Rumi

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad was born in 1207 in Balkh in the Khwarazmian empire, the son of a respected scholar and preacher named Baha ud-Din Walad. The family fled westward as the Mongol invasions advanced, traveling through Baghdad, Mecca, Damascus, and finally settling in Konya in the Sultanate of Rum (the Persian name for the formerly-Roman Anatolia, from which Rumi’s later epithet derives). In Konya, Rumi succeeded his father as a teacher of Islamic law and theology; by his late thirties he was a respected scholar with several hundred students, a wife and family, and a comfortable institutional life.

In 1244 he met Shams of Tabriz — a wandering dervish of fierce, almost terrifying spiritual presence. The friendship that followed, and Shams’s disappearance in 1247 (most likely murdered by Rumi’s jealous students or possibly his own son), broke open Rumi’s contemplative life. The grief and the love it had revealed produced poetry of extraordinary intensity — the lyric ghazals of the Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, named for the lost teacher; the six-volume narrative Masnavi; the discourses gathered in Fihi Ma Fihi. Rumi taught and wrote for the next twenty-five years, attracting a devoted circle in Konya. He died there in December 1273 (the Mevlevi tradition calls his death-day Şeb-i Arûs — the night of the wedding, when the soul rejoins the Beloved).

What he taught

Rumi’s poetry is not systematic theology. It is the working out, in image and music, of a small set of recurring intuitions:

• Love is the pedagogy of God. Across the Masnavi and Diwan, the human capacity to love — including the painful, mistaken, longing forms of love — is the means by which the soul is trained for love of the divine. Whatever you really love, you become.
• The reed cut from the reed-bed. The opening of the Masnavi: the reed flute laments because it has been cut from its source; its music is its longing. The image carries through the work — the human as the cut reed, the longing as the music, the return as the work of a lifetime.
• The radical compatibility of paths. Rumi was a serious Muslim, prayed five times daily, taught Islamic jurisprudence — and his poetry insists, with characteristic directness, that the divine is met by hearts of any tradition. I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Gabr, nor Muslim… I belong to the Beloved.
• The dance. Movement, music, and bodily practice as means of opening the heart. The sema — the whirling meditation his [[mevlevi-order|Mevlevi order]] developed — is structured prayer, not entertainment.

On Rumi in English

Rumi has been the best-selling poet in the United States for several decades, almost entirely through the freely-rendered versions of Coleman Barks. These versions are loved and have brought millions to the poetry; they have also drawn careful criticism from scholars (Franklin Lewis, Omid Safi, others) for sometimes minimizing the explicitly Islamic frame of the work. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s posture: read Barks, and read also the more literal scholarly translations (Nicholson, Arberry, Mojaddedi); the full Rumi is more rooted, more Islamic, and more grounded than the popular American “Rumi” sometimes suggests.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[sufism]]
• Parallels: [[spirituality]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Rumi. [[the-masnavi|The Masnavi]]: Book One. Trans. Jawid Mojaddedi. Oxford World’s Classics, 2004. (Books Two through Six in subsequent volumes.) Source class: primary text / scholarly translation.
2. Rumi. Mystical Poems of Rumi. Trans. A.J. Arberry. University of Chicago Press, 1968 / 2009. Source class: primary text / scholarly translation.
3. Rumi. The Essential Rumi. Trans. Coleman Barks. HarperOne, 1995. Source class: primary text / popular versions.
4. Franklin D. Lewis. Rumi — Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Oneworld, 2000. Source class: book / definitive scholarly biography.
5. Annemarie Schimmel. I Am Wind, You Are Fire: The Life and Work of Rumi. Shambhala, 1992. Source class: book / accessible study.

Lenses still to grow

• Shams of Tabriz as a figure in his own right — there is a Maqalat attributed to him deserving treatment.
• The [[mevlevi-order|Mevlevi order]] he occasioned through his son Sultan Walad — the sema, the tekke tradition, the modern Mevlevi institutions.
• The Coleman Barks question in detail — what is gained and what is lost in the popular American Rumi.
• Rumi and women — his teaching to his daughter-in-law Kira Khatun, and women in the early Mevlevi.
• The Persian poetic context — Sana’i, Attar, Sa’di, Hafiz — within which Rumi’s work lives.