The Poet of Love and Tumult
Excerpt kindly provided by Eileen
The meaning of poetry
has no sureness of direction; is like the sling, it is not
JALALUD'DIN RUMI, THE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY Persian lawyer-divine
and Sufi, widely considered literature's greatest mystical poet,
understood very well the uncontrollable and idiosyncratic impact
of poetry. Yet one wonders if even he, for all his intuitive grasp
of language, humanity and the cosmos foresaw the deep and diverse
influence his own work would have on readers throughout the world
seven centuries after his death-or the myriad meanings enthusiasts
would draw from his sprawling and contradictory poems. In the Islamic
world today, Rumi is read for much the same reasons he was revered
during his life: for his excellence as a poet; for his rare ability
to empathize with humans, animals and plants; for his personal refinement;
and, above all else, for his flawless moral center and ability to
direct others towards good conduct and union with Allah.
Rumi's work also has been read in the West for centuries
and there have been informed references to him in the work of Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and many other eminent
writers. But in recent years the popularity of his work in the West
has increased to a surprising extent: according to the Christian
Science Monitor, Rumi ranked as America's best-selling poet in 1997.
His biography, or at least the highlights of his difficult but victorious
life, should prove as inspiring as his poetry to his diverse and
The key events of Rumi's life-or those that appear
to have shaped his poetry to a great extent-seem to have been his
insecure childhood spent with his family roaming between countries
at the time of the Mongol invasion; his close relationship with
his father, the mystic Baha al-Din; his great popularity as an Islamic
professor; and his unusually intense spiritual and emotional love
for the dervish Shams al-Din of Tabriz.
Many Western readers prize his work less as a moral
lodestar and resource for merging with the Absolute, and more as
a vehicle for illuminating our own highly secular age. Although,
to be sure, these readers also are drawn to the ecstatic and transcendental
qualities of the great mystic's work. Western admirers tend to extract
Rumi from his historical context and embrace him as one of their
own. Not a few have seized on his poetry as a springboard for their
own creative expressions, including New York clothes designer Donna
Karan, who in 1998 unveiled her spring line of fashions while musical
interpretations of Rumi's work by the health writer Deepak Chopra
played in the background. Composers Philip Glass and Robert Wilson
have written "Monsters of Grace," an operatic extravaganza
that can be enjoyed with three-dimensional viewing glasses and a
libretto of one hundred and fourteen Rumi poems interpreted by American
poet Coleman Barks.
Quick-thinking American entrepreneurs seem to devise
new means to capitalize on Rumi's soaring popularity nearly every
month. Recently, several versions of "Rumi cards," a new
method of fortune-telling, combining snippets of the poet's work
and aspects of the Tarot, have appeared in U.S. bookstores. And,
for those who peruse the World Wide Web, it is possible to dial
up "rumi.com" and be informed that, "In the name
of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful, Jalalu'ddin Rumi.com is coming
Commercialism aside, the differences between the Islamic
and Western view of Rumi probably become most apparent when exploring
the subject of love, a central preoccupation of the poet's work.
Western readers have been captivated by Rumi's frequent and masterful
use of romantic imagery, which, coupled with the medieval lack of
prudery have caused some to regard him chiefly as a love poet. Many
are fascinated with Rumi's mystic identification and all-encompassing
spiritual love for his mentor Shams al-Din of Tabriz. Some construe
this relationship as a conventional love affair, given Rumi's frequent
declarations of his overwhelming longing for Shams after Shams'
mysterious departure. Indeed, in 1998, the gay magazine The Advocate
published a piece in which it was argued that Islamic scholars have
obscured a likely gay relationship between the poet and Shams. Other
Western readers are charmed by the lack of priggishness and the
nearly Chaucerian quality contained in some of Rumi's depictions
of heterosexual couplings.
Yet Islamic scholars consistently have interpreted
the relationship between Rumi and Shams as an example of the Sufi
call to open one's heart to another human, in order to open one's
heart to God. At the same time, Rumi's frequent use of ardent, earthy
imagery to describe his affinity with his beloved Shams also is
in keeping with the conventions of Persian love poetry, which sometimes
used sexual imagery to depict platonic love between men.
Similarly, anecdotes of sexual love are not necessarily
viewed as mindless endorsements of licentiousness by Islamic readers,
but sometimes as ironic and cautionary commentaries on human nature.
And in other ways, Islamic readers enjoy a very different Rumi.
