Mawlawya's religious chanting kept Rania Khallaf::rkhallaf dizzy for days. Here she describes the show Sitting through the Mawlawya show for an hour and half was not an easy assignment. To begin with, it started half past nine on a Ramadan night. Then the founder of the company and its sole chanter, Amer El-Touni, commenced by hailing the Prophet Mohamed and God. He began with poems of Ibn El-Fared and then continued with other poets. As he sang, four dancers in white costumes wove a circle around him. At first they stood calmly with their right hands touching their hearts. A few minutes later they started to move and revolve from left to right. And they never stopped for the duration of the show. El-Touni's strong, spiritual voice coupled with the live Sufi music brought on an entirely surreal mood. It sent one's soul soaring to the sky, a sky that was open and blue. The show took place in the Wekalet Al-Ghouri, an old and evocative venue with brown Arabesque windows; the ambiance was more than perfect. It was equally amazing to watch the dancers who kept on moving in small circles without a minute to rest. It certainly left me dazzled. How were they able to do it? Some of the dancers joined the company when it was formed in 1994, while others are still training in private studios. Those who have the skill to dance in the tanoura (whirling dervishes) are luckier -- the technique is very similar. From time to time the company publishes announcements welcoming new dancers and offering training for those who have no knowledge but want to learn Sufi dancing. Mawlawya was established in 1994 as a religious chanting and dance company. El-Touni studied the old ways of religious and Sufi chanting from different eras. Mawlawya as an art was first established by Galaleddin Al-Rumi some 800 years ago, and it appears to have come to Egypt with the Ottoman conquest in 1517. "The tradition survived and flourished in several parts in Egypt until 1952, when the new principle of socialism set in place by the 1952 Revolution outlawed it, just as it had been outlawed even in Turkey itself. However, the mawlawya tradition has recently been born again in Turkey although merely for touristic purposes. The lyrics of the songs are derived from famous Sufi poems by Ibn El-Fared and El-Hallag, Ibn Arabi and others. The technique is almost the same, and entails, so to speak, moving around with a few gestures and movements of the arms and twists of the head. "It is basically a mood of meditation, an attempt to communicate with God," El-Touni says. "It was invented by Al-Rumi as a way of mourning the sudden death of his master. Therefore it is known as a sad ritual." There is a kind of philosophy in the idea of revolving, he continues; the planets revolve around the sun; the Tawaf or moving around the Holy Shrine during hajj also goes from left to right, and the blood circle also goes from left to right and it only goes from right to left when the heart stops beating. "But, for me it is a matter of love; loving God, a carnival mood. I teach the company how to love each other; how to love the dance itself; how to express their feelings and to communicate with God while dancing," El-Touni adds. El-Touni was born in 1966 and is a graduate of the Education College and worked as an Arabic language teacher in a secondary school. Five years later he left his job and travelled to Greece, where he stayed for six years and embarked on an entirely new career as a munshid [religious chanter] with some Sufi music bands there. The Mawlawya also run some workshops with Sufi musicians from Cuba, Spain and the United States. So far, Mawlawya has danced on hundreds of nights in many places in Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and France and in the US, and has received a warm acclaim wherever it has appeared for its unique and sincere performance. In Egypt, the company performs in several governorates, most notably in Malawi, a small town in Minya governorate, where about two million Sufis from the surrounding villages have attended its recent shows. The company will soon embark on an entirely new experience when they present for the first time a play called The Mountain, an adaptation of a novel by the Algerian author Al-Taher Bin Galloun entitled Laylet Al-Qadr. This will be presented within the framework of the Cairo International Experimental Theatre Festival, due to take place next month. El-Touni, who studies his masters, says it is apparently involved in the theme intertextuality in theatre, with a special focus on Russian drama and the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. For him mawlawya is "some kind of theatrical art, which needs to be developed and is open to mix with other kinds of music like world music." El-Touni dreams of a tekeya, the old Ottoman word for the premises of such dance companies, a place where a good reciter of the Quran teaches his students. "Such a place should have productions from other similar Sufi companies from around the world, as well as a school to teach the Quran to young people, and it should provide loans for assisting the poor and the elderly as a way of teaching people how to cooperate and love each other."
