RUMI: PAST AND PRESENT, EAST AND WEST

THE LIFE, TEACHINGS AND POETRY OF JALAL AL-DIN RUMI

Franklin D. Lewis

Introduction

Rumi-mania

Jalaªl al-Din Rumi, as the Christian Science Monitor recently proclaimed (cover article by Alexandra Marks, November 25, 1997), has become the best-selling poet in the United States. Audiences at poetry readings enthusiastically respond to Rumi's poems, often recited to the accompaniment of live music by Coleman Barks, who, more than any other single individual, is responsible for Rumi's current fame; his The Illuminated Rumi (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), a coffee-table collection of translations and inspirational illustrations, is enthusiastically recommended by the most widely read newspaper in America (Deirdre Schwiesow, USA Today, November 3, 1997, D8). Devotees of Sufism, adepts of New Age spirituality and those with a mystical orientation toward religion all revere Rumi as one of the world's great spiritual teachers. Beyond that, Rumi has entered American popular culture, so that along with such self-help and personal-improvement material as Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, spiritually driven commuters now unwind to audiobooks of Rumi's poetry as they sit in traffic jams on their way home from a hard day's work (William Davis, Boston Globe, March 30, 1998, C1).

On Lafayette Street in New York City, a clientele of about four hundred people a day at the Jivamukti Yoga Center, including such celebrities as Mary Stuart Masterson and Sarah Jessica Parker, do spiritual aerobics to a background beat that sometimes mixes rock music and readings of Rumi (Penelope Green, New York Times, March 15, 1998 Sec. 9,1). Meanwhile, Robin Becker and her dance company, inspired by the whirling dervish tradition, have performed two vignettes – ‘Night’ for solo dancer and ‘Doorways’ for five dancers - as part of a program called ‘Dances From Rumi’ to favorable reviews at Playhouse 91 (Jack Anderson, New York Times, December 12, 1994, C18). In December 1994 Pir Publications and Sufi Books gathered Coleman Barks, Robert Bly and the dancer Zulaika with musicians from the Paul Winter Consort in Manhattan's Symphony Space for a concert/recitation to observe the 750th anniversary of Rumi's meeting with Shams. The acoustic band Three Fish, which features vocalist Robbi Rob of Tribe After Tribe, drummer Richard Stuverud and bassist Jeff Ament of the heavy metal rock band Pearl Jam, derives its name from an allegory in Rumi's Masnavi. With lyrics from Rilke, Lorca and Rumi, Three Fish produced an eponymous CD in June of 1996 thematically organized around three songs taken from this Rumi tale: ‘The Intelligent Fish,’ ‘The Half Intelligent Fish,’ and ‘Stupidfish’ (Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, July 14, 1996 and http://www.sonymusic.com/artists/PearlJamchords/framex.html, the Pearl Jam website, under ‘Other Projects’).

Anthologies aimed at unchurched Westerners hungry for some form of non-institutional religion or non-traditional spirituality often include Rumi in the company of other visionaries, poets and seers. The poet David Halpern sets poems by Rumi next to those of other spiritual poets like Blake and Rilke in his anthology Holy Fire: Nine Visionary Poets and the Quest for Enlightenment (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994). Robert Barzan brought the case of Rumi to the attention of the gay community in an article entitled ‘Homoeroticism and Spirituality: Rumi and the Sufis,’ which, as editor, he included in Sex and Spirit: Exploring Gay Men's Spirituality (San Francisco: White Crane Press, 1995). Barry Walters claims in The Advocate, a gay liberation paper published in Los Angeles, that Islamic scholars have tried to ignore or cover up ‘the probable homosexual relationship’ between Rumi and Shams al-Din of Tabriz (‘Music Heart Beats,’ The Advocate, September 1, 1998, 54). Rumi translations also make an appearance in Sam Hamill's anthology The Erotic Spirit: Poems of Sensuality, Love and Longing (Boston: Shambala, 1996).

