This strenuous effort renders them perfectly hideous, their very eyes seem ready to start from their sockets, and their lips foam as the inspiration possesses them. Thus retreating and springing forward, they, each time, with increasing energy, renew their invocations of Allah, Allah, Allah, hoo! until the distinctness of their articulation is lost, and their exclamation becomes, in reality a complete howl, as if proceeding from a pack of enraged dogs--thus meriting the sobriquet of the "Howling Dervishes."
The movements and cries increase in swiftness until a mist of dust pervades the dim apartment, and the wild and pale enthusiasts, drenched with perspiration, seem like fantastic demons in the realms of discord. Suddenly some of them, stripped to their waists, rush forward and seizing the poignards and stilettoes, commence a wild, infuriated dance, jumping, leaping, and lacerating themselves--fixing the weapons into the hollow of their cheeks, and twisting them round and round, as if on pivots, until, exhausted from exertion, they fall to the ground in a spasmodic fit.
"Only to show with how small pain, The sores of faith are cured again,"
Now the enthusiastic mothers approach, and cast their children before the presiding sheikh, who, as they lie extended before him, deliberately plants his heavy feet upon their frail bodies, and so stands for some seconds. Old men and maidens, lay themselves low before this saint, who is supposed to be by this time so inspired as to have a miraculous power of expressing all ailments and maladies from the human frame, and to have become so etherealized by the ecstatic ceremonies as to lose all his specific gravity.
The Abdals include the various classes of the stoics, who generally pretend to a total renunciation of all worldly comforts. Sometimes clothed in the coarsest garments, and again half naked, and even with lacerated bodies, they wander through the Mohammedan dominions, a miserable set of frantic, idle, and conceited beggars. They may, in fact, be considered the "communists" of the East, who despising honest pursuits, live upon the community at large.
They commit the worst extravagances under the pretence of heavenly raptures, and are even supposed to be divinely inspired. Idiots and fools are esteemed by the Mohammedans as the favorites of Heaven; their spirits are supposed to have deserted their earthly tenements, and to be holding converse with angels, while their bodies still wander about the earth.