Rumi

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Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273) was a Persian poet, jurist, and Sufi teacher whose verse on divine love became, for the order that formed around his memory, not literature to admire but a path to walk. In the Persian-speaking world he is known as Mawlana, “our master”; the name by which the West knows him, Rumi, simply marks where he lived — Rum, the old Islamic term for the formerly Roman lands of Anatolia, where Greek-speaking Christendom had ruled before the Turks came. He is the poet of the lands beyond the eastern empire’s edge, named for the empire he never saw.

A life broken open

He was born in the eastern Iranian world, in or near Balkh — though Franklin Lewis, weighing the family’s own record against the geography, places the household for the years around Rumi’s birth at Vakhsh, a small town on the Vakhsh river in what is now Tajikistan, on the far edge of Greater Khorasan. The distinction matters less than the world it names: a frontier of the Persianate east, learned and devout, soon to be overrun. His father, Baha al-Din Walad, was a respected preacher and teacher, a man of the pulpit and the pen; the son was raised inside a household where the Qur’an was the air breathed and the soul’s itinerary toward God the constant subject.

While Rumi was still young the household left, moving west ahead of the advancing Mongols whose armies would shortly erase the cities of Khorasan from the map. This was not a journey but a years-long exile — through Nishapur, where tradition holds the boy met the aged poet Attar; on pilgrimage to Mecca; through the cities of the Arab and Anatolian world — that ended at last in Konya, in the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, in present-day Turkey. There Baha al-Din held a teaching post, and there, after his father’s death, Rumi in time succeeded to it. By his late thirties he was an established scholar of law and theology with a circle of students and the dignity of a settled, conventional eminence: a jurist who issued legal opinions, a preacher who filled a hall. The path of his life looked already drawn.

What undid it was a person. Around 1244 a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz arrived in Konya — old, fierce, unbiddable, indifferent to rank and learning. The encounter between the two men consumed Rumi entirely. For months they withdrew together into conversation that left no record, and the sober jurist who had measured out the law came out of it a poet who had lost all measure. The settled circle resented the stranger who had stolen their master; Shams left, was coaxed back, and around 1247 or 1248 vanished a second time, most likely killed — by some account with the connivance of Rumi’s own household. Rumi’s grief did not heal into resignation. It turned into language. The enormous lyric collection of ghazals and quatrains that poured out of him in the years that followed he titled not under his own name but under his friend’s: the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi — the collected poems of Shams of Tabriz, as though the dead man were speaking through the living one, as though there were no longer a clear line between lover and beloved, seeker and sought.

The two great works

The Divan is the record of the ecstasy. His other great work, dictated across the last decade of his life to his disciple Husam al-Din Chalabi, is the Masnavi — a poem of some twenty-five thousand rhyming couplets in six books that his followers came to call the Persian Qur’an. The epithet is precise and deliberately reverent: not a rival scripture but a commentary on scripture in verse, the Book unfolded through story. And it moves entirely by stories — animal fables, bawdy jokes, scenes from the bazaar, parables of kings and slaves and fools, each one opening, without warning, onto a teaching about the soul’s distance from God and the ache to return. The narrative is never the point; it is the husk around the point, and the poem is forever breaking off its own tales to chase the meaning that prompted them.

Its governing image stands at the very head of Book One, in the lines known as the Song of the Reed. A reed has been cut from the reed-bed and hollowed into a flute; when it is played, the sound is its weeping for the marsh it was torn from. Everyone who hears it hears their own severance. Separation, in the Sufi reading the Masnavi assumes, is the condition of every created thing — each soul a reed cut from its origin — and the longing that separation breeds is not an affliction to be cured but the very engine that drives the return. The cry is the way home. To read the poem is to be made to feel the wound and to be told that the wound is the door.

What he taught

What Rumi taught belongs to the broad current of Sufism, and more precisely to its Islamic heart: that the aim of human life is fana, the annihilation of the self in God, the drop returning to the sea. But his distinctive emphasis is the means. The schoolmen reached toward God by argument and the jurists by law, and Rumi had been a master of both; what Shams broke open in him was the conviction that the self is dissolved not chiefly by reasoning but by love — by dhikr, the remembrance of God on the tongue and in the heart, by poetry, and by music and rhythmic movement that loosen the grip of the calculating mind. This is not anti-intellectualism so much as a ranking: the intellect is a fine mount until it reaches the door of the Beloved, and there it must be left behind, the way a candle is no longer needed once the sun is up.

It would be an error — the central error the scholarship guards against — to read this love as a vague spirituality floating free of its faith. Rumi came to his theology of tolerance and ecstatic love not by turning away from Islam but by going further into it; every line of his verse rests on the Qur’an, on the sayings of the Prophet, and on the technical vocabulary of the Sufi masters before him. His openness toward Christians, toward Jews, toward the worshipper whose form of prayer he found mistaken, is itself a Qur’anic openness, the largeness of a man so far inside his tradition that he has come out the other side of its quarrels. His thought sits in conversation with the speculative mysticism of his age — the philosophy of being that Akbarian Sufism was systematizing in the same century, the inheritance of the Avicennan philosophers and of Suhrawardi’s philosophy of light — but Rumi is not a system-builder. He is a teacher of the heart who reasons in images, and the images do the work that arguments do elsewhere.

