The Books: The Essential Rumi

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry. Next book on the shelf:

The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

Ptolemy Tompkins wrote in Time Asia Edition on September 30, 2002

Jalaluddin Rumi was, among many other things, a lover of irony, of the odd and absurd juxtapositions that life creates. So it may be that he would have savored the fact that Madonna set translations of his 13th century verses praising Allah to music on Deepak Chopra’s 1998 CD, A Gift of Love; that Donna Karan has used recitations of his poetry as a background to her fashion shows; that Oliver Stone wants to make a film of his life; and that even though he hailed from Balkh, a town near Mazar-i-Sharif situated in what is today Afghanistan, his verse has only become more popular with American readers since September [2001], when HarperCollins published The Soul of Rumi, 400 pages of poetry translated by Coleman Barks. September 2001 would seem like an unpropitious time for an American publisher to have brought out a large, pricey hardback of Muslim mystical verse, but the book took off immediately. It has a long road ahead, however, if it is to catch up with a previous Rumi best seller, The Essential Rumi, published by HarperCollins in 1995. With more than 250,000 copies in print, it is easily the most successful poetry book published in the West in the past decade.

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, the 13th century Persian poet, was born in Balkh, Afghanistan and is a hero of Persian culture.

I went to a Nowruz festival once at the Bowery Poetry Club, and it was a strictly Iranian crowd. I’ll never forget it. The candles, the apples, the crowd chanting along with the poems read out loud, it was amazing and I keep meaning to go again. Rumi grew up in a time of great upheaval (although I suppose there is always upheaval in that area of the world), with various clashing dynasties and galloping Mongol hordes stalking the land. His family was always on the move. They fled Balkh which was threatened by being overrun by the Mongols, and traveled to Baghdad. They then went on the Hajj (the annual pilgrimage to Mecca), and ended up settling down in what is now Turkey. The borders of that area are somewhat arbitrary (at least in the present-day), and Rumi wrote in the Persian language, revolutionizing it, and is known as a Persian poet, one of the writers responsible for the Persian Literary Renaissance at that time.

Robin Wright wrote in The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran”

The political upheaval [in Iran] particularly opened the way for a revolution in Persian literature. For over a millennium, poetry had had priority in a land that revered the lyrics of mystics such as Hafez, Ferdowsi, Rumi and Attar, who wrote at the height of Persian and Islamic glory in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Christopher Kremmer wrote in The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: A Ten-Year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes (a book I highly recommend):

Around the first century AD, Balkh became an important staging post on the Silk Road, selling and trans-shipping raw silk from China to Persia and eventually Europe. The city spawned many imitators, among them Samarkand, Marakanda, Bukhara, Khiva, Merv, Tus, Ravy and Qom. After Muslim Arab armies arrived in 663 AD an Islamic renaissance flowered in its thriving bazaars, bathhouses and barrel-vauled palacees. By the eighth century the military prowess, artistic refinement and scientific achievements of the Islamic world had far surpassed the Christian West. Thinkers, poets and mathematicians thrived in Balkh, among them the Persian free-thinker Omar Khayyam, who spent his formative years there. In 1207, the city gave birth to another wild man, the poet Jalal-ud-Din Balkhi, also known as Rumi, who held that music and poetry could facilitate direct and ecstatic experience of God, and founded the Sufi Muslim order of whirling dervishes.

Rumi is still popular today, not just in the area of the world from which he hailed, but in the West: his works are published widely in translation. Not only is he known for his poetry, but also his mysticism and religious beliefs, his Sufism, and the founding of the Sufi Order following his death.

Annemarie Schimmel wrote:

He turned into a poet, began to listen to music, and sang, whirling around, hour after hour.