While Rumi seems slightly out of place in company with Yeats and Ginsberg, and seriously misunderstood as a poet of sexual love (whether gay or straight), it simply defies credulity to find Rumi in the realm of haute couture. But models draped in Donna Karan's new black, charcoal and platinum fall fashions actually flounced down the runway to health guru Deepak Chopra's recent musical versions of Rumi, with Madonna and Demi Moore looking on all the while (Robin Givhan, Washington Post, April 6, 1998, D1). It should, however, come as small surprise that the American minimalist composer and Buddhist activist Philip Glass, who has devoted previous operas to Einstein, Gandhi and the Hebrew Bible, now offers with Robert Wilson a massive multimedia piece called Monsters of Grace (version 1.0), complete with 3-D glasses and featuring a libretto of 114 poems of Rumi in the translations of Coleman Barks. Though the score begins with a soft solo voice singing ‘Don't worry about saving these songs,’ this mega-monster event effectively memorializes Rumi in the most modern and technological of media.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, the so-called Whirling Dervishes, descendants and disciples of the spiritual fraternity Rumi founded, billed as folk dancers since the government of Ataturk proclaimed the dervish orders illegal in 1925, attract the interest of tourists from all over the world and provide a symbolic link between modern secular Turkey and the religious heritage of its Ottoman past. In 1999 ubiquitous red banners commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic hung from government buildings and tourist attractions, including the front of the shrine of Rumi.

International film crews have traveled to Turkey to make documentaries about the Mevlevi ensemble of dancers and musicians for broadcast on French and British television. The ensemble itself has traveled through Europe and the United States on several tours over the last ten years, making several visits to the recording studio along the way. More recent visits include Australia in 1996, where tickets sold for between $20 and $30 to see the ceremonies of meditative turning (sama) and/or the performance of the Turkish State Mystical Music Ensemble. In 1994, when the Mevlevi dervishes came through Atlanta, the two prominent American translators of Rumi's work, Coleman Barks and Robert Bly, turned out for the event (Helen Smith, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 6, 1994, N5).

The British actress Vanessa Redgrave, in collaboration with the Mevlevi ensemble, provided the narration for a recent film directed by Fehmi Gerceker about ‘the idea of acceptance, urging human beings to respect each other's faiths, orientations, and religious ideals,’ entitled Tolerance: Dedicated to Mawlana Jalal al-Din (Falls Church, VA: Landmark Films, Prima Productions, 1995). Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor of the National Review, an important American journal of conservative thought, visited Rumi's shrine in Konya a few years ago and, impressed with Rumi's ecumenical and understanding spirit, cautioned American politicians that it would be wrong to consider Islam as a monolithic fundamentalist danger (‘Islamic Fundamentalism Revisited,’ National Review 45 [November 15, 1993]: 62-3). Indeed, any objective western reader who takes the time to compare the Divina Commedia with the Masnavi, which is about twice as long as the former, will have to acknowledge that Rumi, who wrote a half century before Dante, reflects a much more ecumenical spirit and a far broader and deeper religious sensibility.

In the nearby Islamic Republic of Iran, Rumi has reached new heights of popularity among the modern heirs of his language and culture. New commentaries, studies, and editions of his works, but especially recitations and musical performances of his poetry, have captured the imagination of intellectuals and the general public in Iran. Not just for scholars and literature-lovers, Rumi is championed by proponents of civil society, such as the Shiite philosopher Abdol Karim Soroush, as a precedent for and exemplar of a more expansive and tolerant Islam. Although Rumi societies have not yet reached the erstwhile popularity of the Omar Khayyam clubs once found in major British and American cities, small groups of non-Muslim Americans, like ‘the lovers of Rumi’ in Kirkland, Washington, meet every few weeks in a prayerful attitude for readings of Rumi's poems followed by dervish dancing to Turkish music, much to the surprise of Iranians in America (Abd al-Hosayn zarang, ‘Va baz hamchonan shab-e Rumi,’ Kelk 89-93 [1997]: 629-35). Iranians who visit Rumi's shrine in Konya are also surprised and amused by the Turks and Europeans who come there on pilgrimage (Mehdi Nafisi, ‘Dar jostoju-ye ja-ye pa-ye Mowlana dar Qonya,’ Iran Nameh 15, 4 [Fall 1997]: 647-8).

