Difference between tasawwuf and whirling

A Brief Description of the Question: 

I am having a hard time deciding on how to ascertain knowledge from a sufi. Should I acknowledge opinion from sufi scholars? What differientiates a sufi from a dervish?

The Answer: 

For a Muslim there is no drawback in taking lessons or learning something from a sufi or another person. However, one should act cautiously and should not trust everybody. There are a lot of wrong and aberrant ideas nowadays and various people who present themselves as sufis or religious scholars but actually who are not.  

Furthermore, it is not necessary to take lessons from Sufis or scholars in order to learn and live Islam but it will be very useful for us to make use of people who know the Islamic realities and practice them and follow their example.

The meaning of the words dervish and sufi is given below.    

DERVISH: An expression used for the members of a tariqa (sect). It is derived from Persian “deryush” which means “a beggar going from one house to another”. After the 5th century of Hegira calendar, this word began to be widely used for members of a tariqa. Words like abdal, faqir, lover, miskeen (poor), saint and father are used in the same sense. In some regions the word “ikhwan” (brothers) is used. Dervish also means doorstep, expressing that even if a dervish is stepped on like a doorstep, he should put up with all the troubles. Like the word, the concept also originated in Iran and then was transferred to other countries. Arabs took the word as it is and made it plural like an Arabic word, “darawish”.  

SUFİ; A person who purifies his heart for Allah.
Sufi is a person who is cleaned off filth, filled with contemplation, oriented towards Allah from human beings, and for whom gold and mud are equal. Sufi is a person whose heart Allah purified and so whose heart became full of light and attained the pleasure of Allah’s zikr (mentioning the name of Allah).

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