The Dervishes of the North explores what practices associated with Rumi in public and private spaces tell us about Sufism and spirituality, including sacred, cultural, and artistic expressions in the Canadian context. Using Rumi and contemporary expressions of poetry and whirling associated with him, the book captures the lived reality of Sufism through an ethnographic study of communities in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1, “Situating the Study of Sufism in Canada,” locates the study of Sufism in the global West, specifically in the context of Islam and Muslims in Canada and in the context of popular spirituality. Since the author of the book, Merin Shobhana Xavier, seeks to identify a subfield of Sufism in Canada, the chapter serves to position this subfield across numerous literatures, namely Islam in Canada, diaspora studies, Sufi studies, and popular spirituality. The chapter begins with the story of Islam in Canada with conjectures about the first Muslims in Canada—the enslaved and formerly enslaved peoples who were forced across the Atlantic Ocean. Xavier highlights that Sufism, an important field of study, has been largely neglected in Canada. The chapter concludes with a look at the academic literature on Sufism in the global West, examining how the formulation of Sufism in colonial and postcolonial times has informed how we approach contemporary Sufism and its diverse expressions.
Chapter 2, “Early Sufi Communities in Canada,” focuses on interviews with Sufi students and teachers to tell the story of some of the first Sufi communities in Canada. Xavier mentions that the earliest Sufi institutions and communities included Muslims who had arrived in the 1930s and the members of Gurdjieff societies in Toronto and Halifax. The chapter then turns to the communities of Inayat Khan (d. 1927) and the various branches that arose in Canada starting in the 1970s, especially through the leadership of Inayat Khan’s sons, Vilayat and Hidayat Inayat Khan, and his student, Samuel Lewis or Sufi Sam (d. 1971). Later, the author shifts her attention to another tradition of Sufism that began to emerge: Turkish Sufism, which includes the practice of sama (turning) that materialized with the arrival of Reshad Field (d. 2016) in Vancouver in 1973.
Chapter 3, “Sama, Shab-i arus, and Rituals of Remembrance,” focuses specifically on the tradition of sama as a ritual practice among some Rumi-based Sufi communities. The chapter begins by detailing the development of sama and zikr in early classical Sufi textual traditions, drawing from the discussions and writings of premodern figures such as the Sunni theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) and Rumi, who described sama as a tool for actualizing unity with Allah, which is the ultimate goal of Sufism. She highlights how the practice of sama was transformed during the Ottoman period and finally banned during the rise of the Turkish secular republic at the start of the twentieth century. Xavier gives some of the premodern and modern histories and practices of sama in a Sufi as well as a Turkish context and traces this ritual expression in Canada in the second part of this chapter. In her discussion of samain Canada, she draws from her conversations with Raqib Brian Burke, who was instrumental in training a second generation of whirling dervishes (samazens), including Tawhida Tanya Evanson, Mira Hunter Burke, and Shams al Haqq Farzad AttarJafari, who have come to be leaders and teachers in their own right and are training a third generation. Evanson and AttarJafari are known for their understanding of this practice and for drawing parallels to the treatment of sama among the classical Sufi figures introduced at the start of the chapter. Describing the rituals in Vancouver (Rumi Society), Toronto (Rumi Canada), and Montreal (Sema Space), the author provides details of the demographics of Sufi communities where she observed and participated in sama while specifying the technical features of the practice of turning and comportment, which are all aimed at the remembrance of God. The chapter concludes by providing ethnographic reflections about another vital annual ritual she encountered during her fieldwork—the death anniversary of Rumi or the shab-i arus, which is celebrated in December. Xaiver talks about how this practice has become tied to a Canadian Sufi landscape among diasporic and non-diasporic and Muslim and non-Muslim Sufi communities in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Overall, the chapter shows how Rumi’s legacy is maintained through the ritual practices of sama and shab-i-arus in Canada, a custom that dates back to the classical period of Sufism.
