The Great Master Junayd was asked why the Sufis felt such powerful emotions in their spirit and the urge to move their bodies when listening to sacred music.
This was his reply: “When God asked the souls in the spirit world: ‘Am I not your Lord?', the gentle sweetness of the divine words penetrated each soul for ever, so that whenever one of them hears music, the memory of this sweetness is stirred within him, causing him to move”.
In the early 9 th century, when the Muslim mystics organised their Sufis brotherhood or orders, they adopted music as a support for meditation, as a mean of access to the state of grace or ecstasy, or quite simply as “soulfood”, in other words something that gives new vigour to a body and soul tired by the rigours of the ascetic life.
In Sufism, the sama' (meaning literally “listening”) denotes the tradition of listening in spiritual fashion to music, chanting and songs of various forms.
The very meaning of the word sama' suggests that it is the act of listening that is spiritual, without the music or poetry being necessarily religious in content.
The major preoccupation of the Muslim mystics was to give ecstasy a real content and music a true meaning.
The Sufis mystics brotherhood known as Mawlawiyya (Turkish: Mevlevis, more familiar in the West as the “whirling dervishes”) was founded at Konya (Anatolia) by the great Persian poet Jalâl al-Dîn al-Rûmi (1207-1273).
Although we associate this ritual above all with Turkey, local traditions have been in existence in Syria, Egypt and Iraq since the 16 th century.
They survived there after the dissolution of all Sufis fraternities in Turkey in 1925.
Damascus is one of the principal centers of Islam, the former capital of the Ummayyad dynasty and a stage in the pilgrimage to Mecca. In their meeting places there the Mawlawiyya adopted the original suites ( wasla) , modes ( maqâm) and rhythms.
The ritual may not be performed in the mosques, where musical instruments are either forbidden or else only allowed in the form of percussion instruments, which are generally played in the courtyards.
Certain great mosques, such as the Ummayyad Mosque (also known as the Great Mosque of Damascus) possess a specific vocal repertory. The sacred suites are known as nawba-s , a term reserved for secular suites by the former inhabitants of Andalusia and the Maghreb.
Generally accompanied by a male vocal choir ( bitâna) , the reciters (munshid) work into the “samâ” (sacred concert) extracts from the repertoire of the Great Mosque, the naming of God ( dhikr-s) and extract from the Birth of the Prophet (mawlid).
Their expressiveness (hiss) is fundamentally serene, always subtly inventive and rigorously organized rhythmically in order to progressively lead the assembly into a trance ( inkhitâf) or a state of meditation (ta'ammul) , a choice which depends on each individual fraternity. |