Memorialized by his poems, Rumi has remained very much alive for over seven hundred years in the hearts of readers of Persian from Bosnia to India. Soon after his death in 1273, a legendary haze obscured the actual circumstances of his life, however, and the hagiographical tradition transformed Rumi from a remarkable man into a mythical, even archetypal figure. Although Iranian, Turkish and European scholars have attempted over the last half century to recover a more historically factual account of Rumi the man, no one has as yet undertaken a rigorous investigation of all the published information available on Rumi. We therefore remain some way off from reconstructing an exhaustive biography detailing all that can be known about him.

My personal encounter with Rumi began as a teenager in southern California in the mid-1970s, where I first learned of him through devotional and religious texts, especially the Seven Valleys by Baha'u'llah (1817-92), the founder of the Baha'i Faith, who quotes many lines from Rumi in his own writings. In college I read the scholarly works of Nicholson, Browne and Arberry, and after making enough progress in Persian, also became acquainted with Rumi's poems in the original. A cassette recording of the modern Persian poet Ahmad Shamlu reciting Rumi's poems has been a constant companion of mine since the early 1980s. I watched with delight as Rumi won a growing following in North America. I watch now with concern as pop culture dilutes and distorts his message, with a foreboding sense that modern secular culture will inevitably reduce the sacral into the banal through its relentless commercialism and consumerism. Meanwhile, I continue to read and reread Rumi with a deepening appreciation of his insight, which is continually enhanced by the efforts of scholars to understand and explain him.

The proliferation in English of works about Rumi and translations of his poems and sermons over the past several decades has presented the interested reader browsing shelves of libraries, bookstores and web sites with a bewildering array of materials - some popular, some devotional and some scholarly. Since much of this literature approaches Rumi from a limited or particular perspective, it is easy to come away with an incomplete or even distorted picture of Rumi, the teacher, the preacher, the poet, the humanist, the pious Muslim and mystic visionary. In his magnum opus, ‘The Spiritual Couplets,’ or Masnavi-ye manavi, Rumi retells a tale told by an earlier Persian mystic poet, Sanai (d. 1131), whose ‘Garden of Truth,’ the Hadiqat al-haqiqat (69-70), provided a model for Rumi's own Masnavi. This little parable, which originated in Buddhist scripture and retains its association with India in the version of Rumi, illustrates the woolly and mammoth nature of truth, humorously reminding us that no one person from his or her necessarily limited human perspective can wholly comprehend the nature of reality (M3:1259--78):

In a darkened room stands an elephant

brought by Hindus promoting spectacle

throngs enter the pitch black to see it

but eye-blind, they grope with palms to sense it

Each in turn describes aloud

what he feels he sees, as follows:

(Touching the trunk) It's shaped like a drainpipe

(Reaching the ear) It appears to be a fan

(Feeling the leg) An elephant's a pillar

(Petting the back) Feels I'm touching a plank!

And so it goes: each knows the beast

by the part where he feels it

Their words seem to outward eye in discord

one calling P what the other called Q

But give them a candle to hold up to it

and discord departs from what they intuit!

Room on the Shelf for Another Rumi?

The book you now have in your hands attempts to hold up a candle to the growing body of publications on Rumi, casting some light on the historical Rumi, the myths and traditions that developed around him, the history of his reception in the Islamic world and in the West, and especially the phenomenon of his recent popularity. It hopes to give a bird's-eye view of the elephant, providing a primer to a serious contemplation of Rumi's life and writings, including a summary of the current state of knowledge about Rumi, a bibliographical guide to works about him and translations of his writings, a historical overview of his life and influence, and suggestions for future avenues of research and investigation. As such, Rumi - Past and Present, East and West should prove a helpful companion to scholars and serious students of Rumi, as well as to lovers of his poetry, those inspired by Rumi's spiritual vision, or those simply curious about what all the ruckus over Rumi is about. My hope is that these pages will guide readers working or wading through either the original Persian or the available translations of Rumi's work, and enhance their understanding of his message, his appeal and his relevance for Western culture.

