CAIRO - Several men clad in long, white robes and wearing tall, beige hats walked onto the stage. Accompanied by eight traditional Turkish musicians, sitting on chairs on the stage, the men started spinning ecstatically in an effort to meditate and find harmony. The Destar Turkish Classical and Sufi Music Whirling Dervishes Show Ensemble performed as part of a spiritual night held last Monday in the Small Hall at the Nile-side Cairo Opera House. The event was organised by the Yunus Emre Turkish Cultural Centre. The whirling of men and their concentration of the heavenly music so touched the audience's feelings that, when the show finished with the recitation of some verses from the Holy Qur'an, the audience were still swimming in the wonderful religious, spiritual atmosphere. The group, led by Ugur Erdem Urer, a lecturer in Afyon Kocatepe University's State Music Academy, was established by young academic artists in 1996 with the aim of putting on high-quality performances. The members of the group are all talented young Turkish musicians. The group has held many annotated Turkish music concerts in their home country, Turkey, and various other parts of the world. They specialise in performing outstanding samples of classical Turkish music and Turkish Sufi music. It was the Turkish Mawlawi fraternity of Sufis (Muslim mystics), founded in Konya, Anatolia, by the Persian Sufi poet Jalaluddin al-Rumi (1207-1273), whose popular title ‘Mawlana' (Arabic for ‘Our Master') gave the order its name. The order, propagated throughout Anatolia, controlled Konya and its environs by the 15th century and then, in the 17th century, appeared in Istanbul. Their performance here came as part of the 5th Sama'a International Festival for Sufi Music and Chanting, with Turkey being the guest of honour. Destar will also perform this evening and on August 6 in the Ghouri Dome, 11 Al-Azhar St., Ghouria, Islamic Cairo, as well as tomorrow and on August 8 at the Cairo Citadel, and on August 5 at the Sayyed Darwish Theatre, Alexandria. All these performances are at 9:30pm.
