A spectre has been haunting some Muslim writers and critics over the last few years – the spectre of a popular appreciation of the poetry of Jalal-ad Din Muhammed, better known as Rumi. It is the spectre of ordinary mortals reading some of Rumi’s poems with little or no interest in his piety, Islam or the Qura’n. Allegedly, an unholy alliance of Western interpreters, translators, pop icons and New Age spiritualists have conspired to ‘Erase Islam’, and ‘de-Islamise’ Rumi. He became one of our ‘Best Selling Poets’ because his poetry has been taken out of its Islamic context as part of a ‘spiritual colonisation’; pop stars Madonna and Chris Martin of Coldplay read and quote Rumi; and horror of horrors, his poetry is being used on pillow covers, wedding invitations, and in books on mindfulness-based meditation, a very secular activity. This, allegedly, is one part of the West’s demonisation of Muslims, and characterisation of Islam as a ‘Cancer.’
If you have heard such allegations, you will find their sources- verbatim, including the language and ideas- here: The New Yorker, 5 January 2017: “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi,” by Rozina Ali; New York Times Book Review, 20 January 2017: “How Did Rumi Become One of Our Best-Selling Poets?” by Azadeh Moaveni, and Al Jazeera, 17 December 2023: A tale of two Rumis – of the East and of the West, By Indlieb Farazi Saber. These contributors, in turn, seem indebted to a few Muslim authors and scholars like Omid Safi, Muhammad Ali Mojaradi, or Sharghzadeh (#RumiWasMuslim website), and Ibrahim Gamard, co-author/translator “The Quatrains of Rumi” and manager Rumisite.com. Some of these ideas found their way even to the BBC website (now archived); for example inanities like, “Love is an overwhelming part of Rumi's work, but for Rumi, this love was a higher love for God, and not for humans.”
Rumi’s encounter with Shams Tabrizi turned him from a preacher to a poet. These allegations turned me from a lay reader of Rumi’s lyric poetry into an amateur, quasi-scholar. I argue here that these allegations are misplaced, unjustified, biased and wrong. Some of them use selective and self-serving citations from Rumi scholarship. My arguments are informed by common sense, and my own understanding of poetry. I have found support in the scholarship of specialists in Persian language and literature, both Western and Iranian. Through a process of ‘deconstruction,’ of arguably one of the most sensual of Rumi’s ghazals (#1826) from the Divan cited by Rozina Ali, I hope to expose the serious flaws in ‘erasure of Islam’ argument. The analysis covers Rumi's concept of love (ishq), both human and divine. It addresses the 'Qura’n in Persian' label often used to stifle discussion. I provide supporting references/links - a kind of literature review and reading list. Those who do not agree with me can directly go to these resources and come to their own conclusion.
Rumi – The Pious and the Poet in Context
I first heard of Rumi as a young boy. In our north-Indian home, my father would often recite verses from Persian poets Hafiz, Sa’di and Rumi. The context most often wasn’t religious. These verses captured and made an everyday emotion or situation memorable, much like a quote from the Bible, Shakespeare, or Wordsworth does in English speaking cultures. One day, in a wistful mood we were reminiscing the premature death of my mother, the separation of our siblings. My father recited, and translated the famous lines from Rumi’s song of the reed flute in the Masnavi- ‘Beshnu as nay chun hikayet mi kunad- Waz judai ha shikayat mi kunad’ (Listen to the reed-flute, the story it tells! How it complains of separation”). I was hooked. Rumi’s words, their music and rhythm, made a permanent home in my heart. Years have passed, and yet, the sound of a flute triggers a flood of memories of my father and mother. Rumi’s words work like the smell of madeleine in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Interestingly, my father also mentioned as an aside, the Persian poet Jami’s hyperbole about the Masnavi being the ‘Qura’n in Persian.’ My preference for the poet rather than the pious Sufi was made there and then. Later in life, I read Rumi’s lyric poetry in original Farsi, with help from English translations and interpretations. I listened to Shahram Nazeri sing Rumi (Rumi reportedly created/recited his poems of the Divan- singing, dancing to music, which others recorded). The majesty, magic and ecstatic power of Rumi in the original Farsi was palpable even when I did not fully grasp the meaning.