Rumi’s father was an Islamic jurist, who ran a madrassah, and when he passed away, Rumi took over his position. He had always been religious, but not legalistic about it. He felt that outward observance of Islamic rituals was very important, but he wanted to go deeper. He was a questioner. He was looking to connect to the Divine, rather than just obey the rules set down for him by the “experts”. He was looking for a PERSONAL experience with the Divine. He felt that music and poetry and dance was the way to access that connection (the whirling dervishes, etc.). It was his life’s work to explain this, and describe it. He did so in poetry (as well as his sermons), but he wrote down all of his ideas in a couple of massive volumes. He acquired followers, through his writings and also through his position at the madrassah. After his death in 1273, the Mawlawī Sufi order was founded by his followers. It is still in existence (although it has had its controversies, and its problems with oppression).

Jason Elliott writes, in his wonderful book An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan:

Much of subsequent Sufism rests on the notion that when the lesser, egotistically oriented self of a person is displaced, the greater or Universal self is found, enabling the experience of contact with the Divine. The ordinary, sensible world is simply the reflection, at its more attenuated end, of the Divine emanantion, and Man its most exquisite mirror. As the dust of egotism is blown from the mirror … The foundation of Sufi practice is neither ascetism nor retirement from the world, although there may be periods of both. The austerities of monasticism were disapproved of by the Prophet himself, and Islam never fully lost the company (or the genes) of its most spiritually inclined. It is perhaps the Sufi’s willingness to undertake his spiritual training in the rough and tumble of life that accounts for the breadth of Sufism’s appeal. In Sufism there is the renunciation of ties, but the most obvious among these – the visible ties of the material world – are the least essential. ‘Is there anything more astonishing,’ writes a nineteenth-century Sufi master, ‘than that a man should put the blame on his professional activity for not being able to perfect himself?’

Rumi’s mausoleum is now a pilgrimage pitstop. Robert Kaplan describes going there in his book The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy:

Along with a throng of pilgrims, I removed my shoes and entered Rumi’s blue-domed mausoleum. A sign in English greets visitors with Rumi’s words: ‘Come, come whoever you are, whether you be fire-worshipers, idolaters, or pagans. Ours is not the dwelling place of despair. All who enter will receive a welcome here.’ Turkish women wrapped in red head shawls and men with beards and woollen hats mingled easily with Western tourists amid the overlapping Oriental carpets and gold-leafed Koranic calligraphy framed by colorful tiles. Not just the tourists, but the pilgrims too, were happily snapping photos. Rarely had I been in a holy place with such a welcoming climate.

I bought this book when I was in grad school, and read it at a leisurely pace, picking it up, opening it up randomly, reading the poem there, closing it for weeks, and then picking it up again. My experience of Rumi’s stuff is this: If I tried to read him cover to cover, or if I tried to immerse myself in his work, a lot of it started to seem monotonous. I couldn’t differentiate between poems. This is most certainly my failing. But when I read him in small doses, a poem here, a poem there, his words leapt off the page with an urgent truth. He certainly requires that you go deep. You cannot remain uninvolved and read Rumi, his stuff doesn’t work that way. A friend of mine from Iran told me that Hafez is the real poet that all Iranians revere. Hafez’s work hasn’t really been translated properly (in her opinion), and so he doesn’t have the same reputation in the West that Rumi does.

At that Bowery Poetry Club event I went to, the entire crowd, drinking wine and holding candles, chanted Hafez’s poems in Farsi, word for word, in unison.

I still remember coming across this passage in his poem “Muhammad and the Huge Eater” and feeling a shock of recognition. That duck was ME.

There is a duck inside you.
Her bill is never still, searching through dry
and wet alike, like the robber in an empty house
cramming objects in his sack, pearls, chickpeas,
anything. Always thinking, “There’s no time!
I won’t get another chance!”

A True person is more calm and deliberate.
He or she doesn’t worry about interruptions.

But that duck is so afraid of missing out
that it’s lost all generosity, and frighteningly expanded
its capacity to take in food.

Even now, that image resonates with me. It dovetails perfectly with my thoughts on generosity/scarcity/reciprocity – the triangle that obsessed me in 2009 when I was struggling so mightily. I guess it still obsesses me, but I am trying to be more gentle now, a little less rigorous. That “duck” image was really important for me: it helped me understand what was going on back in those days when I had first moved to New York, and I felt like I was starving (not literally, but emotionally). Scarcity makes deprivation even more acute.

