OF THE DERVISES. 32? 



dervises, who subsist on plunder rather than alms, and who render 

 themselves formidable by the disorders they commit under licence 

 of the impunity generally granted them in their quality of dervises. 

 They are called seuah (traveller), a generic term designating der- 

 vises who travel by order of their superiors to receive donations, 

 foreigners of religious orders, and dervises who are dismissed from 

 the convents for serious offences, as well as others forbidden by the 

 statutes of their order to have any fixed place of abode. 



More than thirty orders of dervises are reckoned, but we shall 

 limit the present notice to the orders of the Mevlevi, the Bedevi, and 

 the Rufdi, as the heads of the three principal divisions into which the 

 orders of dervises existing in Turkey may be divided. 



THE METLEVI DERTISES. 



The Mevlevi dervises claim as founder Djelaleddin, surnamed 

 Sultan-ul-Ulema, or sovereign of the learned. 



Djelaleddin was born at Balkh, the capital of Khorassan, in the 

 year 604 of the hegira. His paternal grandfather had married the 

 daughter of Ala-eddin, the last king but one of the dynasty of the 

 Khorassmians, kings of Khorassan, and was himself of a distinguished 

 family, as by his father he was descended from the caliph Abubekr, 

 and his mother also was daughter to a king of Khorassan. 



Djelaleddin succeeded his father in the title of Sultan-ul-Ulema, 

 and likewise inherited his acquirements. He publicly taught in 

 Iconium, after the custom of the ancient philosophers, and his lessons 

 were diligently sought after by the whole city, when, in 642, the der- 

 vise Chems-eddin ofTauris, a disciple of Abubekr, sheik of an order 

 of dervises, came to Iconium and endeavoured to draw off to a con- 

 templative life Djelaleddin, who was devoted to the physical sciences 

 and the visible things of this world. His numerous disciples, who 

 found their master suspend his instructions and shut himself up with 

 Chems-eddin, resolved on the ruin of that dervise, who avoided death 

 by flight. Djelaleddin, inconsolable for his departure, renounced 

 the world, became a dervise, and established, in 643, the order of 

 the Mevlevi dervises. His work entitled " Mesnevi," much celebrated 

 in the East (where most of his verses have passed into proverbs), and 

 a voluminous collection of his odes, are the depositories of the moral 

 doctrines he taught. The poems of Djelaleddin, always on a didac- 

 tic subject, are lively, and in that terse and animated style that our 

 national poets have occasionally imitated with success, but the type 

 of which is only to be found in oriental writers, and more particularly 

 in the scriptures. 



Djelaleddin died in 672, aged seventy-eight years. Tchelebi- 

 Effendi, resident at Konieh (Iconium), is now the head of the Mevlevi. 

 He is entitled, as descendant of Djelaleddin, to name the sheik of the 

 convents of his order, and enjoys the prerogative of buckling on the 

 reigning sultan the sabre of Othman. 



He who wishes to become a Mevlevi must renounce the vanities of 

 this world, and busy himself in the lowest drudgery of the kitchen, 

 during a noviciate or a thousand and one days, without ever quitting 

 the walls of the convent. When this period has expired the sheik 



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