Our traditional friends went bananas over this. They said it was evidence of how misguided these lot were. Is this the one where the shaykh is also holding the hand of a non-Muslim woman? That really got them going.
Yeah I think it is. An old friend of mine from the Hizb sent me it.
The last people I ever want to defend are sufis, but I just want to say that women definitely have sema and hadra. They just aren't filmed in it. I have attended many semas and hadras with women, and they do get down. there is a documentary, I think it is called 'Mystical Iran' or 'Mystic Iran' that focuses a lot on Kurds who are (Sunni) Qadiri Sufis and the woman filmmaker snuck a camera into the women's hadra. As a sufi woman at the time, I was very mortified by 'outsiders' seeing these things, especially because the Salafis would use images of hadra and sema, like those posted here, as 'evidence' against us. I had been to a sema and hadra where non-Muslims were invited to watch and I hated it. It was like the circus came to town and they came to see the freak show.
Although I must be honest. Hadra is fun, it's like the only time as a strict Muslim woman you can really 'get down' and move and jump and all that. It's like a work out. But I know that it looks strange and even me, when I would see videos of ecstatic hadras (vs sober hadras like the Chechen ones here), I was bothered by them. There is footage in that documentary of a woman in an ecstatic state.
It was always a bit embarrassing to me though because the purpose is to reach a state of ecstasy and communication with Big Al and I didn't. If it was just 'Hey, let's get together and chant some songs and maybe have some drums and do this sort of movement' that would be fun. Like a drum circle. But then the pressure to 'feel a greater connection to god' and all that junk is thrown on to it and it has to be taken very seriously, and I just didn't think .. if god wants to get closer to you, does he need you to do a half hour of cardio first?
I was told that after the hadra, some people would reach certain stations where they could see certain "beings" such as Khidr and Jibreel. All that bouncing around seems to have paid off for them. I remember doing dhikr in a group and I got light headed eventually after trying too hard.
Topic: Muslim Rave Party!