To the Islamic mind, there are no necessary divisions between the
secular and spiritual realms, or between man and God. Rumi's bawdiest
jokes, his most erotically-charged images, his cosmopolitan grasp
of cultures and religions outside his own, and his fluent knowledge
of law, history, literature and nature are not viewed as ends in
themselves: they are only devices for expediting readers' connection
with Allah and the unseen world. For all the dazzling breadth and
variety of the Mathnawi, Rumi's six-volume masterpiece, the work
also may be said to have had only a single purpose: communion with
For Islamic readers, Rumi remains an important commentator
on the Koran and a brilliant exponent of Sufi philosophy, the strain
of Islam that stresses direct and ecstatic communion with Allah
over Aristotelian questioning. Rumi, who was strictly educated in
religious law and philosophy, is viewed in the Islamic world as
a spiritual descendant of two other great Sufi writers, Sana'i and
Attar. He shared with those two writers the goal of eliminating
corruption from religious practice and institutions. He also is
widely seen as the vindicator of his father, Baha al-Din, an Islamic
preacher whose metaphysical and mystical leanings often were greeted
with skepticism because of a prevailing bias towards Aristotelian
inquiry in his native Khorosan, today known as Afghanistan.
In Turkey today, Rumi is revered by many as the founder
of the Mevlevi Order, which is associated with the colorful "whirling
dervishes," the Sufis who twirl themselves into joyful merger
with the Absolute. Indeed, Rumi himself helped make popular the
once questionable practice of this mystic dance by twirling, first
in the marketplace, and later, to the astonishment of many, at a
funeral for a beloved friend. Iran, which has assumed the role of
the preserver of Persian culture, has in recent years offered its
respects to the poet through an abundant outpouring of new scholarly
So, why are there so many views of Rumi, and so many
ways to read him? How can so many types of contemporary readers
connect so intimately, and apparently quite sincerely, with this
long-dead medieval writer?
In his work, Rumi tells us over and over that he is
attempting to put into language the nature and significance of the
invisible universe, a task he freely admits can only be achieved
in part. In "The Story of Solomon and the Hoopoe," Rumi
writes: "Do thou hear the name of every thing from the knower?
Hear the inmost meaning of the mystery of He That Taught the Names.
With us, the name of every thing is its outward appearance, with
the Creator, the name of every thing is its inward reality."1
The best explanation for Rumi's popularity may simply
be that he was a very wonderful poet-uniquely capable of transcending
"outward appearances" and conjuring up the mystical "inward
reality," yet entirely realistic and modest about the limitations
of his words-and there are very few such writers in the world. It
also must be remembered that the Mathnawi, Rumi's longest work,
is a Persian classic and by itself would ensure his literary immortality.
Another part of Rumi's very broad appeal may derive
from his genuinely cosmopolitan character; if many types of people
today feel linked to Rumi, it may be because in his lifetime he
enjoyed unusually good relations with diverse groups. Born in or
near Balkh in the province of Khorosan, in what is now Afghanistan-an
area with Buddhist, Islamic, Christian, Zoroastrian and Jewish traditions-Rumi
apparently was familiar with all those religions and often friendly
with their practitioners. After the death of his first wife, an
Islamic woman, Rumi chose as his second wife a woman many people
believed to be of Christian origin. This second marriage took place,
somewhat remarkably, at the time of the Crusades, when large portions
of the Christian and Islamic worlds were preoccupied with conquering
each other. The hagiographers tell us that there was no more beautiful
tribute to Rumi's universality than his funeral, a forty-day marathon
of grieving attended by distraught, weeping Muslims, Christians,
Jews, Greeks, Arabs and Persians.
Then again, the loose, rambling structure of Rumi's work-especially
the Mathnawi, which is full of free associations and abrupt changes
of topic-makes for a grab-bag style of poetry, capable of engaging
many different people because it contains a wealth of topics. Some
of the slightly chaotic quality of Rumi's works may be attributed
partly to the fact that he did not write it down himself. Rather,
he dictated his poems and musings to scribes who followed him about,
attempting to keep up with his fast-paced mind. The scholar Annemarie
Schimmel in the Triumphal Sun tells us something about the conditions
under which Rumi's mysterious changeable poetry was produced:
The looseness of the Mathnawi, which most readers
find difficult to appreciate, is reminiscent of the form of mystical
sessions [which Rumi held with his disciples]; the master gives
some advice or expresses an opinion; some visitor or disciple may
utter a word; he takes it up, spins a new tale out of it, is caught
by some verbal association- very common in the Islamic languages
with their almost infinite possibilities of developing different
meanings from one Arabic root-then, he may become enraptured and
recite some verses, and thus the evening passes in an enchanted
atmosphere; but it would be difficult to remember the wonderful
stories and points the next day in any logical sequence.2
As for Western readers, there is another important
reason for Rumi's surprisingly strong appeal today: his ability
to evoke ecstasy from the plain facts of nature and everyday life.
