WHIRLING DERVISHES

WHIRLING DERVISHES

A couple of weeks ago the Syrian consul in Madrid who gave us our diplomatic visas to come here arrived in Syria on holiday and invited Robert to lunch.  However, there was a mix-up in the times and the upshot was that Robert could not go.  Ghassan then went to Hama to visit his family and last night we went out to dinner with him at one of the traditional restaurants in the Old Town called the Omeyyad Palace.  

The restaurant is situated up an alley just beside the great mosque and, if you did not know where you were going, I am sure you would just walk straight past. We certainly did.  If Ghassan had not been hanging around waiting for us, we might never have found it! The entrance is just as unlikely looking as most things in Damascus, but when you climb up the flight of stairs the restaurant is situated in what must have been the sitting area of a large Damascene house with lots of hanging plants everywhere.  It was packed to the gunwhales, mostly with Syrian families out for the evening.  

The restaurant offers an open buffet for a fixed price of 350 Syrian pounds at lunchtime and 700 in the evening.  The buffet consists of a mezzé or starters section with about twenty different dishes on offer including houmous, felafel and a large variety of  salads.  For the main course there were fish and meat dishes on offer, but we did not partake of any of those.  Then the dessert table included fruit salads of various kinds, traditional Middle Eastern pastries with pistachios and honey and cheese cake, fruit cake and another typical dish made of milk like a blancmange with nuts through it.

The larger tables for big groups are made of wood but the smaller tables are like huge engraved copper trays on wooden legs.  Between courses a dwarf waiter came around with a traditional coffee pot to serve Arabic coffee, which is made with lightly toasted coffee beans mixed with cardomom seeds.  It is a very good digestive.

Music is played throughout the evening by a group of musicians and their repertoire is traditional Syrian music.  There was also a troupe of dancers performing folk dances which were very lively indeed and then the whirling dervishes.  This was not a large group but a man and his small son of about five years.  They wore their long white swirling skirts with a white waistcoat and a fairly tall brown fez on their heads.  It is amazing to watch them do this whirling using a technique which I don’t fully understand but which permits them to whirl for a long time without any sign of dizziness at all.  It was interesing for me because during the whirling they raise and lower their hands and place them on different parts of the body and it would seem that they are always placed on chakras and pulse points.  Another movement is like forming an “energy ball”.  This “dance” is not really a dance at all but part of a religious rite and the music played is special religious music.  The idea behind it is similar to meditation and an inducement to the states of ecstasy mentioned by St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila.  In other words, it is a mystical technique.  When you think about it, this link between Oriental and Western mysticism is not at all surprising because both St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila were born in Jewish families which were forced to convert to Christianity during the Inquisition and they would both be familiar with the Jewish book of mysticism, the Zohar. In fact the whirling is practised by the Sufis who are the Islamic counterpart of Christian mysticism (the word “sufi” means mystic).  The little boy was quite amazing.  He could whirl and whirl and then just walk off without the slightest sign of dizziness.

Of course, there always has to be a buffoon and last night it was in the form of a French tourist sitting just right in front of the musicians and dancers who insisted on getting up and trying to dance the belly dance and clapping out of rhythm and generally making a fool of himself but in the belief that he was the “life and soul of the party”.  I always wonder if these people have no sense of how ridiculous they are?

When we had finished eating we went out for walk around the vicinity and Ghassan took us to another restaurant at the other side of the mosque so we would know where to find it and to have a look at the inside.  The entrance was just as unlikely as the other, perhaps even more so, because on the ground floor bakers were busy making bread and other things.  However, upstairs the decoration of the walls is magnificent and the effect is that of sitting under three bedouin tents.  We did not stay long because the decibels of the music were too uncomfortable.  However, that did not seem to bother the hundred or more people having dinner there who all seemed to be enjoying themselves enormously.


May 8th 1998