‘Erasure of Islam’: Coleman Barks, The Poet/Translator Who Started it All
“The Rumi that people love is very beautiful in English, and the price you pay is to cut the culture and religion,” argues Rozina Ali . Let us deconstruct this argument through Rumi’s ghazal # 1826. (“gar che ze Hur pursedat, rukh benuma ki hamchuneen), as translated by Fatemeh Keshavarz:
If anyone asks you about the huris, show your face, say: like this!
If anyone seeks a fairy, let them see your countenance!
If anyone talks about the aroma of musk, untie your hair, and say: like this!
If anyone asks you about the moon, climb up on the roof, say: like this!
If anyone asks: “How do the clouds uncover the moon?” untie the front of your robe, knot by knot, say: like this!
If anyone asks: ”How did Jesus raise the dead?” kiss me on the lips, say: like this!
If anyone asks: “What are those killed by love, like?” direct them to me, say: like this!
Rozina regards Barks’ re-working of AJ Arberry’s translations of this Rumi’s ghazal (“Like This.”) as one proof of the ‘erasure of Islam.’ She writes (emphasis mine):
“Arberry translates one of its lines, rather faithfully, as “Whoever asks you about the Houris, show (your) face (and say) ‘Like this.’ Houris are virgins promised in Paradise in Islam. Barks avoids even the literal translation of that word; in his version, the line becomes, “If anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look, lift your face and say, Like this.” The religious context is gone."
The choice of words by Barks here is arguable, but the charge of ‘erasing Islam’ and the logic supporting it are egregious. What, we might ask, are the ‘religious’ purposes for which the virgin houris are offered in Paradise to pious Muslims? In his Introduction to Rumi: The Book of Love, Barks admits to “loading Rumi’s poetry with erotic fruit. I don’t do that now.” However, Rozina totally ignores what the poem signifies: a hour/hur has long been a trope for feminine beauty in Persian and Urdu poetry. Fatemeh Keshavarz writing about the same poem in her Reading Mystic Lyrics: The Case of Jalaluddin Rumi argues that Rumi blends the “carnal with the spiritual,” because he wishes it to be understood in ordinary, human rather than vague and generalised terms. In this poem, he preserves vivid erotic details which are usually avoided in mystical poetry.
More generally, Fatemeh says (p.146): “Rumi’s brand of mysticism was a multifaceted one. It involved... a specific interest in evoking carnal and sensual experience. Instead of promoting the view that one has to transcend the human level to experience the mystical, Rumi tended to see the mystical just as an aspect of the human experience. With characteristic boldness, he crossed the borderline between the spiritual and the carnal to emphasise that the two were indeed one and the same, a view he expressed directly in his didactic Masnavi-1:111: Love, whether of this kind or that kind / Shall ultimately guide us to the king.” In the Divan, contrary to the Masnavi, says Fatemeh, the descriptions are more ‘experiential’, ‘personal’, ‘descriptive’ and ‘sensual.’ Alas, the only reference Rozina makes to Fatemeh are about Rumi having memorised the Qura’n, and assertions, like, “everything has a form, everything has culture and history. A Muslim can be like that, too.”
Rozina demonstrates either a misunderstanding of poetic metaphors and symbols or a naive tendency to interpret them literally. She cites a ruba’i (Quatrain#158) (“Az kufr ze Islam beru.n sehra ast..) Coleman Barks translates these lines as “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” See, Islam erased again! This kind of translation, she quotes Omid Safi, is an example of “spiritual colonialism.” She refers to Jawid Mojaddedi as a more faithful translator, who retains Qura’nic/Islamic terms. What she conveniently ignores is Jawid Mojaddidi’s observations in Beyond Dogma: “Whatever objections one might have about the word-for-word accuracy of these contemporary translations by Barks, which were never intended to be literal, anyone familiar with the thirteenth-century Sufi Rumi’s oeuvre will know that the message they convey is representative of it. … these examples indicate that the translations that are enjoyed by millions of readers in North America and beyond are not as far removed from the original on a fundamental level as some might fear.”
While she accuses Barks of ‘de-Islamising’ Rumi, Rozina ignores numerous poems in Bark’s collection The Essential Rumi that have clearly Islamic titles, references, and notes: like Bismillah (with the name of Allah) and Zikr ( recitation or remembrance of God). In A note on the organisation of this book, he says impishly, .”.the design of this book is “meant to confuse scholars who would divide Rumi’s poetry into the accepted categories.” Barks also tells his readers: “If one selected an “essential” Rumi, it would be the zikr, remembering that everything is God.”