One often gets the sense that merely to draw breath, or catch sight
of another creature, are immensely pleasurable events. Many of Rumi's
poems convey feelings of great joy in being able to play any sort
of role at all in the natural order. And such confident expressions
of belonging and pleasure are too rare in the technologically sophisticated,
but socially fragmented modern world. Consider this translation
of a section of the Mathnawi, by Jonathan Star:
My soul wants to fly away when
your presence calls it so sweetly.
My soul wants to take flight, when you whisper, "Arise."
A fish wants to dive from dry land into the ocean, when it hears
the drum beating "Return."
A Sufi, shimmering with light, wants to dance like a sunbeam when
darkness summons him.3
In short, Rumi's work responds to an increasing need
many of us have for an instinctive and mystical response to the
ordinary events of life, and for a more joyful daily existence.
For, although Rumi's work is peppered throughout with biting social
commentary, cynicism and a mordant wit, the overall effect of reading
his poetry is very encouraging, as if some small portion of his
vast inner state has been transferred to the reader. Moreover, Rumi
was indeed a very great love poet-whether his work is interpreted
in an earthy, secular context, or within a strictly spiritual framework.
His aching longing for Shams and his poetical dissections of the
many states of love provide readers with a vocabulary for exploring
the wide array of their own emotional and spiritual states. The
love documented by Rumi is very complex, a privilege and a torment,
laced with many shades of sadness and joy and bewilderment. There
is little sentimentality for its own sake in Rumi's work; his meditations
on love often shed light upon its turbulent and unsettling aspects,
while also illuminating its transformational potential. In the Divan-e,
You are in love with me, I shall
make you perplexed.
Do not build much, for I intend to have you in ruins.
If you build two hundred houses in a manner that the bees do;
I shall make you as homeless as a fly.
If you are the mount Qaf in stability.
I shall make you whirl like a millstone.
These sorts of meditations on love probably are eagerly
read today by many in the West, not just for their superb imagery,
but because readers today desperately want to probe love more fully
and participate in its most mysterious and inchoate aspects. Yet
we find ourselves in a culture that sometimes approaches love as
a dull series of kitschy moments, the better to patronize it.
Rumi's contemporary relevance can also be found in
the frequently severe and unsettling circumstances of his life.
Like many people in both the Islamic and Western worlds today, Rumi
lived through extraordinary social and political tumult. It appears
that the poet was able to convey the chaotic nature of poetry and
life very convincingly because his own life was placed in uncertainty
and danger on many occasions, during both his childhood and his
adult years, sometimes due to political instability, and other times
due to profound inner change. Many modern readers, finding themselves
in tumultuous conditions, take comfort in the way the poet transcended
and triumphed over harrowing circumstances.
The area in which Rumi's family lived during his early
childhood was under threat of the Mongol invasion. There are many
indications that the terror unleashed in the Islamic world by the
Mongols was the principal reason his family left its native Khorosan
while Rumi was still a young child. However, a few texts suggest
that Rumi's father decided to leave because he did not enjoy the
level of influence he felt he deserved as a distinguished Islamic
In either case, Rumi, perhaps at the tender age of
ten or twelve, along with many of his relatives, fled Khorosan,
an area in which the family had lived for generations. They began
an approximately ten-year, fifteen hundred-mile trek and eventually
reestablished themselves in Konya in Asiatic Anatolia, or modern
Turkey. Along the way, young Rumi lost his mother, one of his father's
four wives, and most probably experienced numerous other sorrows
and deprivations. Scholars have suggested that Rumi's imperturbable
inner state and his mystic sensibility were cultivated in large
part as a defense against the transience, loss and terror he endured
during his childhood.
After settling in Konya, Rumi apparently had a fairly
stable early adulthood, becoming his father's intellectual successor
and traveling to meet other scholars. Initially, he settled into
the fairly conventional life of an Islamic lawyer-divine and scholar
and enjoyed great prestige in Konya. Yet he was to purposefully
rattle his own secure existence at the age of thirty-seven when
he suddenly formed his extraordinary mystical friendship with the
eccentric dervish Shams al-Din of Tabriz. After encountering Shams,
Rumi's life changed as much as it had when he had left Khorosan
as a child. As the literary critic Fatemeh Keshavarz so aptly puts
it: "Shams awakened in Rumi the wayfarer who had to free himself
of rational and speculative knowledge to seek new horizons."
If encountering Shams was an experience of freedom and enlightenment
for Rumi, losing the dervish was one of great loss and heartbreak,
intensified by the possibility that Shams was murdered by one of
Rumi's own sons.
Rumi's fascinating and itinerant, if sometimes harrowing childhood,
as well as his watershed encounter with his mystical Beloved Shams,
and his subsequent creation of brilliant lyrics, are stories which
can be grasped by both medieval and modern people. These stories,
as much as Rumi's poetry, resound with people today caught up in
social upheaval beyond their control, as well as those who deliberately
unravel their own conventional security in search of more meaningful