ICONIUM AND THE WHIRLING DERVISHES
The city of Iconium, currently known as Konya, is mostly known as the last city where the well-known sophist and poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi lived and where he died in 1273. Rumi’s believes are still followed by many communities and concentrate on the use of music, poetry and dancing as a path for reaching God. For Rumi, music helped devotees to focus their whole being on the divine, and to do this so intensely that the soul was both destroyed and resurrected.

The followers of Rumi founded the Mevlevi Order, or the order of the "whirling" dervishes. These whirling dervishes perform the "Sema", their "turning", sacred dance in remembrance of God. In the Mevlevi tradition, Sema represents a mystical journey of spiritual ascent through mind and love to "Perfect." In this journey the seeker symbolically turns towards the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego, finds the truth, and arrives at the "Perfect"; then returns from this spiritual journey with greater maturity, so as to love and to be of service to the whole of creation without discrimination against beliefs, races, classes and nations.

Film Link YouTube : Sema Ceremony of the Whirling Dervishes