Sufism is the mystical side of Islam. It is the tradition within the tradition that seeks not just to follow God's laws but to merge with God's presence directly, in this life, in this body, in this breath. The central practice of nearly every Sufi order is dhikr, Arabic for 'remembrance': repeating divine names or phrases out loud or silently, most often 'La ilaha illa Allah' (There is no god but God) or simply 'Allah.' The practice comes from a verse in the Quran: 'Verily, in the remembrance of God do hearts find rest' (13:28). Dhikr can be silent (khafi) or aloud (jahri), alone or in a group, with or without rhythmic breathing and movement. In group practice it usually starts seated, with people chanting together in a circle, the volume and intensity building as it deepens, sometimes joined by swaying, drumming, and eventually movement. The goal is a state called fana: the dissolving of the ego-self in the presence of God, which the great Sufi poets describe as the drop dissolving into the ocean.
Rumi, Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207 to 1273), the Persian poet and mystic whose translated poetry outsells every other poet in America, was not mainly a poet. He was the founder of the Mevlevi Order, one of the most important Sufi orders in history, and his poetry poured out of a mystical life of extreme depth. His bond with the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, whom he met in 1244, shattered his settled world and opened him to a direct experience of divine love. That experience 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 very substance of divine reality, which the human heart can reach directly once it opens past the closed-off 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 linked to Rumi's tradition, is one of the most recognizable images in world spirituality: white-robed figures spinning counterclockwise on the left foot, the right arm raised with the palm up (receiving from heaven) and the left arm lowered with the palm down (passing it to earth). The whirling is not a performance. It is a careful method for reaching the altered states linked to closeness with God. When you spin steadily, the vestibular system, the balance apparatus in your inner ear, produces neurological changes that shift how the default mode network works, quiet the brain's left-hemisphere story-making, and create what practitioners describe as being everywhere and nowhere at once. The raised right arm becomes an antenna. The lowered left becomes a ground. The dervish becomes the axis mundi, the spinning center of the cosmos. It takes years of training to do safely and meaningfully, but even short periods of slow, careful spinning in a safe space can give you a taste of what it feels like.
The Chishti Order, the leading Sufi order of India and Pakistan, whose lineage includes Moinuddin Chishti (buried in Ajmer, whose shrine draws millions of pilgrims a year), Qutb-ud-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki, and Nizamuddin Auliya, developed qawwali as its main vehicle of dhikr: devotional music performed at shrines to bring on the state of hal, an overwhelming sense of divine presence, in the listeners. The Chishti masters taught that sama (listening) was the highest form of dhikr: that the heart, opened by music played by masters in the right spirit for listeners in the right state, could receive transmissions of divine love that skip the rational mind entirely. The late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the greatest qawwali singer of the 20th century, was the living proof of this tradition's power.