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The Dervish and the DJ: Sufi Trance and Electronic Music’s Search for the Sacred

Somewhere in Almaty, Bukhara, or Istanbul. Candles burning, a circle of men beginning to sway. The air smells of incense. Someone is chanting Allah, Allah, Allah, and the repetition has been going on long enough that it no longer sounds like a word. Time has softened at the edges. A few bodies are trembling.

Whirling dervishes, 2023. Wikimedia Commons.

The coordinates shift. The trembling does not.

A club in Goa, a field in Portugal, or a warehouse in Berlin. The kick drum is running at exactly 140 beats per minute. The bass has been building for four minutes and has not yet dropped. Bodies are beginning to dissolve into each other, identity loosening at its seams, the ordinary sense of a bounded self-melting, in one raver’s phrase, into “waves of flows.”

A rave in Postdamer Nuthe-Park, 2025. Wikimedia Commons.

What divides these places may be everything that usually organizes human experience; religion and recreation, the sacred and the secular, devotion and hedonism. Or, looked at differently, almost nothing; two groups of bodies somewhere, surrendering the self to sound.

Sama’—Arabic for “listening”—is the Sufi practice of structured audition that includes chanted poetry, rhythmic breath, sometimes instrumental music, organized to move the practitioner toward wajd, ecstatic consciousness (Lewisohn 1997, 8; Ghani 2011, 287). The word wajd itself contains the answer to what sama’ is for: It means simultaneously “ecstasy,” “finding,” and “being.” The goal of the whirling dervishes, to some extent, is a temporary annihilation of the self — fana — followed by baqa, the soul’s resting in God.[1] Ghani puts it plainly: sama’ “necessitates a death for this world through annihilation in God” (Ghani 2011, 276). The mechanism is music. The destination is the dissolution of the boundary between self and the divine. That destination is what makes the comparison to the dancefloor apt.

Studying qawwali, Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, in her analysis of Sufi music in India and Pakistan, argues that the meaning of the performance is produced through the real-time interaction between the musicians’ musical choices and the assembled audience’s spiritual states, with the performers actively responding to signs of wajd in listeners (1986). Working on Tunisian Sufi music, Richard C. Jankowsky argues that the devotional, therapeutic, and social work of this musical form is done through its formal properties, which he identifies as “sonic continuity, timbral constancy, gradual transformation, and intensification” (2021, 25). He describes trance as a “test of limits of the self” (2021, 65–66), and argues that each Sufi ritual community carves out different niches within a broader “shared spiritual and musical ecology of ambient Sufism” (2021, 25), with musical form doing the work of differentiation and identity-making.

The structural description just given applies, with minimal adjustment, to the academic literature on raves. Raves have already been studied as new religious movements (Olaveson 2004), liminal rituals (Gerard 2004), and as “institutiant” religious experiences (Gauthier 2004) in Graham St. John’s edited volume Rave Culture and Religion (2004). Scott R. Hutson argues that raves function as genuine spiritual healing rituals in Turner’s sense—producing communitas, liminality, and ego-dissolution—with the DJ occupying a structurally shamanic role analogous to ritual guides in indigenous traditions (2000, 42). He calls this “the shamanic connection between raver and DJ” (2000, 43), and contends that rave, like the most authentic rituals, bridges the “ought” and the “is” through symbols and embodied experience (2000, 43). Similarly, Robin Sylvan argues that popular music subcultures function as fully realized religious communities, providing “an experience of the most complete identity with the Creator” (2002, 96). Judith Becker calls the people most susceptible to this lever “deep listeners,” individuals predisposed to enter trance states through music (Becker 2004). Some of them end up in dhikr circles. Some of them end up at festivals.

