Sema

The Mevlevi order takes its shape from Jalal al-Din Rumi, who died at Konya in 1273, but the sema as a fixed ceremony is the work of the generations after him. The stories told within the order describe Rumi turning spontaneously in the street, and it is that spontaneity, disciplined into a repeatable liturgy by his son and successors, that the modern ceremony preserves. By the classical Ottoman period the order held lodges across the empire, its own musical repertoire had been composed for the rite, and the ceremony had acquired the sectional structure it still follows.

The order was closed along with all other Sufi lodges by the Turkish Republic in 1925, and its property was taken. What survived did so as a designated cultural performance, revived from the 1950s at Konya around the anniversary of Rumi's death, and that history leaves the sema in a genuinely awkward position: the same event is a rite for those performing it and a heritage spectacle in the way it is often staged and ticketed. The atlas records both without collapsing one into the other. The turning done in a lodge for the order's own purposes and the turning done on a stage for an audience use the same movements and are not the same act, and Mevlevi practitioners themselves make that distinction sharply.

The ceremony is read symbolically at every point, and the readings are the order's own rather than an outside interpretation. The black cloak the dervish wears on entering stands for the tomb and is cast off to reveal the white gown, which stands for the shroud; the tall camel hair hat is the tombstone. Removing the cloak is therefore a death, and what turns afterward has already died to itself. The dervish crosses his arms over his chest at the start, standing for the unity of God, and opens them as the turn begins.

The arms then hold the position the ceremony is best known for: the right palm turned upward to receive from God, the left turned down toward the earth to pass on what has been received, so that the turning body is a conduit and keeps nothing. The head is inclined toward the right shoulder, and the turn is anticlockwise on the left foot, the right foot pushing. The ceremony runs through a naat in praise of the Prophet, a drum stroke, an improvised reed flute taksim, a circling procession, and then four salutes, the selams, each with its own character, before a recitation from the Quran closes it. The whole runs about an hour. Sufi orders have argued about the permissibility of music and movement in worship since the earliest centuries, and the Mevlevi position is one answer among several rather than the settled view of Islam.