of the equator near the post is divine; the end near the entrance is human. The right semicircle, traversed in the salutations, is the descent of the divine into the human; the left is the answering ascent of the human toward the divine. The whole motion of the ceremony is the cosmos in compressed form — descent and return, separation and reunion — performed by the body of one dervish at a time and by the company of dervishes together.

Two smaller symbols are worth knowing. The red colour of the post is the colour of the sky at sunset, in honour of Şems-i Tebrizi (whose name means "the sun"), of Mevlana's death, and of union itself. And the dervish's outstretched arms — palm-up, palm-down — together with his upright body in between, trace the Arabic letters that spell lâ ilâh, the negation that begins the Islamic confession of faith: there is no god (but God). The body is the prayer.

x.Şeb-i Arûs and the Modern Pilgrimage to Konya

The night Mevlana died — the evening of 17 December 1273 — has been kept by the order ever since as the Şeb-i Arûs, the Wedding Night. The metaphor is not original to him. The death-day of a Sufi saint is called an urs, "wedding," in the wider Sufi tradition, on the understanding that on that night the soul is finally married to its Beloved. But Mevlana made the metaphor his own. He wrote of his coming death without sorrow, told his disciples that they should not weep, and asked instead that musicians play. The funeral procession through Konya in December 1273 was attended, the medieval sources record, by Christians and Jews as well as Muslims, each grieving in their own forms, each insisting that he had been theirs.

The annual commemoration — Şeb-i Arûs Töreni in modern Turkish — runs for ten days every December, ending always on the night of the seventeenth. It is held at the Mevlana Kültür Merkezi, a purpose-built cultural centre on the eastern side of the modern city, and across the museum complex itself. Concerts of classical Mevlevî repertoire — Itrî, Dede Efendi, the Selim III âyîn — are programmed alongside the Sema ceremonies. Tickets are released months in advance; pilgrims and visitors come from across the world. The Konya provincial directorate of tourism estimates more than two million visits to the Mevlana Museum each year, with a heavy concentration in the Şeb-i Arûs week.

The museum itself rewards a slow visit. It centres on the green-tiled mausoleum — the Kubbe-i Hadra, built in the thirteenth century with later Ottoman additions — under which Mevlana, his father, his son Sultan Veled, and several other masters of the order are buried. Around it are arranged the dance hall, the dervish cells, the small mosque, the kitchen, and a remarkable small library of medieval manuscripts, including early copies of the Mesnevî in the master's own son's hand. Outside the entrance is the rose garden: a quiet, paved courtyard with a single fountain at its centre, in which the city's pigeons gather and rise. On almost any morning of the year you will find pilgrims standing here, alone or in small groups, simply looking at the dome.

A practical note for visitors

Konya is reached by high-speed train from Ankara (about 1 hr 45 min) or Istanbul (about 4 hrs 15 min), and by direct flights to Konya Airport (KYA). The Mevlana Museum is in the city centre, an easy walk from any of the central hotels. Photography is permitted in the courtyard and most museum rooms but not, by tradition, in the tomb-chamber itself; visitors are asked to remove their shoes at the entrance and to dress modestly, as for any working pilgrimage shrine.