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 Remembrance
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".