What Is Sama? The Dance of the Whirling Dervishes

Sama is the Sufi spiritual practice of listening to music and poetry to draw closer to God. Its best-known form is the turning of the whirling dervishes: men and women dressed in white who spin with their arms open for long minutes, like a prayer without words.

A dance before it was a performance

Before people danced for joy, they danced to reach the world above. In many ancient cultures dance was a rite: to call for rain, to mourn, to give thanks. It was a language in which the body said what words could not.

Sama grows from that same root but goes its own way. In the Sufi tradition, dance became a measured, ordered rite, with precise movements, music and symbols, for a single purpose: prayer and, in the end, union with the Beloved; what Sufis call fana, the drop dissolving into the sea.

The dervish does not turn to be seen; the dervish turns to be emptied of self.

What the word means

Sama (Arabic and Persian سماع) literally means “listening”. For Sufis it is not about hearing but about listening with the whole body: music, poem and silence become a path to the divine. In Turkish it is sema, and the one who turns is a semazen.

Rumi, Shams and the origin of the turn

The whirl is tied to Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273), the Persian poet and mystic born in Balkh who settled in Konya, in today’s Turkey. His life changed in 1244, when he met the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz. From that friendship came Rumi’s poetry and, tradition says, his habit of turning as he listened to music.

After Rumi’s death, his son Sultan Walad and his disciples shaped the Mevlevi order, which made the turn a ceremony with its own rules, music and symbols.

What the turn means

• Turning around the heart. The dervish turns from right to left, around their own heart, as planets and atoms turn: everything that exists revolves.
• One hand to the sky, one to the earth. The right palm faces up to receive; the left faces down to give. The dervish keeps nothing.
• Dying to the ego. The tall felt hat (sikke) stands for the tombstone of the ego; the white skirt (tennure), its shroud. Shedding the black cloak at the start means being reborn to the truth.

The music of sama

The ceremony is accompanied by chant, drums and above all the ney, the reed flute. Rumi’s great poem, the Masnavi, opens with the lament of the reed, crying because it was torn from the reed bed: the image of the soul longing for its origin.

Sama today

UNESCO has inscribed the Mevlevi Sema Ceremony on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Every 17 December, the anniversary of Rumi’s death, Konya celebrates his “wedding night” (Şeb-i Arus), because Sufis see death as reunion with the Beloved. Today women whirl too, in Turkey, Iran and many other countries.

Sama in fiction

Elif Shafak’s novel The Forty Rules of Love brought the story of Rumi and Shams to millions of readers. In The Order to Delete by Awa Rafi, sama is at the centre: Sara has whirled in secret, behind a closed door, for half her life, because it is the only prayer she has left before a God who does not answer. When she meets Zeus, an artificial intelligence that always answers, the turn becomes the book’s question: what happens to faith when something finally replies?

Read more: novels about artificial intelligence and the soul, or use the reading group guide with your book club.

Frequently asked questions

Is sama a dance?

It is a dance, but in the oldest sense of the word: not to entertain, but to pray. Its movements follow rules and each one carries a meaning, and it is not performed for an audience but for God.

Why don’t the dervishes get dizzy?

Years of practice, a fixed gaze and breathing in time with the music let them turn for a long time. Most people who try it for the first time do get dizzy.

Where can you see a sama ceremony?

Konya and Istanbul hold regular Mevlevi ceremonies, and whirling dervish groups perform at festivals around the world.