I'll meet you there.
- Rumi
Mohammed first walked the vast sea of sand as a nomad with a single word on his wind-torn lips.
When the searing Arabian sun beat down upon his people's wrinkled faces and unmasked eyes, Love became their shade.
And as Prussia deemed knighthood and the Holy Roman Empire kicked inside his mother's womb, the European nations to the west found themselves deteriorating beside their swords, their alphabets slumbering with them inside their Testaments, inside their weeping steeples and houses made of illiterate stone. The star that shot through the great, magnificent sky was unseen by their eyes above the glow of their lights, where past the holy cities it was beheld. In the desert, they watched God born in the burning sky.
Praise Allah, they cried. Praise Love.
---
All was white, now. Sadiq Adnan sat before the empty room. His shadow from the sun rising upon his back began to stretch before him in an attempt to escape the physical world.
Sadiq, meaning friend.
His mask reflected the walls as when he first attained anonymity. His shadow inched away further across the wooden floor. It was frightened. Visibly, he smirked in that funny way of his. He would not do without reclaiming it.
He waited.
Somewhere, the singing of history hummed its way into each corner of space. Sadiq watched it carefully as it paused, and a tape clicked. Next track. The reed flute began the next procession of sound, sidling against the walls of the room and whispering sweet nothings into his ears that stuck out beneath the red hat.
The shadow slid further, adorning the floor with shapes crafted by the fingers of the sun.
Click.
His coiled hand sprung suddenly from his lap and hit the escapee with the beat of a drum. His fingers slithered back into his palm as he stood, his other self stretching itself thin. Poised straight and tall toward the invisible horizon. The sun burned dully into his back, robed in black.
The moment of glory was over. Stepping carefully around the center of the room--counterclockwise, Arthur had called it once--he watched his other self cloaked mysteriously in the shroud of another world. He stopped, and he bowed to it.
It bowed back to him, the form becoming halved as it descended toward his feet. He walked forward across a red sheet lain vertically on the floor--Rumi was a dervish, meaning door--and he turned. The rising sun washed his body with the rays of a thousand lights. Reflecting these back into the burning sky, he bowed, and faced the red door below.
Passage granted.
White skirt billowing at his heels as the clouds lace the sky--as the shroud of the ego clutches to its tombstone--he continued his steady pace around the room.
First round, knowledge.
Second, experience.
Third, truth.
Bow to the entrance and again to the exit.
If you do not go in, you will never find out.
He was on his way to somewhere, but there was no hurry. His narrowed, opened eyes beneath the slits of his mask began to leave the focus of the objects before him and instead watched the space, as he did his shadow, ever-following his ascent in this world and examination into the next.
Stop.
His shadow was not finished. It quivered silently with the anticipation of a dance. Locked in the world beyond, the world that exists parallel and in secret at all times, the shadow wanted to dance with its equal. He breathed. The reed flute and the oud encouraged him to experience divine communion.
Sadiq pulled back his arms and allowed his black robe to fall behind his feet. It was his grave.
He reached up and graced his mask with his fingers, carefully. His other self was no longer afraid of him. Dawn broke on his tanned skin as he lifted the shadow from his face, casting it beside his tomb.
Stepping forward into the center of the room, the center of space, the center of time, he began to spin. His head tilted toward the direction of heaven, and with his eyes closed, he watched.
His body rotated like the blades of a fan; his mind centered and unmoving. His lightly-soled feet stepped over one another carefully and rhythmically, as they danced beneath the spinning top of white shroud, the sound of the snaking flute and the oud plucking its way into his heart as it unfurled; a flower blooming amidst the selams of the spinning dance. His eyes had closed themselves gently, awaiting, anticipating truth.
Counterclockwise, Arthur had chuckled. The Western voice had been harsh upon the enclaves of his steady ears. Click. Camera flash.
Sadiq smiled again, though this time, it was meant for all but himself. In his spin, he lifted his right palm to the sky as a receiver of grace, as the other palm faced the earth below. A whirling dervish. God channeled through him. Dervish means door. With his grave burning behind him and his hatred lost, he danced with his self, and through it, Love.
Die before death.
The whirling dance of the Mevlevi Order of the Sufis is a method of meditation that originated in the Ottoman Empire during the 13th century. Sufism is part of a mystical sect of Islam, in which pure Love is essentially emphasized as being above all else in existence. The goal of the whirling performed by the dervishes is to attain God and his Divine Love and by doing so, discarding all other worldly things. The Whirling Dervishes continue to exist centrally in Turkey to this day, and tourists from all over the world go there to witness their spinning ritual.
I was lucky enough to witness one of these performances and it blew me away. Though I altered a few things for the sake of fanfiction, I can only hope for some level of accuracy in my understanding and portrayal of the performance itself.