The Order an Empire Sponsored, and a Republic Banned

Sultan Walad, Rumi's son, took his father's devoted following and organised it into a formal order with its own initiation, hierarchy and ceremonial practice, most famously the turning sema from which the order's popular Western name derives, and the Mevleviyya went on to become one of the Ottoman Empire's most prestigious and well connected Sufi orders, with lodges, tekkes, established across the empire and particularly influential ones in Istanbul, drawing patronage from sultans and the court elite over several centuries. That close relationship with the imperial establishment made the order especially vulnerable when the empire itself gave way to a secularising republic: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's government banned all Sufi orders and closed their lodges across Turkey in 1925 as part of a broader programme to remove religious institutions from public life, ending the Mevleviyya's standing as a functioning religious order within the country of its own founding.

The turning ceremony survived this ban chiefly by being reclassified as cultural heritage rather than religious practice, performed since then in Turkey largely as a preserved folk and tourist spectacle, so that the whirling dervishes familiar to a global audience today are, in an important sense, the last public remnant of an order the modern Turkish state itself dissolved as a living religious institution.