The whirling dervishes

A dervish or darvesh (from Persian: درویش‎‎, Darvīsh via Turkish,Somali: darwiish, Arabic: درويش‎, Darwīš) is someone guiding a Sufi Muslim ascetic down a path or "tariqah", known for their extreme poverty and austerity. A tiny percentage of dervishes were Jews. Their focus is on the universal values of love and service, deserting the illusions of ego to reach God. In most Sufi orders, a dervish is known to practice dhikr through physical exertions or religious practices to attain the ecstatic trance to reach God. Their most common practice is Sama, which is associated with the 13th-century mystic Rumi.

The Persian word darvīsh (درویش) is of ancient origin and descends from a Proto-Iranian word that appears in Avestan as drigu-, "needy, mendicant", via Middle Persian driyosh. The Iranian word is probably a cognate with the Vedic Sanskrit word adhrigu-, an epithet of uncertain meaning applied to several deities. The Vedic word is probably to be analysed as a-dhrigu-, that is "not dhrigu-," perhaps "not poor", i.e., "rich." The existence of this Vedic cognate suggests that the institution of the holy mendicant was as prominent among the ancient Indo-Iranian people as it has been historically in later Iran in the form of dervish brotherhoods, and also in India in the form of the various schools of sannyasis. However, because the etymology of the word is not apparent from the point of view of the modern Persian language, there have been attempts to make the parts of the word interpretable in terms of contemporary words and with reference to Sufic mystical concepts. Der, spelt as dar before 1964 (Dari language), means "door" in Persian; dervish has been interpreted as "one who goes from door to door". The Persian word also gives terms for "ascetic" in some languages, as in the Urdu phrase darveshaneh tabi'at, "an unflappable or ascetic temperament". According to the Bundahishn dervish or darwesh means "visitor from many doors". The term is a composition of the word der or dar and the adjective wish or wesh ويش or وش vsh (much, more), and means "someone who goes from door to door and sings, gets money, and wakes the people". This word is outdated in Persian, but it exists in the Indo-Iranian language of Pashto as wesh zalmanyan or wish zalmayan, meaning "awakened youth".

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