Sufism is the mystical dimension of Islam — the tradition within the tradition that seeks not merely to follow the laws of God but to merge with the presence of God directly, in this life, in this body, in this breath. The central practice of virtually every Sufi order is dhikr — Arabic for 'remembrance' — the repetitive chanting or silent repetition of divine names or phrases, most commonly 'La ilaha illa Allah' (There is no god but God) or simply 'Allah.' The practice derives from the Quranic verse: 'Verily, in the remembrance of God do hearts find rest' (13:28). Dhikr can be practiced silently (khafi) or aloud (jahri), alone or in groups, with or without rhythmic breathing and movement. In group practice, the dhikr typically begins seated, with participants chanting together in a circular arrangement, the volume and intensity building as the practice deepens, sometimes accompanied by rhythmic swaying, percussion, and eventually movement. The goal is a state called fana — annihilation of the ego-self in the presence of the divine — described by the greatest Sufi poets as the dissolution of the drop in the ocean.
Rumi — Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273), the Persian poet and mystic whose translated poetry outsells every other poet in America — was not primarily a poet. He was the founder of the Mevlevi Order, one of the most significant Sufi orders in history, and his poetry was the overflow of a mystical life of extreme depth. His relationship with the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, whom he met in 1244, shattered his settled world and initiated him into a direct experience of divine love that produced the 25,700 verses of the Masnavi — called 'the Persian Quran' — and the Divan-i Shams. Rumi's central teaching is the primacy of love: not romantic love but the cosmic love that is the substance of divine reality, to which the human heart has direct access when it opens beyond the contracted self. 'Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.'
The sema ceremony of the Mevlevi Order — the whirling practice associated with Rumi's tradition — is one of the most recognizable images in world spirituality: white-robed figures spinning counterclockwise on their left foot, right arm raised with palm up (receiving from heaven), left arm lowered with palm down (transmitting to earth). The whirling is not performance. It is a systematic technology for inducing the altered states of consciousness associated with divine proximity. The vestibular system — the inner ear's balance apparatus — when subjected to sustained rotation, produces neurological changes that modulate the default mode network's activity, suppress left-hemisphere narrative processing, and create what practitioners describe as the experience of being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The right arm raised becomes an antenna. The left becomes a ground. The dervish becomes the axis mundi — the spinning center of the cosmos. The technique requires years of training to perform safely and meaningfully, but even brief periods of slow, intentional spinning in a safe space can give practitioners a taste of the underlying phenomenology.
The Chishti Order — the dominant Sufi order of India and Pakistan, whose lineage includes Moinuddin Chishti (buried in Ajmer, whose shrine receives millions of pilgrims annually), Qutb-ud-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki, and Nizamuddin Auliya — developed qawwali as its primary vehicle of dhikr: devotional music performed at shrines, designed to induce the state of hal (an overwhelming experience of divine presence) in listeners. The Chishti masters held that sama (listening) was the highest form of dhikr — that the heart, opened by music performed by masters in the right spirit for listeners in the right condition, could receive transmissions of divine love that bypassed the rational mind entirely. The late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the greatest qawwali singer of the 20th century, was the living embodiment of this tradition's power.