INTRODUCTION
Mawlana Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi (1207–1273), more commonly known in the West as Rumi, was a brilliant poet and celebrated mystic from the thirteenth century, whose lyrical and ecstatic articulations of divine love have touched and inspired hearts around the world since medieval times until the present day. Born in Central Asia, Rumi migrated west with his parents as a boy to Anatolia during a period of extreme regional instability and uncertainty due to the ongoing Mongol invasions and local power struggles. Though Rumi has been lauded as a “best-selling poet” in America for decades and many have heard of his message of love, the mystical meanings and spiritual contexts of his poems have been crying out for more attention.
Many people today are hungry for spiritual nourishment and in search of something greater than themselves. The usual uncertainties and anxieties of life have been compounded by the recent tumult of political events and the carnage of an ongoing global pandemic. Life as we knew it has been upended. Caught between the crushing waves of rising intolerance and mass death, many souls across the world are seeking to soothe their sorrow, anger, and alienation in this unjust world that glorifies materialism and worships wealth above all else. Rumi, whose own day was marked by violent chaos and mass death, offers us a portal out of our despair. He invites us to: “Rise from the plague of hypocrisy and deprivation, and enter the world of life and self-subsistence.” Through his celebrated verse, Rumi gently guides us to become free from our attachments to the material realm and our own “self” through reflection, devotion, and the overpowering force of love. A touch of insanity doesn’t hurt, either!
In his poetry, Rumi frequently refers to Islamic mysticism, or Sufism, as “the way” or “the path” that leads away from worldliness toward the divine realm. Sufism is the road of love that a yearning heart takes in its journey toward truth. It is a mystic path tread by spiritual wayfarers with polished hearts and perfected virtue who strive in every moment—with each breath—to experience divine love. Rumi does not only use the words “Sufi” and “dervish” for Muslim mystics—he also calls them the dear ones, the poor ones, the lovers, the people of purity, the friends, the wanderers, the freed ones, the aware ones, the knowers of God, the people of the heart, and those who are truly existent. A mystic master himself, Rumi’s exemplary spiritual life and visionary poetry exude the compassionate spirit of religious tolerance, celebrate the healing power of the creative arts, and unveil the heights of spiritual ecstasy and transcendence. To uncover the deeper meanings of Rumi’s poetry, this book contextualizes his exalted verses in the essentials of Islamic mysticism.
What is the gift of Rumi? The gift of Rumi is, first and foremost, love. Rumi was a mystic preacher of love who professed the healing and transformative power of love. He was a poetic master who beautifully captured the sweet pain of the heart’s yearning for greater intimacy with the divine. At the core of Rumi’s mystical poetry is the “religion of love,” which transcends all religions. As Rumi wrote: “The religion of love is separate from all religions. For lovers, the only creed and doctrine is God.” A devout Muslim, Rumi refers to God in his poetry as “the beloved”—the source of love itself. Through his majestic verses of ecstasy and longing, Rumi invites us into the religion of the heart and guides us to our own loving inner essence. His playful and profound articulation of the soul’s journey back to its pure nature and loving source is a gift to all humanity.
Rumi’s given name was Muhammad. The honorific, Jalal al-Din, given to him by his father, means “Splendor of the Faith.” Arabic, Persian, and Turkish speakers in the past and present do not refer to him as “Rumi.” Rather, they call him “Mawlana” or “Mevlana,” which means “Our Master” or “Our Teacher.” The moniker “Rumi” means “The One from Rum,” with “Rum” referring to Byzantium, the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which included the territory of modern-day Turkey, where Rumi lived for most of his life. The nickname “Rumi” gained currency in the 1920s and 1930s, as a result of its usage and propagation by western Orientalists. Rumi is buried in Konya, which during his life was the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum in south-central Turkey.
As Rumi wrote mainly in Persian, his poetry has been recited through the centuries by Persian speakers in what is modern-day Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent. All along the Silk Road, Muslims for centuries have sung his poems in many different languages as lyrics for their traditional music genres and forms—such as qawwali in India and Pakistan and shashmaqam in Central Asia. Rumi’s poetry still plays a central function in the lives of millions of Muslims around the world. In fact, in his poems he references geographies far and wide with allusions to Egypt, Yemen, Iran, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, China, Syria, Iraq, India, Oman, and beyond. Rumi’s poetry, in the past and present, has influenced and inspired writers in many languages, such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Pashto, Turkish, Tamil, Gujarati, and Chinese. Rumi also knew Arabic, and he wrote hundreds of poems in Arabic, too.
Rumi was a revered Muslim scholar, jurist, and mystic. As a Muslim, he observed the five pillars of Islam—the profession of faith, the daily prayers, the giving of charity, the fasting of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was a Sunni Muslim who practiced Islamic mysticism, and he followed the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence. His father, Baha al-Din Walad, was also a respected Muslim preacher, theologian, and scholar of the Qur’an. In the words of Rumi’s spiritual master, Shams of Tabriz, the Qur’an is the “Book of Love.” Rumi draws frequently from the Qur’an in his poetic masterpiece, The Masnavi, which explores the spiritual journey of a soul returning to its source through a variety of tales and Quranic allusions. However, in many popular English translations of Rumi’s verse, a significant portion of Islamic references have been left out.
Some of the selections in this book come from The Masnavi, which Rumi described as “the roots of the roots of the roots of religion” and “the explainer of the Qur’an.” Many have called his six-volume masterpiece with over 25,000 verses the “Qur’an in the Persian language.” Perhaps no other text apart from the Qur’an, the holy text of Islam, which was recited by the Prophet Muhammad in Mecca and Medina in the seventh century, has so influenced the lives of Muslims around the world as Rumi’s Masnavi. As Rumi explains: “My Masnavi is the shop for unity—anything that you see except the ‘One’ is an idol.” Rumi also wrote sermons and thousands of odes and quatrains, a number of which are also featured in these pages.