The order and the turning

Rumi did not found an order. He left a devotional circle, and it was his son Sultan Walad, across the decades after the master’s death on 17 December 1273, who gathered the disciples, built the mausoleum, and shaped the loose community into the structured brotherhood that took his father’s title — the Mevlevi order, the whirling dervishes. Their ritual turning, the sema, enacts the longing of the reed as motion: the dervish revolves on the left foot with the right palm turned up to receive from heaven and the left turned down to give to the earth, a body made into a channel, turning around the still point of the heart. The order embedded itself in the high culture of Anatolian and Ottoman Sufism, producing across the centuries a refined musical liturgy and a place at the sultan’s court, until the Turkish Republic closed the dervish lodges by law in 1925 and the Konya āsitāne became a museum. The tomb beneath the green-tiled dome remains a place of visitation; what was suppressed as an institution persisted as a transmission, and the turning is danced still.

The two Rumis

Outside the tradition Rumi has had a second, looser life. Modern English versions — most famously Coleman Barks’s, who does not read Persian and works by re-casting the literal scholarly prose of Reynold Nicholson and A. J. Arberry into American free verse — have made him a best-selling poet in the West, often shorn of the Islamic devotion that every line assumes. The figure who results is a sage of borderless love, a guru dispensing comfort, with the mosque and the Qur’an and the Prophet quietly edited out. Scholars have named the gap with some force: Rozina Ali, surveying the controversy in The New Yorker, calls it the erasure of Islam from the poetry of Rumi, and the Duke scholar Omid Safi calls the larger pattern a spiritual colonialism — the occupation of a landscape that Muslims from Bosnia to Bengal have lived inside for seven centuries. The resemblance readers feel to other love-mysticisms — to the bhakti devotion of the Indian poet-saints, to the songs of the Kabir tradition, to the mystics of every faith who have spoken of ecstasy and the unsaying of the divine name — is real and worth tracing as kinship; it is not identity. His is a love that means what it means inside the faith that shaped it.

The texts and the scholarship

The English Rumi rests on a single monument: Reynold A. Nicholson’s eight-volume The Mathnawí of Jalálu’ddín Rúmí (London: Luzac, 1925–1940), which pairs a critical Persian text with a literal English prose translation and two volumes of philological commentary, and remains the indispensable scholarly starting point cited by every later worker. Nicholson’s textual foundation shifted partway through the project: only from Book III onward could he build on the oldest complete manuscript, the codex dated 677 AH (1278 CE), copied within five years of Rumi’s death and held in Konya, which he judged the most authoritative witness and which the modern Persian editions of Mohammad Estelami and, most recently, Mohammad-Ali Movahhed take as their base. Before Nicholson, three Victorian Persianists had carried portions of the poem into English: James Redhouse’s rhymed Book One (1881), prefaced by the hagiographic anecdotes of Aflaki; C. E. Wilson’s literal Book Two with commentary (1910); and E. H. Whinfield’s abridgment of all six books (1887, 1898), long the standard popular Masnavi.

The modern critical literature is anchored by Franklin D. Lewis’s Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000; revised 2008), the comprehensive English study of the life, the work, and the Western reception, and the book that most sharply distinguishes a translation from the looser adaptation Coleman Barks and his heirs produce. It is complemented by Annemarie Schimmel’s literary-religious monograph The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Mawlānā Jalāloddin Rumi (SUNY Press, 1993), which roots Rumi’s ecstasies in Qur’an, hadith, and the earlier Sufi poets, and by William C. Chittick’s The Sufi Path of Love (SUNY Press, 1983), which arranges Rumi’s own words by doctrinal theme. The compact authoritative reference is the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry, whose treatment of the life and teachings supplies the scholarly framing behind everything above. The completist verse translations now underway — Jawid Mojaddedi’s Oxford World’s Classics Masnavi in rhyming couplets and Alan Williams’s bilingual blank-verse edition — are the first full Persianist renderings of the whole poem since Nicholson, and the measure of how seriously the field has taken the task of giving the Masnavi back its religion in English.

The reed that opens the poem does not stop weeping when the story ends. It cannot be otherwise: the flute is hollow because it was cut, and the cut is the same wound in every reed in the bed. What the cry says, said in a thousand parables across twenty-five thousand lines, is that the marsh is real and the way back to it runs through the longing itself — that the soul torn from God is drawn home by the very ache of the tearing, until the player and the breath and the reed are no longer three things but one note.

→ In the library: Rūmī — The Mesnevī, Book the First (Redhouse, 1881) · Rūmī — Masnavi i Maʿnavi, abridged (Whinfield, 1898)

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Logos · Sufism · Islamic Sufism · Persian Poetic Mysticism · Mevlevi Order Mevleviyya Whirling Dervishes · Akbarian Sufism Wahdat Al Wujud · Anatolian Ottoman Sufism · Sufism Comparative