In our manic zap-zap world, the word "dervish" tends to have somewhat frantic connotations. Add the word "whirling", and you get an almost comical picture of bodies spinning out of control. But anybody who has experienced the whirling ceremony of Sufi mysticism at first hand - and everybody should see whirling dervishes at first hand at least once in his or her life - will tell you different.
Frantic? It's anything but. First of all, there's music: calm, uncluttered music with the unmistakable geometric patternings of the Middle East. Then there's singing: eloquent, sinuous melodies as evocative of poetry as they are of prayer.
An atmosphere of absolute stillness is created. And then, out of the stillness, the dervishes begin to turn. Gently, gracefully, the very embodiment of the timeless music of the spheres, which, as each dervish whirls independently, shoulder to shoulder, is precisely what they're supposed to represent - the earth rotating on its axis while orbiting the sun or, if you prefer, God.
Even if you don't prefer God, the Sufi whirling ceremony is a spectacle of great beauty that moves in mysterious and often surprising ways. Take the group which is to whirl at the National Concert Hall on Thursday night, Sheikh Hamza Shakkur and the Al-Kindi Ensemble. Dervishes from Damascus, you might think - and you'd be right.
The sheikh, a larger-than-life figure with a rich, warm bass voice, is the choirmaster of the Great Mosque of Damascus and a hugely popular figure in his native Syria. But who's this shaven-headed character on the sheikh's left? He is the group's artistic director and kanun player, and he isn't Syrian at all. His name is Julien Jalal Eddine Weiss, born in Paris to a Swiss mother and a father from Alsace. Asked how he got involved with Arabic classical music, he laughs. "It's a long story, this one!" he says.
Like many another story of teenage adventure, it begins: "In the hippy period, I was travelling to Morocco and I lived in Marrakesh . . ." But it has a very different ending. A classical guitarist, Weiss was recruited to compose music for a contemporary theatre group. But it wasn't until he heard a recording of the great Iraqi oud (lute) player, Munir Bashir, that he began to take an interest in what might be termed Middle Eastern trad.
"And there starts the story because in the 1970s in Morocco, I was very young, you know? And I got the nostalgie, the atmosphere of the souk and the medina of Marrakesh - but I didn't care about Arab music. I wasn't interested. I liked jazz, or classical music, or south American music like bossa nova or salsa," he says. The encounter with Bashir's recording, however, prompted him to find out more about this strange, exotic music. As a guitarist, he could easily have taken to the oud, but instead he chose to study the kanun or zither.
"If you play violin or guitar, it's not difficult to play the oud, but that's not the same as knowing something about the music," he says. "I wanted to start from the beginning, not just play flamenco on the oud and impress people, you know? And so I started this terrible instrument."
Notoriously difficult to master, the kanun is plucked with two fingers, but in the hands of a virtuoso its other-worldly, metallic soundscape is stunningly varied and expressive. Now, after years of study with teachers in Baghdad, Cairo, Tunis, Istanbul, Beirut and Aleppo, not to mention years of research into the complex and controversial harmonics of the instrument, Weiss is as virtuoso a kanun player as you're likely to find. These days he spends most of his time in a 16th-century Mamluk palace in Aleppo, where he organises regular musicroom concerts in traditional style. He performs and records all over Europe with top-notch Arab musicians.
In 1986, he also converted to Islam. Was this an inevitable move? He laughs again. "I had no interest in religion before," he says. "My family was Calviniste, but totally agnostic for two or three generations. For me, religion was bullshit. I was more interested in scientific studies, cosmology, astrophysics. But then I started to go deeply into the tradition of this music and it came to me like that - to change, to try to live another way.
"But I am a little bit heterodox Muslim. I am not orthodox in my philosophy; I am not like a donkey, you know? Many people are a little bit . . . They want a prison of the mind. It's not my way. I have a poetic conception of Islam."
As far as the whirling dervishes of Damascus are concerned, he's in good company. Poetic is the perfect word to describe their latest and eponymous double CD on the Harmonia Mundi label. Not only does it sound gorgeous, but it also looks terrific, coming as it does in a beautiful book-shaped set with plentiful photographs and informative essays which put most contemporary world music releases, with their flimsy background notes, to shame.
There's just one thing missing, of course - the whirling of the dervishes. Catch them at the NCH on Thursday night, if you can.
The Whirling Dervishes of Damascus whirl on Thursday night at the National Concert Hall at 8p.m.
