8 - ‘Watching myself in the mirror, I saw ʿAlī in my eyes’: On Sufi Visual and Material Practice in the Balkans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
After the expansion of the Ottoman Empire during the fifteenth century, sizeable numbers of dervishes emigrated to the newly conquered territories in the Balkan peninsula. Reacting against the increasing institutionalization of Sufi orders, these itinerant antinomian dervishes embraced a variety of unconventional and socially liminal practices, including ascetic acts that are practised to this day. This chapter discusses such Sufi material-visual practices with particular reference to the memorial services for the Prophet Muḥammad's grandson Ḥusayn and other members of his family during the sacred days of ʿĀshūrāʾ and Sultan Nawruz. These include special ritual practices such as piercing dervishes’ bodies with swords or iron spikes aimed at taming the base soul (nafs).
Keywords: Sufi; dervish; Balkans; ʿĀshūrāʾ; Sultan Nawruz; training the soul
Muḥammad is ʿAlī, ʿAlī-Muḥammad,
ʿAlī is Muḥammad, ʿAlī-Muḥammad, Allah!
ʿAlī is Muḥammad, ʿAlī-Muḥammad.
Ilāhī (Devotional song).
In his Mashāʿir al-shuʿarāʾ (Biographies of the poets) the sixteenth-century judge and poet ʿĀshik Chelebi (d. 1571–72) from Prizren in Kosovo described a dervish of the Ḥaydarī sect, named Baba ʿAlī Mest as having worn earrings, a collar around his neck and chains on his body, as well as a ‘dragon-headed’ hook under his belt and a sack. Following the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century, sizeable numbers of dervishes, mostly of heterodox origin like ʿAlī Mest, emigrated to the newly conquered territories in the Balkan peninsula. As a reaction to the increasing institutionalization of Sufi orders, these itinerant antinomian dervishes, sometimes referred to as qalandars, embraced a variety of unconventional and socially liminal practices. Travelling alone or in bands, they deliberately inverted social hierarchies and explicitly violated Islamic law as a form of religious and social protest.
Some of these dervishes performed special ascetic practices that were profoundly physical and material in character. These included ritual self-laceration, and piercing their own bodies with swords or iron spikes. Such self-mortification left marks on the body that stood as material-visual reminders of the dervishes’ exertions and communicated their spectacular and theatrical actions to wider audiences. The concomitant display of animal attributes also reflected the dervishes’ own animal-like force. It acted not only as a means of liberation and a critique of social controls but, above all, served as a prime tool in the dramatic attempts to discipline, control and tame their own ‘animal’ or base souls (nafs).
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- Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World , pp. 151 - 174Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019