Rumi’s verses of love and spiritual ecstasy have resonated with countless hearts around the world through translation, but his poetry in the original Persian is even more dazzling than most people realize. Many of Rumi’s poems are so spiritually deep (the words and meanings can be translated in a multitude of ways) that native speakers of Persian can debate for hours, days, and even weeks about just one verse or even one word. A significant amount of Persian scholarship on Rumi is still not translated into English, and a large portion of his own oeuvre has not yet been translated into English.
Through the ages, poetry has been an essential element of Persian culture. In almost every Persian home today, you can find the poetry of Rumi and other celebrated Persian poets, such as Ferdowsi, Sana’i, Abu Hamid bin Abu Bakr Ibrahim (Attar), Sa‘di, Hafez, and Abu Sa‘id Abi’l-Khayr. Every time I have visited the tomb of Rumi in Turkey and the mausoleums of Hafez and Sa‘di in Shiraz in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I have been touched and inspired by the devotion of the countless hearts gathered around the tombs of these medieval poetic masters, clutching their immortal words in their hands and paying their respects in person. As one Iranian friend said to me, “My teachers are Omar Khayyam, Hafez, and Rumi. Omar Khayyam is my logic—there is nothing to this world. Hafez is my heart. He teaches me beyond love and compassion. Rumi is my destination. To become one! The ‘one’ is the self. To become one’s true self.”
In the Islamic Republic of Iran today, politicians frequently invoke these Persian poets for their domestic audience. The centrality of poetry in Persian culture is why President Obama, in one of his Persian New Year video messages, quoted from the famous Persian poet Sa‘di: “There are those who insist that we be defined by our differences. But let us remember the words that were written by the poet Sa‘di, so many years ago: ‘The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.’” These same words are engraved on the entrance of the United Nations in New York City.
Writers and travelers in the West have been captivated by Persian poetry for centuries. Dervishes appear in Western travel accounts and memoirs as early as the fifteenth century. Scholars believe that perhaps the earliest reference to Persian poetry in English is George Puttenham’s inclusion of four anonymous “Oriental” poems translated from Persian in The Arte of English Poesie in 1589. In fact, Sa‘di’s masterpiece, Gulistan, was introduced to French, Latin, and German readers as early as the eighteenth century. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe drew inspiration from Hafez for his West-Eastern Divan, published in 1827, and Gertrude Bell (d. 1926), who infamously helped draw the borders of the modern Middle East, also published translations of Hafez. Persian poetry had a profound influence on romantic and transcendental poetry in America due to its universalist and humanist themes.
Some of the most celebrated early American writers drew inspiration from Sa‘di’s Gulistan, Hafez’s Divan, Omar Khayyam’s Ruba’iyyat, and Rumi’s Masnavi—which were all accessible to Western audiences as early as the eighteenth century. American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were influenced by these Persian masterpieces, and they put themselves in dialogue with these celebrated Persian poets. As Thoreau (d. 1862) wrote about the Persian poet Sa‘di: “I know, for instance, that Saadi entertained once identically the same thought that I do, and thereafter I can find no essential difference between Saadi and myself. He is not Persian, he is not ancient, he is not strange to me.” Post–Civil War American poets were drawn to Persian poetry’s themes of nature, suffering, and transcendence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (d. 1882), who was first drawn to Persian poetry as a child, helped to popularize Persian poetry in America. Like Whitman and Thoreau, Emerson was drawn most to Sa‘di, and he even wrote a poem titled “Saadi” in 1842 that used Sa‘di as an alter ego. Emerson wrote, “He inspires in the reader a good hope. What a contrast between the cynical tone of Byron and the benevolent wisdom of Saadi!” Emerson translated hundreds of lines of Sa‘di’s Persian poetry into English from the German translation done by Friedrich Rückert (d. 1866).
Translations of Rumi’s poetry into European languages emerged in the late eighteenth century. Rumi was translated into German by Friedrich Rückert, Friedrich Rosen (d. 1935), Georg Rosen (d. 1961), and Austrian scholar Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (d. 1856), whose translations of passages from Rumi’s Masnavi and Divan-e Shams directly inspired Goethe. Aflaki’s thirteenth-century hagiographical account of Rumi was translated into French by Clément Huart (d. 1926). Reynold A. Nicholson published fifty Rumi poems in English in 1898, and soon after a groundbreaking translation of The Masnavi. Rumi’s other twentieth-century translators in English have included Arthur J. Arberry, Annemarie Schimmel, Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, William Chittick, Franklin D. Lewis, Jawid Mojaddedi, and others.
Though references to Rumi had been made in English by transcendentalists, who were aware of his poetry through the German translations of Hammer-Purgstall and F. A. G. Tholuck, and in the early twentieth century by the followers of the Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan (d. 1927), founder of the Sufi Order of the West, the poetry of Rumi did not vault to mass popularity until after Robert Bly gave a copy of Arberry’s translations to Coleman Barks in the 1970s. Because Barks was not familiar with Persian or the Qur’an, his collections are not necessarily accurate representations of Rumi’s own words and ideas. However, Barks’s popular translations did bring the figure of Rumi to millions in the West who were drawn to Barks’s free-verse modern idiomatic reimaginings of Rumi’s verse. In fact, one of my Iranian colleagues recently told me that Barks’s freewheeling translations helped “unlock” the original for him and inspired him to return to reading Rumi in Persian. Many, however, have been much more critical of Barks and other popular translators of Rumi who have had no expertise or education in Persian or Islam.
Copyright © 2022 by Emily Jane O’Dell