This book also presents a great deal of new information about Rumi's life and circle, based on a careful and critical evaluation of the original Persian sources. The general outline of Rumi's life has been recounted in many books, but rarely with any detail to the historical and social context. Many books about Rumi have uncritically accepted or even deliberately perpetuated a legendary image of Rumi. I have tried to rectify this by providing direct access to the pivotal sources in translation, thus making the reader privy to the cruxes around which debates and controversies over the life of Rumi revolve.

Medieval works recounting the lives of saints must be used judiciously, for the hagiographical tradition does not concern itself with historical accuracy and biographical facts. Rumi - Past and Present, East and West makes a concerted effort to distinguish the factually accurate and plausible from the legendary and mythical aspects in the biographical tradition of Rumi, so that we may get a closer glimpse of the historical personage of Rumi. Rumi himself gives us precious little in the way of autobiography. The sources which give us the bulk of our information about the life of Rumi were written down, like the Gospels, some time after his death and they take as their subject, not the mundane historical details of his life, but the panorama of his spiritual influence. Throughout the chapters of part I (Rumi's Fathers in Spirit) and part II (Rumi's Children and Brethren in Spirit), we will evaluate the nature and accuracy of our three principal sources, whose authors wrote between twenty and seventy-five years after Rumi's death, compare and contrast their accounts, and lay out their discrepancies. Readers can therefore make their own judgments, though I will offer a number of new solutions and conclusions about how to evaluate and understand the mass of hagiographical detail.

Perhaps more importantly, Rumi - Past and Present, East and West provides a wealth of contextual detail about the intellectual, religious and mystical circle in which Rumi grew up, studied and matured (part I). Though the name of Shams al-Din of Tabriz is well known to us as the source of Rumi's inspiration, precious little of substance has been written about the life and writings of Shams in English or any other Western language. Most of what we read about Shams derives from the hagiographical sources and has little if any basis in fact. Yet we can learn a good deal about Shams through his own writings and sayings, and through Shams, we learn much more about Rumi. I therefore draw heavily upon the writings of Shams and make the latest Persian scholarship about him available (chapter 4).

Likewise, Rumi's father, Baha al-Din, and Rumi's mentor, Borhan al-Din, both exercised a major influence over Rumi's life and thought. Here, for the first time in English, the lives and works of these teachers and companions are discussed at length, reconstructing the specifically Islamic context of religious law, spiritual discipline, and metaphysical yearning, as well as the system of patronage in which Rumi functioned and flourished. A translation of one of Rumi's sermons also appears here in English for the first time (chapters 1 through 3). With this understanding of the intellectual and spiritual influences that shaped Rumi's thought, we can then turn our attention to his later life and writings (chapters 5 and 7). Our insight into his poetry and his devotional life then becomes much keener and the essence of what he taught and stood for comes into sharper relief (chapter 9).

The reader will also learn in these pages about how Rumi has been received by later readers in both the East and the West (parts IV and V). Chapter 6 describes the hagiographical tradition that grew up around Rumi's memory and chapter 10 provides the longest and most detailed account available in English of the history of the Mevlevi order, the spiritual fraternity founded in Konya by Rumi's son, Sultan Valad, and now operating in America. Rumi has had a greater impact on Persian, Turkish and Urdu literature than perhaps any other single author, and commentaries on his thought and theosophy have been written by Muslim thinkers from Bosnia to Bengal. An overview of his influence and reception in the Muslim world is therefore given in chapter 11. Readers in the West began to discover Rumi about two hundred years ago; he not only left his impression on nineteenth-century metaphysical thought in the West, influencing a number of the pioneers of the study of comparative religion, but more recently he has become an integral part of the spiritual beliefs and practices of many Americans and Britons.

