The Path

Sohbet, ilahi and music صحبة

Much of the path passes not through books but through companionship: sitting with a teacher, listening, and singing together.

Sohbet

When the lodges of Türkiye were closed in 1925, sohbet carried the Rifāʿī teaching. In Kenan Rifâî's family home in Istanbul, conversations for family and friends trained a new generation, and his students wrote them down. His commentary on Rūmī's Mathnawī was later assembled from their notes. Today's communities still speak of their gatherings as dhikr and sohbet.

Ilahi

Turkish devotional hymns, ilahis, are sung within the dhikr and on their own. Devotional poems to the Pîr open the 2011 Evrâd, among them one whose every verse closes on his name. Kenan Rifâî wrote and composed ilahis; his İlâhiyyât-ı Kenan gives the notation of some seventy-five, set by himself and by the composers İzzeddin Hümâyî Elçioğlu and Muallim Kâzım.

Music in the ceremony

In the standing dhikr, ilahis, Arabic chants and odes follow its rhythm; percussion is used, and the ney is played in the dhikr of the names Ḥayy and Jalāl.