The Dervish Diaries

Always on the outside
Of whatever side there was
When they asked him why it had to be that way
"Well," he answered, "just because..."

--Bob Dylan, "Joey."

In every society and in every historical period there are always those who preserve their sense of personal integrity by inhabiting the interstices of any institution through which they may pass. This mode of being-in-the-world involves a type of ecstatic asceticism: what Victor Turner called "liminality."

"The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ('threshold people') are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions..."

--Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 95.

Asceticism is always and everywhere a form of self-sacrifice. What "threshold people" choose to sacrifice is the security of unambiguous membership in any established community. Ecstasy, in this sense, is, literally, "standing outside" of expected patterns of behavior and identity. This is the self-presentation of the Qalandar Dervishes of the Islamic "middle period" (1200-1550 CE)--the individuals Ahmet Karamustafa has most memorably termed "God's unruly friends."