Albert Aublet, Ceremony of Rufai Dervishes (1891) (Houston David B. Chalmers Collection).
At a tangent from Bektashis and Alevis (here and here) is the Rufai (Rifa’i) Sufi order, now most common in the Balkans (see e.g. here).
Again thanks to Kadir Filiz, I note two remarkable early film sequences showing a Rufai lodge in Skopje performing the burhan ritual (“proof” of faith) with self-mortification (cf. Kurds, Amdo Tibetans, and Hokkien Chinese)—demonstrating both the shaykh’s charismatic powers and the worshippers’ transcendence of the mundane world. This silent footage shows a healing ritual at a lodge in 1930:
And this 1951 film—now with sound—was shown in 1955, with useful commentary:
That second footage shows the same group, in a much reduced lodge. By 1930 Skopje had just become part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia; after German occupation in World War Two, by the time of the 1951 footage it was part of Tito’s socialist state—offering food for thought on the maintenance of traditional ritual practice under such regimes, just as I find for Maoist China.
Here’s a more recent clip of a Rufai (not Bektashi!) ritual in Kosovo, for Nevruz:
Stephen Jones: a blog 