The Night Raqs of the Dervishes

Beneath a starry sky — which, for the first time in the whole history of this collection, has exchanged the golden day for a deep blue night — a circle of dervishes whirls on a stony clearing. Blue with a golden pattern, green, grey, yellow, brown — the robes collide in colours, like a living, pulsing vortex. The long sleeves have flung upward and are thrown back over the head — not a gesture of the dance but the casting off of bodily, earthly fetters, those bonds that keep the soul tied to the day and to reason. Below on the left two stand frozen in a brotherly embrace: not being in love, but a dissolution into the unity of equals, the erasing of the boundary between 'I' and 'you'. Beside them a man in grey-blue reaches his hands forward, gropingly, as if he walks not by his eyes but by his hearing — through the stream of music that the leaf cannot show but conveys unerringly. The night was not chosen by chance: it is the time when the earthly noise dies down and that which by day remains hidden is revealed. A thin crescent with a large star hangs on the left, while on the right two cypresses stretch into the sky — a mute echo of those same upthrown arms, only in a tree rather than in a body. At the foot of the rocks flowering shrubs show white along the stream, as if the plants too had been awakened by this whirling. Forty days went into bringing out every fold of the upflung sleeve in this wordless but frenzied vortex. About the work The miniature belongs to the genre of sama — the Sufi ecstatic whirling, known in the painting of Maverannahr of the 16th–17th centuries as one of the purest ways of showing the dissolution of the personal 'I' in divine love. Unlike the earlier leaves of the collection, here for the first time the very border has been changed: in place of the customary ebru marbled paper there is a deep dark-blue mount with the finest golden floral pattern, echoing the night sky of the scene itself. The nocturnal hour was chosen deliberately: in the mystical tradition it is precisely the darkness, and not the day, that is considered the time when hidden truths are revealed. The miniature was created by the master Davlat Toshev, for whom this wordless vortex became an image of the highest, most honest form of silence. Details Base: Natural handmade Bukhara silk paper (90% silk, 10% cotton) Technique: Tempera, watercolour, natural plant and mineral pigments, gold leaf (23 carat) Unique piece