A Piercing Ritual Goes On in Kosovo

After hours of swaying trance-like and chanting Islamic prayers, the dervishes who live in Serbia’s Kosovo province began the ultimate test of their faith.

Crowded before a dervish altar, the little boys went first. Shejh Xhemali Shehu, the holy father of the clan, blessed a metal spear the size of a knitting needle and then guided it through the fleshy cheek of each youngster’s beaming face.

No blood. A miracle, the holy father proclaimed.

The older men went next. As a drum beat, a cymbal clanged and rhythmic, guttural chants crescendoed, the dervishes pierced themselves in the cheeks, throats and stomachs with thick metal knives and shouted in unison, “Allah!”

This ritual marking the start of spring and the birth of Ali, a revered figure in Islam, is a celebration that forms part of the mystery shrouding ethnic Albanian culture.

But if the dervish rituals are utterly foreign to Kosovo’s Serbian rulers, so are they an oddity for the Albanian Muslim mainstream.

Dervishes--practitioners of the Islamic mysticism known as Sufism--are a dying breed in this part of the world. They were used as political pawns in the former Yugoslav federation’s Communist history and are now just trying to stay out of trouble in the wake of a deadly Serbian crackdown on Albanian separatists in the province.

Last month’s police siege prevented some dervishes from reaching this year’s ritual, members of the sect said, and special prayers were intoned for the dead, who were declared “innocent shehids,” or Muslim martyrs. Still, the ceremony went ahead as it has for centuries.

The dervishes of Prizren, a picturesque town in the mountainous southern part of Kosovo, about 12 miles from Serbia’s border with Albania, date back at least to the 1500s. Members of the Sufi orders are credited with converting much of the Albanian population to Islam after the Balkans were conquered by the Ottoman Turks.

Sufism is an ancient brotherhood of Muslims who believe that they can commune with God on a more personal basis than is allowed under standard Islam. Always on the fringes of orthodox Islam, they incorporate in their rituals music and dance--elements forbidden in most Muslim worship--and try to achieve a state of ecstasy through which they can reveal the divine powers of God.

The so-called whirling dervishes are the most famous, named for the rhythmic motions they use to bring on their trances.

Dervish sects exist today in Turkey, Iran, India, Albania and elsewhere. A few dervishes live in the United States and Canada.

“We are the mystic men of Islam,” said Jakub Jaka, a 38-year-old Kosovo Albanian, former English professor and practicing dervish who attended this year’s body-piercing ceremony in Prizren.

Shehu, who is both the patriarch of his clan and the lead mystic, opened the ritual, known in Arabic as the dhikr, with prayer and a sermon on the birth of the prophet Muhammad and the Shiite belief that Muhammad chose his cousin Ali as his successor to lead the Muslim nation.

About 70 men dressed in white fez-like caps and sleeveless tunics--representing the manner in which Ali’s arms were supposedly cut off when he was tortured to death by his rivals--listened intently as they sat on the floor of Shehu’s tekke, or dervish prayer hall.

Ceremonial clubs, swords and canes hung on one wall, framed by stenciled scriptures from the Koran. Red and green lights flanked the altar, which was painted to resemble a Moorish arch.

Songs, chants and dance eventually built up to the body piercing, acts that symbolized the torture of Ali and his son Hussein as they fought to defend their form of Islam. Because, in theory, at least, the wounds do not bleed, the self-mutilation is regarded by believers to be a miraculous display of God’s touch, possible only through absolute faith.

“The miracles are not for show,” explained Shehu’s 36-year-old son and designated successor, Adri-Hussein Shehu, “but to convince ourselves that God exists. We rely on him.”

The finale at this year’s ceremony came when the elder Shehu, who is 72, placed his barefoot, 9-year-old grandson, his cheeks already skewered with a spear, on the edge of a sword. Dervish guardsmen then lifted the sword with the boy standing on its edge and held boy and blade aloft.

Throughout the dhikr, an audience of worshipers and local curiosity-seekers gasped and watched in awe.

One or two, overcome, ran from the room. Despite the proclaimed miracles, blood ran down the faces of several men.

“I feel good,” one of the gored boys assured a reporter afterward. “No pain.”

The dervishes said some of their members could not attend the proceedings this year because of police roadblocks and the atmosphere of fear that has pervaded Kosovo since state security forces pursuing armed Albanian separatists killed more than 80 ethnic Albanian men, women and children. The violence has left most of Kosovo’s residents terrorized.

Kosovo’s dervish sects have always had uncomfortable, ambiguous relations with things political.

Soon after World War II ended, the elder Shehu said, he was imprisoned by the former Yugoslav federation’s Communist authorities because of his Albanian nationalist beliefs.

In the years that followed, however, the rumor within the Albanian community was that some of the dervish followers were in fact spies for the Serb-dominated regime.

As time went on and tensions between Serbs and ethnic Albanians worsened, authorities generally tolerated, even favored, the dervishes and other marginal sects, in contrast to their repressive treatment of mainstream Islam. This tactic was used by Communist rulers to try to divide and conquer Muslim and Albanian minorities.

Now, Adri-Hussein Shehu said, it’s best for the clan just to stay on the sidelines and keep religion and politics separate--an approach that harks back to the Communist era but that is rarely achieved in today’s Balkans.

“First I am a Muslim, then I am an Albanian,” he said after the ceremony had concluded and visitors were milling around the tekke.

The statement immediately offended an Albanian onlooker. In a setting as charged as Kosovo, attempts at being apolitical can be seen as betrayal.

“I thought it was the other way around,” the angry onlooker retorted. The two began to argue.

“What people do outside these walls is their own business,” an adamant Adri-Hussein Shehu insisted. “You don’t mix in politics, you have no problems.”