Let’s go back to Sufism. Maria Pini’s description of the “ecstatic moment” as a “release from monadic territory—an outburst which represents less the escape of mind from body than the absorption of the individual in a wider body” (1997, 124) articulates the dissolution of bounded selfhood that can be identified as structurally parallel to fana.  Graham St. John’s review of how repeated exposure to the dance assemblage (mostly drugs) “tunes” a transcendence in ravers such that participants become adept at reattaining altered states (2006, 9) finds a parallel with Becker’s concept of deep listeners trained in trance susceptibility. Sylvan’s interviewees describing “unity with people” and a “visceral sensation at the top of the head, opening” (2002, 96) are talking about phenomenological accounts that map closely onto descriptions of wajd in Sufi sources, and these are presented as genuine religious experiences rather than metaphors.

Electronic dance music (EDM) does exploit this machinery of trance with sonic sophistication. The four-to-the-floor kick drum, the ascending bassline, and the build-and-drop are tools of rhythmic manipulation. The parallel between Sufi rituals and dancefloor practices is structurally compelling, but it is not the crux of the matter. The crux arises when the two places from the introduction stop running independently and start sharing material; when Rumi’s[2] verses are set to synthesizers, when a producer samples qawwali, and when the sonic technology of one tradition is extracted and redeployed inside the aesthetic economy of the other.

That extraction has a name and precedents. Discussing the globalization of sacred music, Qureshi argues that Sufi music has been global for a very long time, constituting a pre-colonial “world system” across the Muslim world, but that its recent Western commodification transforms sama’ from a process-based, collectively embodied practice into a capitalist individual consumer product (2013, 584).  Indeed, in Turkey, where Sufi orders and their lodges were shot down in 1925, the Mevlevi sema ceremony is now a ticketed tourist show in Konya, edited down and reframed as a cultural performance. In post-Soviet Russia and Central Asia, Sufi aesthetics circulate at “spiritual” fairs alongside Tibetan bowls and Siberian shamanic recordings (cf. Lindquist 2006). Does that mean that the silsila[3] evaporates and only the vibe remains?

For instance, Rumi is pretty “cool.” People tattoo his verses and name their children after him. Studying Canadian Mevlevi contexts, Merin Shobhana Xavier argues that Rumi’s commodification and consumption require a discussion of cultural appropriation, and that popular art is not a site outside power but one of its instruments (2023, 141–143). Omad Safi identifies the price of this popularity: The Rumi that people love is the Rumi from whom Islam has been removed (Safi 2021). Yet, he insists that the “real” crisis is not only Western appropriation. In many Muslim communities, Rumi and the entire Sufi-poetic tradition have already been evacuated from within Islam, producing an Islam preached “without poetry, without spiritual depth, without reaching toward God as the Beloved” (Safi 2021, para. 10).

Then, the structural question, when a psytrance DJ samples a qawwali recording and releases it as “spiritual music,” is not simply one of taste or appropriateness. It is: What has been taken, from whom, and at what cost to the people for whom this was never aesthetic material but actual practice?

But what if the one with the silsila was also the one with the Ableton[4]?

Mercan Dede (b. 1966, Arkın Allen) is simultaneously the DJ and the dervish. He does not resolve the tension so much as occupy both positions at once. In his work, the ney—the reed flute whose sound Rumi identified with the soul’s cry of separation from its origin in the opening lines of the Masnavi, called Ney-nāme—is layered directly over synthesized drone, four-to-the-floor percussion, and ambient electronic production. In other words, the instrument that Sufi teaching holds to be a technology of longing becomes, in his hands, also a technology of the dancefloor. The two sonic logics cohabit.

Mercan Dede received his musical training through traditional channels, studying with Sufi music masters such as Üstad Nezih Uzel, Ömer Erdoğdular, and Niyazi Sayın in Turkey. Xavier (2023, 149) documents him participating in a dhikr facilitated by a Sufi teacher in Vancouver, having traveled from Montreal specifically to support the gathering—not as a performer in the commercial sense, but in his own framing, as a contributor to a community coalescing around a shared practice, which draws a picture of a person for whom the two places described in this essay’s opening are not metaphorically adjacent but literally the same room, and who has chosen to work in the overlap rather than choose between them.

Mercan Dede performing at TFF Rudolstadt 2014. Wikimedia Commons.

