In the end, the mountains of imagination were nothing
but a house.
And this grand life of mine was nothing but an excuse.
You’ve been hearing my story so patiently for a lifetime
Now hear this: it was nothing but a fairy tale. – Rumi
It was an easy choice deciding how to inaugurate this literature series. As one of the most well-known poets in the region, and one of my favourite writers, I felt an exploration of Rumi’s life and poems was a good first step in my journey through the Middle-Eastern literature landscape.
For those who don’t know him yet, Rumi (in full Jalal al-Din Rumi) was a Sufi mystic and Persian poet. He was born in 1207 in Wakhsh, in what is now Afghanistan. He travelled a lot throughout his life, due to the political turmoil in the region. After the Mogol invasion of Central Asia around 1215, Rumi’s family moved steadily westward. They visited Baghdad, Persia, and made a pilgrimage to Mecca to finally settle in Konya, the capital of the Turkish Empire.
By the age of 25, Rumi was a respected scholar following the Sufi path, a form of Islamic mysticism emphasising introspection and spiritual closeness with God. However, his life changed in 1244 when he met Shams-e Tabriz, a wandering Sufi mystic, with whom he shared an intense student-master relationship.
Under the guidance of Shams, Rumi lost his appeal for the more academic approach to the study of Islam and became an ascetic, devoted to a more unorthodox spiritual path. “Shams-e Tabriz stirred Rumi’s genius away from religious orthodoxy to a more inclusive understanding of humanity and to being more in touch with the human and worldly sides of spiritual arguments,” explains Dr Saeed Talajooy, lecturer in Persian and comparative literature at the University of St Andrews. Shams pushed Rumi to question his scriptural education, debating Koranic passages with him and emphasising the idea of devotion as finding oneness with God.
Four years after meeting him, Shams disappeared. Some believe he was killed by Rumi’s jealous son, others that he married one of Rumi’s daughter. Rumi’s grief led to some of his greatest work. For the rest of his life, Rumi always remained a respected member of Konya society, and his company was sought by the leading officials as well as by Christian monks.
Whirling Dervishes and the Mevlevi Order
Rumi, when living in Konya, founded one of Islam’s major Sufi orders, the Mevlevi, more popularly known as the “whirling dervishes”. I will probably dedicate a separate article on the subject as I find this dance absolutely fascinating but essentially, whirling dervish ceremonies started as a form of meditation. Rumi used to tell his followers, “There are many roads which lead to God. I have chosen the one of dance and music.” He would fast, meditate and then dance to reach a state of enlightenment. Dervish dancers start to turn in rhythmic patterns, using the left foot to propel their bodies around the right foot with their eyes open, but unfocused. Their whirling is accompanied by music, which consists of a singer, a flute-player, a kettle-drummer and a cymbal player. Traditionally, dervishes have been only men but in the early 2000s, some groups began allowing women to join.
In 1925, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s first president, closed all the orders and hermitages as part of his secularisation policies and for decades, the dervishes had to retreat underground. Today, the Turkish government revived the whirling dervish ceremony as a cultural asset, and ceremonies are also still being performed in Damascus and Aleppo in Syria.
Legacy
Centuries after his death, Rumi’s work is recited, chanted, set to music and used as inspiration for novels, poems, music, films, YouTube videos and tweets. He has even helped the spiritual journey of several celebrities such as Madonna, Chris Martin and Tilda Swinton. (Remember the song Kaleidoscope by Coldplay? It is actually a poem from Rumi). It is perhaps because his poetry is universally understood and studied across time, place and culture that Rumi remains so popular.
Coleman Barks, the translator whose work sparked an American Rumi renaissance and made Rumi the best-selling poet in the US, explains why Rumi endures: “His startling imaginative freshness. The deep longing that we feel coming through. His sense of humour. There’s always a playfulness [mixed] in with the wisdom.”
Poor translation and meme culture
“Of course, as I work on these poems, I don’t have the Persian to consult. I literally have nothing to be faithful to, except what the scholars give.” — Coleman Barks, Rumi: Soul Fury, 217
If you’ve read Rumi in an English translation, the chances are that it was translated by Coleman Barks. His 30 years of work on Rumi’s poetry gained him international fame: he was granted an honorary degree from the University of Tehran, headlined numerous festivals and poetry readings and took official trips to Afghanistan and Iran. Over 500,000 copies of Barks’s books have been sold, in the English-language market where a book of poetry rarely sells more than 10,000 copies. Rumi quotes can also be seen on Facebook, tattoos and, of course, memes.
Barks claims that his versions of Rumi are more appealing to a modern audience because they come closer to the “essence” of Rumi. The result is a “New Age poet, devoid of Islam, the 13th century, or the themes and images of the golden age of classical Persian poetry” as Kat Thornton, a researcher of 19th and 20th century Persian poetry, describes it. In Barks’s version, several images are collapsed or simplified, at the expense of the poem’s tone and references to Islamic teachings. Thorton explains that Barks, like other poets, seeks to make secondary translations of poetry so a mainstream American audience can understand, rather than finding a universal poetic essence.
Translating Rumi remains challenging and a poem can radically change depending on the translator, whom can have a different set of priorities and methods in their translation process than another. “Language isn’t just a means of communication,” the writer and translator Sinan Antoon says, “it’s a reservoir of memory, tradition, and heritage.” As channels between two cultures, translators take on an inherently political project. Translators must figure out how to make, for instance, a thirteenth-century Persian poet comprehensible to a contemporary American audience. Nonetheless, they have a responsibility to remain true to the original work.
Personal impressions
I discovered Rumi’s poetry back in high school thanks to this song which uses lyrics from a poem I love. Having read a few more poems since then, I absolutely love Rumi’s style and I find his poetry strangely calming and soothing. It has a special magic that interprets the human soul across generations of readers, from ancient Turkey to modern Europe, making it so universal, travelling time and space and touching people’s feelings in all different eras. I also think his poetry is demanding, creating a complex and challenging set of poems. Reading his poems, readers can stumble upon parables, little wise epigrams, suggestive fables or pieces of fragmented imagery. As Lee Briccetti, director of Poets House in the US, summarised, “Across time, place and culture, Rumi’s poems articulate what it feels like to be alive.”
I hope by reading this article, Rumi will figure on your bedside table read soon and brings you as much fulfillment out of his writing as I do.
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My favourite Rumi poems:
Bibliography and articles worth to read
- How A Persian Poet Changed My Life – Melody Moezzi for the NY Times
- The Erasure Of Islam From The Poetry of Rumi – Rozina Ali for the New Yorker
- Why Is Rumi The Best-Selling Poet In The US? – Jane Ciabattari for BBC News
- The Whirling Dervishes of Istanbul – Dave McClane on Man Vs Globe
- Rumi and Shams’ Silent Rebellion by Mostafa Vaziri
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