Category: CultureWatch

Mercan Dede

Mercan DedeTurns the Tables on Sufism

By Michele Rousseau

Sufism has few ideas, but an inexhaustible wealth and variety of illustration. Among a thousand fluttering masks the interpreter is required to identify each old familiar face.

~ R.A. Nicholson, 1898

Internationally renound musician and DJ, Mercan Dede, is beloved by many nations of the world but his home country, Turkey, houses his harshest critics – those who feel that his contemporary appropriation of Sufi music, whirling dance, and ethics are an erosion of the traditions of the path.

Michele Rousseau balances the anxieties of Dede’s critics with her own experience of his music, and his extraordinary power to bring people of all walks of life together to partake in a shared experience, a “contemporary sama.”

(Photo Courtesy Yagmur Kizilok)

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The Fez Festival of Sufi Culture, 2011

A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

by Fitzroy Morrissey

Five different Sufi orders performed on successive days during the Festival.  A Sufi tariqah is by its very nature autonomous, distinct and traditional.

In this thoughtful and beautifully written article, Fitzroy Morrisey narrates his personal experience of the 2011 annual festival of Sufi culture in Fez, Morocco.   Beginning with a succinct exploration of the dichotomy between Sufism as it is commonly conceived and Sufism as it is actually lived, the author devotes the rest of the article to a thrilling description of the God-intoxicated music of diverse Sufi musicians, including classical singers, professional Sufi groups, and five Sufi tariqahs from Morocco and Turkey.

(Photo by Thierry Beauvir, beauvir.com)

 

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Sain Zahoor

PAKISTAN’S MYSTIC OF MUSIC

“There are people who walk the earth as if they have walked upon it for centuries. Sain Zahoor is one of them.”

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Parvathy Baul

RENOWNED BAUL SINGER SHARES HER MUSIC WITH SUFI

Parvathy Baul is a singer, painter and storyteller from West Bengal. She is both trained in the Baul order and studied visual arts at the Kala Bhavan University at Shantiniketan.

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Men of Faith

OF GODS & MEN (2010) FILM REVIEW

By Peter Valentyne

Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, director Xavier Beauvois’s film Of Gods and Men is based on the true story of a group of Cistercian monks who lived a monastic life of prayer and service in Algeria from 1993 until 1996, when they were kidnapped and then killed by radical Islamic insurgents.
 

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Turning to Hafez

THE ART OF FIGURAL CALLIGRAPHY

by Jila Peacock

I was born in Tehran to an English mother and Iranian father, and, although English was my mother tongue, my first written language was Persian, which I studied from the age of seven at my Iranian primary school. I remember being introduced at that time to snippets of Ferdousi in my first textbooks, to Sa‘di, my father’s favorite poet, and Edward Fitzgerald’s translations of Khayyam, which my mother would always recite by heart. My introduction to Hafiz came much later in life.
 

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