However, this does not dissolve the critique. Niyya (intention) cannot protect against the structural effects of commodification. The market does not read intentions, only products. His albums circulate in the same “spiritual marketplace” (cf. Roof 1999) as decontextualized Rumi translations and Tibetan bowl recordings. That he knows the difference between sama’ as practice and sama’ as aesthetic experience does not prevent his recordings from being consumed as the latter by listeners who do not. But it does complicate the clean story of a Western DJ extracting spiritual technology from a tradition to which he has no claim. Mercan Dede has a claim, and the question his work forces is whether that claim is enough to change what the music does, or whether, once a recording enters circulation, its origins become irrelevant to its effects.

The dervish and the DJ may both be working with a fragment of something that has been broken everywhere.

In places like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, this becomes a lived collision. The tradition of music as spiritual technology was never imported into Central Asia: It was already there. The baqsy, the shaman healer-musician who entered trance through song to treat illness and navigate between worlds, predates both Islam and the Soviet state. Sufi music arrived in a landscape that already understood music as a technology of the unseen. The appropriation framework, built for a world in which Western consumers extract from non-Western traditions, tends to miss that in Central Asia, the question of what belongs to whom was complicated long before the internet made qawwali available on Spotify.

Sufi communities survived Soviet repression through pragmatic adaptation, embedding themselves in rural family networks, Soviet-sanctioned Muslim institutions, and local social structures (Tasar 2018). Into that space, globalized spiritual culture arrived not as a simple import of Western New Age practices but as the re-emergence of a century-long underground tradition of non-conformist intellectual seeking, shaped by the specific paradoxes of atheist modernity (Menzel et al. 2012; Yarosh 2024). The literal encounter between New Age seekers and Sufi practitioners on Soviet-era Eurasian territory is documented —esotericists making contact with Central Asian dervish-healers as early as the 1980s (Yarosh 2025). Sufi music now circulates in the same post-Soviet spiritual marketplace as Tibetan Buddhism, neo-shamanism, and Western New Age imports. Kazakh traditional instruments appear in electronic productions made by artists who grew up with both Islamic revival and access to global club music.[5]

In Eurasia, the dervish and the DJ are neighbors, sometimes the same person. What connects them is not a shared technique but a shared commitment made without guarantee that sound can alter the self in ways that argument, doctrine, or explanation cannot. Whether that commitment is made within a silsla or inside a festival tent, in Bukhara or Berlin, the question it raises is the same—not where the self goes when it loosens, but what remains when it does.

[1] For more on the internal Islamic debate over sama’, see Lewisohn 1997.

[2] Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī (1207–1273) (known in Arabic as Maulānā and in Persian as Moulavī) was a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic, poet, and legal scholar whose writings—above all Masnavi and Divan-i Shams— became foundational to the Mevlevi order founded by his son Sultan Walad.

[3] Silsila (Arabic: “chain”) is the initiatic chain of transmission linking a Sufi to a living master and, through that master, to an unbroken lineage stretching back to the Prophet Muhammad.

[4] Ableton Live is the industry-standard digital audio workstation (DAW) used by most electronic music producers to compose, arrange, and perform music. It is, in effect, the primary instrument of the DJ and the producer.

[5] Examples include Nazira Kassenova, a DJ who exhibits the biological trajectory described here, and SAMRATTAMA, a post-Soviet musician reconnecting with Kazakh sound through electronic noise.

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———. “Entangled Late Soviet Sufism II.” New Age in Eurasia: Ideologies, Spiritualities and New Religious Milieus (blog). April 5, 2025. https://newageru.hypotheses.org/11384.

Simal Zagra (Şimal Zağra) is a research associate and doctoral researcher in Religious Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany. She is interested in artistic expressions of religious experience, with a particular emphasis on sound, and investigates the politics as well as the therapeutic uses of sound in Turkey following the establishment of the Republic.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Simal Zagra (April 24, 2026). The Dervish and the DJ: Sufi Trance and Electronic Music’s Search for the Sacred. New Age in Eurasia. Retrieved May 19, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/164tv


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