[EXPAT VOICE] Ceremony of the flashbulbs

I came to the event not as a spectator but as a participant. I came for a spiritual experience. If Rumi thought that music and dance was the way to reach tawhid (oneness of God), then I was willing to give it a try, willing to become entranced in the music and movement, willing to abandon my ego and find a greater truth.

Dylan's quote above, with its flashy imagery, message about the commodification of religion and a simple truth that "not much is really sacred" summarizes the impressions I was left with. My spiritual idealism shattered in a thousand flashes.

Or perhaps the letdown happened more slowly. An hour before the ceremony and not knowing Konya very well, a few friends and I walked first to the Mevlana Museum and burial site, thinking the ceremony might be held in the courtyard outback or in the nearby mosque. On the phone, asking another friend for directions, we started down a long road, alongside a graveyard and then a palace-like building under construction, to finally see, in the clearing, what looked like a Las Vegas casino. Lit up with neon pastels and floodlights, the setting, something like a smaller version of the Luxor Pyramid, was more befitting to a Celine Dion concert than to a centuries-old mystical dance. This was my first moment of disillusionment, the images of self-sacrificing dervishes, going weeks without lying down to sleep, begging for periods of their lives to maintain their humble character, paradoxically placed in this gaudy arena.

Entering the building only enforced my first impressions. Like any well-advertised sporting event or concert in America, we sifted through metal detectors and into a hall of merchandise: books, artwork, whirling animatronic figurines. I didn't find a glow in the dark Mevlana, but there were plenty of consumer goods.

Nonetheless, I sat down for the show with the hope of spiritual transformation. The interior of the small arena was set with a quiet ambiance, low lit in red, the soft beats of a dümbek accompanied by a set of traditional strings. Before the dervishes came out, an announcement was made in both Turkish and English: "For the respect of the ceremony, photography is prohibited."

Of course it is. Flash would certainly interrupt this low-lit setting and distract the dancers and audience from the spiritual experience, the communal search for oneness. No pictures. I was happy the announcement was so clear.

As the dervishes filed out, the flashes began, the digital camera noises all around me, like a thousand mini cash registers ringing up a sale, "ka-ching." I watched a security guard move quickly down the rows, hoping he'd make an example of someone, taking away a camera, or removing an audience member. Instead he continued to escort a professional cameraman to the floor of the show, joining the three or four others for unobstructed shots of the dervishes. For the next hour and a half, the onslaught never let up. Flash after flash bleaching that low-lit red ambiance, the "ka-ching" of digital representation interrupting the beats of the dümbek. A man sitting in front of me filmed the entire event on his digital camera, watching the whole ceremony through a 12 square centimeter screen.

The purpose of the ceremony was easy to see without looking too far, as I walked from the arena between tour buses, thinking of what the crowd took away from the event. It wasn't spiritual enlightenment, not a sense of oneness, not a spiritual maturity. What the crowd took was bleached photography and shaky low-resolution video, materials that couldn't possibly convey a transformative spiritual experience but that could only say, "Look, here, I was here." The ceremony became everything but the experience, the possibility of an inexplicable awakening of the first causes and final purposes of our universe, and became instead a commodity, materialized and cheapened for a fleeting future moment in which these pictures may win some minor social recognition. The rich irony is that the documentation itself, the thousands of pictures flashed, tainted any significance the event may have held, rendering both the experience and its representation worthless.