ABSTRACT
Mavlavī music and samā‘, with their originality and highly ceremonial composition, have an undeniable importance within the tradition of Turkish Sufi music. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and during the twentieth century, some scholars reflected on the problems of the evolution of the Mavlavī ceremony which is called mukābele on the basis of their observations.1 Since Mavlānā lived in the thirteenth century, but the ritual itself came into being in the fifteenth century and the said scholars made their assessments on the basis of observations within the last hundred years, it is difficult to trace the evolution of the Mavlavī ceremony into mu ābala. In this study, I will try to explore the evolution and development of the Mavlavī samā‘ in the historical context of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when our sources do not, as yet, mention the mu ābala.2