Shahram Shiva wrote:

Rumi is able to verbalize the highly personal and often confusing world of personal/spiritual growth and mysticism in a very forward and direct fashion. He does not offend anyone, and he includes everyone. The world of Rumi is neither exclusively the world of a Sufi, nor the world of a Hindu, nor a Jew, nor a Christian; it is the highest state of a human being–a fully evolved human. A complete human is not bound by cultural limitations; he touches every one of us. Today Rumi’s poems can be heard in churches, synagogues, Zen monasteries, as well as in the downtown New York art/performance/music scene.

It’s very HUMAN stuff. It’s funny, too. Lots of parables and stories, with chattering voices, and arguments. You can actually feel this 13th century guy who was behind it. It’s totally accessible stuff.

Here is Robert Kaplan again:

Persian literature and architecture had a great influence on the Seljuks. It may be telling that Rumi was a cult figure among hippies in the 1960s and 1970s. He was born in 1207 in Balkh, in the northern, Turkic, part of Afghanistan. As a boy, he traveled with his father for several years across Persia and eastern Anatolia to Konya (the hippie route to India, in reverse). Travel, evidently, leavened Rumi’s spirit, and his tolerance. A flower child of his time, he believed that men, regardless of race or religion, were united, and linked to all of nature by love. This view, which may have had roots in the pre-Islamic past, was expressed in Rumi’s characteristically sensuous poetry:

And I am a flame dancing in love’s fire,
That flickering light in the depths of desire.
Wouldst thou know the pain that severance breeds,
Listen then to the strain of the reed.

Rumi believed that love of God transcends particular religions and nationalisties and that Moslems are by no means the only people to whom God has revealed himself. Rumi said that we should simply say ‘farewell’ to the ‘immature fanatics’ who scorn music and poetry. He cautioned that a beard or a mustache is no sign of wisdom – if anything, travel (the nomadic life) will bring wisdom.. Rumi was an ascetic, the opposite of a religious activist like Mohammed: He thought that men and women should shun politics and concentrate on discoveries of their inner selves. He favored the individual over the crowd and spoke often against tyranny, whether of the majority or the minority, When Rumi died in Konya on December 17, 1273, Christians, Jews, Arabs, and Turks poured forth from the surrounding countryside to mourn. They cried en masse and tore their clothes as a sign of grief. His tomb became a site of pilgrimage. In a part of the world associated with fanatics, he is one of history’s truly ecumenical figures.

Here is a poem of Rumi’s that I love.

Chinese Art and Greek Art

The Prophet said, “There are some who see me
by the same light in which I am seeing them.
Our natures are one.
Without reference to any strands
of lineage, without reference to texts or traditions,
we drink the life-water together.”
Here’s a story
about that hidden mystery:
The Chinese and the Greeks
were arguing as to who were the better artists.
The king said,
“We’ll settle this matter with a debate.”
The Chinese began talking,
but the Greeks wouldn’t say anything.
They left.
The Chinese suggested then
that they each be given a room to work on
with their artistry, two rooms facing each other
and divided by a curtain.
The Chinese asked the king
for a hundred colors, all the variations,
and each morning they came to where
the dyes were kept and took them all.
The Greeks took no colors.
“They’re not part of our work.”
They went to their room
and began cleaning and polishing the walls. All day
every day they made those walls as pure and clear
as an open sky.
There is a way that leads from all-colors
to colorlessness. Know that the magnificent variety
of the clouds and the weather comes from
the total simplicity of the sun and the moon.

The Chinese finished, and they were so happy.
They beat the drunks in the joy of completion.
The king entered their room,
astonished by the gorgeous color and detail.

The Greeks then pulled the curtain dividing the rooms.
The Chinese figures and images shimmeringly reflected
on the clear Greek walls. They lived there,
even more beautifully, and always
changing in the light.

The Greek art is the sufi way.
They don’t study books of philosophical thought.

They make their loving clearer and clearer.
No wantings, no anger. In that purity
they receive and reflect the images of every moment,
from here, from the stars, from the void.

They take them in
as though they were seeing
with the lighted clarity
that sees them.