A “Riot of Perfume in My Heart”
by Barbra Joffe
Qawwali
Tag: Sama
Issue 88 Featured Website Poet
FARRAH A. BOLVARDE
is a Computer Engineer who lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
SAMA
With souls engulfed and hidden
in Your love, this is our Sama
We are ruined; what separation,
or union!? this is our Sama
Dead to our desires, drenched
in blood and far from all, this is our Sama
The twists and turns of this
world are nothing to us, this is our Sama
Clinging to Your wings with hearts soaring
in your love, this is our Sama
Mesmerized by Your beauty, with
only half a glance at the lifeless self, this is our Sama
Wrapped in Your remembrance
with our every particle dancing in ecstasy, this is our Sama
FARRAH A. BOLVARDE
Archives 88 – Editors’ Note
Editors’ Note
In a time when attachment to the world and its wealth seems to many to be out of reasonable control, Winter Issue #88 SUFI explores the many facets of the act of
Archives 88 – Women on the Rooftop
by Safoura Nourbakhsh
Among other things, the hagiographies of Abu Sa’id shed some light on the segregation of the sexes in the Sufi lodges (khaneqahs)
Mercan Dede
Turns 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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Shamanic Traditions and Sufism
Oruç Güvenç and the Healing Power of Music
by Azize Güvenç with Yousef Daoud
Most of us know first-hand the transformative power of music and sound to create a profoundly calming or emotional experience, and readers know our previous issue of Sufi was dedicated to sacred encounters through music.
In their carefully researched essay Shamanic Traditions and Sufism, authors Azize Güvenç and Yousef Daoud take us into the amazing life and work of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç, a Sufi shaikh and master musician of Turkey who provides healing to the sick through music therapies that fuse Sufism with ancient shamanic practices from Central Asia.
Güvenç and his musicians combine music, movement and dhikr to awaken body, mind and soul. And researchers in Europe, the United States and Turkey are studying the positive effects of Güvenç’s sound and movement therapies on patients suffering from cancer, bone fractures, depression and other maladies.
(Photo courtesy of Azize Güvenç)
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