In chapter 4, “The Politics of Consuming Rumi,” the author discusses the other facet of sama, namely poetry that has become a legacy of Rumi in public, cultural, and “secular” spaces. The author locates popular expressions of sama and poetry in cities like Toronto and Vancouver to focus on the crux of one of the core public and critical conversations surrounding the popularization of Rumi today—the commodification and consumption of his legacy. The chapter begins by tracing how Rumi’s legacy was popularized through literary translation and cross-cultural networks as a result of colonial encounters with the Muslim world. Xavier argues that these colonial processes were a significant precursor to the creation of contemporary Rumi renditions, such as the works produced by the American poet Coleman Barks, as well as their reception. She theorizes about the various arguments over Barks’s renditions of Rumi’s poetry, the main one being that they are meant for popular consumption and reflect cultural and religious appropriation. She returns to her interlocutors—Sufis who are leaders, samazens, and poets, many of whom are Muslim, who center Rumi in their cultural, aesthetic, and economic expressions in public spaces. She asks them how they understand cultural appropriation. She traces two main practices: the expressions of Rumi’s poems and the presentations of sama. In her analysis of the popularization of Sufi poetry in Canada, she considers the Zavieh Society in Vancouver, an organization that straddles a secular, not-for-profit institutional framework, yet is focused on teaching Rumi’s works. Then the author considers the practices of turning and gives some examples. For instance, she examines cultural spaces such as the Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Center and smaller performance venues like Small World Music, all in Toronto. Another example is Nasqshbandi Haqqani Kabbani Rumi Rose Garden in Vancouver. Parsing her interview with the current shaykh of the order, Nurjan Mirahmadi, she reflects on how the Naqshbandi Haqqani Kabbani frames the Rumi teas it sells not as a commodity but as a curative spiritual object, one that has been transformed by the ritual of zikr completed by the Sufi community in the storefront space.
The final substantive chapter 5, “Gender Dynamics in Sufi Rituals, Praxis, and Authority,” talks about gender dynamics in ritual contexts, especially gendered authority. Conversations and debates about Sufi women have long tended to focus on their ritual involvement in Sufi practices and on the nature of authority. This chapter traces some of the realities of gender dynamics in classical and medieval Sufism. She marks two central trends in the discussion of Sufi women in textual and classical traditions as highlighted by scholars who study these materials. She emphasizes that Islam has tended to glorify the feminine as a state of being, one that was developed by classical Sufi thinkers and masters like Ibn Arabi (d. 1240). That state of being also emerged in metaphorical tropes used by Sufi figures like Rumi. Yet this metaphysical idealization of the feminine did not readily translate into the veneration of Sufi women as social and/or biological beings; rather, it informed the disparagement of Sufi women generally, and led to the minimizing of women’s roles in literary sources such as hagiographies. She considers various anthropological examples of Sufi women’s presence in ritual praxis or sacred spaces across some Muslim majority contexts; for example, she finds leadership positions that are dependent on a familial patriarchal authority, such as a father or a husband. The chapter concludes by focusing on two Sufi women teachers in Canada: Seemi Bushra Ghazi, based in Vancouver, and Ayeda Husain, based near Toronto. In her discussion throughout these chapters, she challenges scholars to move beyond limited categories of Sufism’s relationship to Islam, the problematics of Rumi’s translation and commodification, and what constitutes real Sufism, so that they will understand how Sufis, especially Muslim Sufis in Canada, are utilizing Sufi identity in gender-egalitarian ways to transform how they enact Islam in Canada. The book ends with reflection on the current terrain of Sufi communities in Canada in the form of an epilogue.
The Dervishes of the North is exceptionally well written. It sheds light on the stories and experiences of Sufis in Canada. For scholars of religion and specialists in Sufism, it contributes to a number of fields: popular spirituality in Canada, Islamic Canada, and global studies of Sufism. The author offers fresh perspectives on gender, race, performance, and diverse activities of Canada’s Sufis that expand our understandings of popular religiosity, alternative spiritual paths, and diverse expressions of Islam in a rapidly changing Canadian society.
–––––––––––-
[Review Length: 1504 words • Review posted on October 3, 2025]