Contemporary Turkish Mevlevi Mysticism. Organisation, spirituality and relations with secular sphere

Since the very first theorization of society, social philosophers and scholars of sociology have understood the phenomenon of religion according to a dichotomous vision between the experience of religiosity, irrational and subjective, and the constitution of forms of religious aggregation, in which this experience is rationalised and organised. A distinction was made between closed (static) religion, which the sociologist-anthropologist Bastide called ‘domestic’ and open (dynamic) or ‘sacred savage’ religion1. Since Simmel’s work On the Philosophy of Religion published in 19122, classical theories have considered religiosity or spirituality as ‘a state of the soul’, intimate, individual and capable of creating forms of sociability in a spontaneous and non-institutional manner.