Chapter Three. Sama, Shab-i arus, and Rituals of Remembrance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The tradition of whirling or turning associated with the Mawlawi Order of Rumi in Turkey has seeped into contemporary western popular culture.Early European travellers in the Ottoman Empire noted the alluring practice of turning and the tennure (white skirt) of the dervishes.One of the first travel accounts to focus on Sufi traditions was by Georgius de Hungaria (c.1422-1502) (Lewis 2000; Sedgwick 2016).Georgius was captured by the Turks and held as a slave in Ottoman lands.During this time, he began to question his Christian beliefs and became attracted to Islam and Sufism.In his account he writes about the dervishes he encountered, "who sway their entire body in a regular and well-measured manner, with a decorous, dignified, and very chaste movement of their limbs, matching the rhythmic modulations of the musical instruments, creating finally a whirl of dizzying velocity, a rotation and revolution, in which the power of these performances consist" (qtd in Lewis 2000: 500).The tradition of turning to the music or sama (sacred audition) drew the attention of many European Orientalists and non-Muslims for centuries.In the late twentieth century, Reshad Feild and Suleyman Loras, a Mawlawi shaykh from Konya, began teaching men and women to turn in Canada (Vancouver) and the US (Los Angeles).The samazens' tradition of turning has also been transmitted through other Sufi orders with connections to Turkish Sufismfor example, through Kabir and Camille Helminski of the Threshold Society, a branch of the Mawlawi Sufi Order, headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, 1 and through shaykha Fariha al-Jerrahi of the Halveti-Jerrahi Sufi group in New York City.Both these orders trace their lineage to their Turkish teacher Muzaffer Ozak.The transmission of turning has not been solely about spreading the teachings of Rumi; it is also about preserving the ritual of sama in the contemporary world, given that it has been outlawed in Turkey since the early twentieth century and is still outlawed and now exists as a cultural expression both in and beyond the Turkish world.A close look at the practice of turning in Canada highlights the central role this ritual plays for some Turkish and Rumi-affiliated Canadian Sufi Chapter Three Sama, Shab-i arus, and Rituals of RemembranceAnd the dancing is a reference to the circling of the spirit round the circle of existing things in order to receive the effects of the unveilings and revelations; and this is the state of the gnostic.The whirling is a reference to the spirit's standing with Allāh in its inner nature (sirr) and being (wujūd), the circling of it looks and thought, and its penetrating the ranks of existing things; and this is the state of the seeker of Truth.And his leaping up is a reference to his being drawn from the human station to the unitive station and to existing things acquiring from him spiritual effects and illuminative aids.(qtd 167) 5
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.042 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".