Although Rumi's influence and popularity in the Occident will never rival his importance in the Middle East and India, he has nevertheless touched the lives of authors and thinkers from Hans Christian Andersen to Hegel and of Eastern gurus transplanted to the West, from Gurdjieff to Meher Baba. A history of his reception in the West is sketched out in chapter 12. Not surprisingly, academic interest in Rumi has steadily intensified in all corners of the globe; several professors and scholars have devoted much of their careers to the study of Rumi (chapter 13). Of course, a legion of translators from Ruckert to Bly to Barks, and a host of others in between, have tackled the poems of Rumi. Chapter 14 details the translation history of Rumi into European languages and analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the English translations currently available. In the last few decades Rumi has jumped off the page and into multimedia formats, inspiring musicians, choreographers, film-makers, video artists and others, even establishing a presence in cyberspace (chapter 15), making Rumi fun and sometimes funny. The discussion and evaluation of this wide variety of presentations of Rumi will, I hope, prove a helpful guide to both beginning and advanced readers of Rumi.

The Poems

Scattered throughout the text of this book, I have quoted lines and even entire poems where relevant to the narrative. The quality of his poems is the reason most of us are interested in Rumi in the first place, so rather than providing prose paraphrases or straightforward explications of the meaning, I have tried everywhere to translate Rumi's poetry as poetry, in a modern poetic idiom. Likewise, I have also translated extended passages from the verse of Sultan Valad, Sanaªi and others, where relevant to the discussion. I have tried to render those poems consisting primarily of narrative couplets (designated by the generic Persian term masnavi) into blank verse for the most part. However, I felt the more lyrical poems (primarily ghazals) generally better suited to free verse and non-traditional structures and patterns.

Most contemporary English ‘translators’ of Rumi work from scholarly English or Turkish translations, and not directly from the original words of Rumi, which are in Persian. Many of these ‘translators,’ for better or for worse, have taken liberties with the text of Rumi's poems. Those in the West who take spiritual inspiration from Rumi likewise tend to wrench him from his Islamic context; their representation of his teachings consequently appears blurred or blanched. Therefore, chapter 8, after describing the main features of Persian prosody, offers a selection of fifty new translations, done directly from the Persian with an eye toward replicating something of their poetic qualities, while at the same time accurately relaying the original content. I hope that some of these translations will suit the taste of some readers and find their place among the many other versions already available in English.

How to Use this Book

This book was conceived as a narrative, but the various sections can be read independently, as some readers may find it more useful as a reference work. Specific topics of interest can be found in the index, and the names of historical figures, authors, translators or scholars discussed at length in the body of the text are printed in boldface on their first occurrence for ease of reference. The sources of information are clearly and copiously spelled out for those wishing to follow up on various points. Most of the citations are given in abbreviated form in parentheses in the body of the text so that readers will not need to refer constantly to endnotes. These are keyed to a table of abbreviations which give the full citations for each text. Because of the extensive range of sources utilized, and the fact that much of the narrative of the book is devoted to a detailed description of the various books available on Rumi, a separate bibliography has not been provided. A companion website to the book, with images and links to other Rumi-related sites (see chapter 15) can be accessed at www.oneworld-publications.com/Rumi.

This is not the final and definitive biography of Rumi, but I have tried to map the terrain that such a book should cover. Likewise, it is not an exhaustive study of all that has been said about Rumi and all that he has meant to different people in different ages, but it does chart in some depth the reception history of his poetry and ideas, both in the Muslim world and in the West, tracing Rumi's impact on literature, music, the arts and contemporary spirituality. If nothing else, the sections on scholarship and translation should help the reader situate her favorite English renditions of Rumi among all the other available versions and discover their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Rumi - Past and Present, East and West is intended, then, as a kind of Rumi bible, a manual for anyone interested in the life, poetry, teachings and influence of Jalal al-Din Rumi, who has been called the greatest mystic poet of mankind. The whirling dervishes plant one foot on the floor with their toes fixed around a wooden peg and turn in Rumi's memory. In like manner, I hope this book will help ground all the lovers of Rumi as they circle, moth-like, around the flame of his works.