If you were to travel to Konya in Turkey, you would most likely be going to see the place where Rumi resided, and his tomb. When you got there, this is what you would see. You would walk into an area that looked like a mosque, but it wasn’t. It’s actually a tomb, an indoor tomb / cemetery with about thirty or forty shaikhs of the order interred there. Then you would reach the area where Rumi himself is interred. To the left of that is a large room that they have turned into a museum, which is where the dervishes would do their sema, their whirling.
If you went outside that building, across from it are two other buildings. One is the mosque that they used at that time and the other is a diorama. We don’t use that word so often. You will see them in the Museum of Natural History in New York. A diorama is a depiction of something, usually using… in the Museum of Natural History in New York, they use stuffed animals and mannequins. Here they use mannequins and recreations of certain things that dervishes would do during their stay within the “dargah”. Dargah means the place where the dervishes stay and carry on their activities. There is usually a guide who explains what is going on.
There is a period when a person comes to the dargah with the intention of becoming a dervish. Then there is the small ritual of the shoes. All the dervishes keep their shoes in a certain place when they come in. The initiates shoes go in a different place. After a certain period of time, either the initiates shoes get put with the other dervishes shoes or the initiates shoes are put outside the dargah. If the shoes are put outside the dargah, that means the initiate was not accepted as a dervish in this particular tariqat.
What’s the point? The point is that in order to become a dervish, you have to be able to act in a certain way. You have be able to carry yourself in a certain way. You have to be able to do things in a certain way. If you couldn’t, you couldn’t be accepted into the circle of dervishes.
A large part of the training in becoming a dervish is adeb (or adab) which essentially means chivalry or etiquette. In other words, you have to know how to act toward others, and toward yourself. There has to be the establishment of an appropriate behavior within you. Of course, you are told and explained what appropriate behavior is, but some people can be explained day and night and night, and day and night, and they don’t get it. And they can’t understand it because they don’t have empathy. They are incapable of feeling what others feel because mostly they are so overwhelmed by their own needs and their own feelings and these needs and feelings are so powerful within themselves that they can’t seem to do anything other than explain what those feelings are and how they themselves should be treated better. Their focus is on themselves as opposed to what’s outside of them, as far as other people.
This is a fault of perspective. You need to have a certain way to look at things. If you can’t look at things that way, then the perspective that you use is going to lead to behavior that puts your shoes outside the dargah. Ibn Araby says in a prayer “Allah, let me see me through the way You see me, so that I may do as You would do, not as I would do…
