A whole experience

PalmaThe imposing cloister of Sant Bonaventura hosted the Ceremony of the Whirling Dervishes, organized by the Toni Catany Foundation, who, as the program states, was a lover of the cultures of the Mediterranean, which he traveled and of which he left artistic testimony in countless photographic series. It is not a spectacle, it isa whole liturgical experience, as Halil Bárcena, the director of the Institute of Sufi Studies of Barcelona, explained very well shortly before initiating this Sêma: The Sufi Journey, performed by the Neva Sufi Ensemble. A group composed, on the one hand, by four musicians with their traditional instruments, the ney, the qanun, the ud, and the bendir —more or less, a flute, a trapezoidal zither, an Arabic lute, and a drum— also responsible for voicing the selam, the greeting in Turkish. On the other hand, the semazens, dancing dervishes, another four, who repeat the turns, always from left to right, with their right hand turned towards the sky and the left towards the ground, the way to establish a link between the soul and the body, between the divine and the human.Robert Graves said in the preface toThe Sufis, by the foundational thinker Idries Shah, that “Sufism represented a current of inner illumination centered on love and self-knowledge, free from oppressive dogmas”. All this was evident in this representation of the music and dances of the classical Mevlevi Sufi tradition. The venue, full; the silence, absolute, reverential. As if it were a service with all its mystical weight. The ascetic movements of the dervishes were responsible for marking the spiritual idiosyncrasy of the performance, while at the same time exhibiting a cadence that was both aesthetic and sober and cenobitic.The music, emotional and profound, with the traditional melodic phrases of the maqamat, which, as the voices chanted the names of the prophets, brought to the performance the pure and transcendent alloy between one and another. It was the feeling that it was all much more than our senses could grasp at first instance. It was a fitting and emotional tribute, but also an open door to another way of seeing and living.