"There's a strange frenzy in my head,
of birds flying
each particle circulation on its own.
is the one I love everwhere?"
-Rumi
The film, Sufi Soul: The Mystical Music of Islam, documents the musical traditions of varies Sufi communities from Pakistan to India, it was originally aired on the BBC. The film is hospitable as it presents the shered inheritance of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the formation of the Sufi tradition, indeed the narrator informs us that, Islam’s Ramadan has its roots in Christian practice of lent.
Much like the accounts found in the Koran, the Torah, and the Bible, the 'Sufi Soul' starts with a tail of two brothers, the narrator William Dalrymple informs us that there is another side to Islam differing from the one presented by the western media, a peaceful Islam called Sufism. These 2 brother growing form the same soil made their paths to heaven in 2 vary different ways, the one through strict adheres to the practice of daily prayer, the other through the palpable experience of Devin Love in the living creation of Allah.
But the Sufi Soul is not an amalgamated lump of love and peace of a soft headed sort, on the contrary as this film documents Sufism is a dizzying array of divergent expressions of Devin Love, ranging from the rowdy punk like rhapsody of the Turkish tradition to the refined Desmond dervishes rooted in the formalism of the late 18th century Ottoman Empire.
And, this all seems appropriate given the vast array of forms found in the world Allah created, and indeed this ontology is bountifully expressed at one point in the film by Nail Kesove; "Everything is whirling in the world from the smallest cell up to the galaxies of the universe, our whirling is to join this universal prayer." Indeed this is a universe and everything in it whirls, but not everything whirls the same, let’s find our way to whirl, in G-d.
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