Barks’ translation also appears in Rumi: The Lion of the Heart. The introduction, preface, notes and references make it amply clear who Rumi was, including his life and times. It has numerous poems where Allah, Muhammed, Qura’n, and other Islamic references occur and are often explained. This is something Rozina in her single-minded obsession for Rumi to be called a “Muslim” has failed to notice or acknowledge. Barks approaches Rumi’s piety with an inclusivist perspective, rejecting religious exclusivism whether it be Islamic or Christian. Besides, do we call Shakespeare a “Christian,” or Tagore, a “Hindu” every time we cite their poems?
The ‘Qura’n in Persian’ – A Hyperbole?
The partisans of Rumi’s piety refer to the Masnavi, as the “Qura’n in Persian.” Hamid Dabashi, in The World of Persian Literary Humanism traces the idea of the ‘Qura’n in Persian” to Arab invasion and conquest of Persia. This gave rise to several movements to claim revelation of a “Persian Qura’n,” which never materialised. Sana’i (d. 1131) identified his own Hadiqat as the “Qura’n in Persian”; years later, the same label was used by Persian poet Jami (1414– 1492), and the Indian poet Mohammed Iqbal for Rumi’s Masnavi.
Hamid Dabashi rightly argues: “Such hyperbolic expressions notwithstanding, the historical fact has always been that Persian remained a noncanonical language in which the literary imagination was paramount, autonomous, and even sovereign. This does not mean that Qura’nic allusions do not abound in Persian literature. But it means that those allusions are assimilated into the literary act and the poetic event, and not vice versa.”
The #RumiwasMuslim variety of critics seem to privilege the Masnavi over the Divan, and prefer a literal translation of Islamic terms in Rumi’s poetry
Mostafa Vaziry, in his arguably controversial book Rumi and Shams' Silent Rebellion: Parallels with Vedanta, Buddhism, and Shaivism, also offers a very different perspective. He feels Rumi can not be labelled based on the sources he used: “It is true that the approximately 25,000 verses (50,000 lines) of the Masnavi include a mixture of Koranic stories and approximately 740 prophetic hadıths. What was not detected by Jamı and the later propagators . .. of Masnavi being “Koran in Persian” is that the Masnavi also contains around 60 Indian, including Buddhist tales, as well as other ancient Persian tales Kelila va Dimna, (itself based on the Sanskrit Panchtantra) and Greek anecdotes .. as well as certain tales about China, alongside other popular preexisting mystical narratives.” Rumi used whatever sources served his theme and purpose best, and whatever literature he was most familiar with. He crossed the borderline between the mystical and non-mystical easily; Masnavi therefore also has a few bawdy tales, bordering on the pornographic, as Mahdi Tourage argues in Rūmī and the Hermeneutics of Eroticism.
Pious/ Sufi, or a 13th-Century Pablo Neruda? False Dichotomies
A false dichotomy is applied to Rumi’s persona (also Hafiz, Sadi, and Khusraw). Once labelled as ‘Sufi’, love is often interpreted only as a longing for union with the divine. This leads to such senseless remarks as “Love is an overwhelming part of Rumi's work, but for Rumi, this love was a higher love for God, and not for humans.” Subtle varieties of such remarks are found in Azadeh’s article. Reviewing Gooch’s, biography of Rumi she blames him for putting “too much emphasis on earthly love.” This, she pontificates, makes Rumi seem like a “Romeo with a turban,” a “13th-century Pablo Neruda.” In support, she offers this inverted logic: “By Rumi’s time, there was no separate mode for earthly love poetry; the Sufis’ metaphorical use of love had taken over the language of Persian poetry entirely.”
The reverse is the case: Persian romantic poetry was purely secular till the 10th and 11th centuries, notes Sunil Sharma in his book on Amir Khusraw. It was then taken over by the Sufis as their preferred mode of expression. Hamid Dabashi notes that Abu Said Abi al- Khayr (967– 1049) is the earliest available source of mysticism and that “… His lyrical poetry provides the earliest extant evidence of the transmutation of physical into spiritual love.”
Dr Safi, cited by Rozina, is also one likely source for Azadeh’s diatribes. In a YouTube video “How to Read Rumi,” he pours scorn on popular appreciation of Rumi’s poetry. The “spiritual but not religious” devotees of Rumi think he wrote poetry for “those living in San Francisco,” he smirks, expecting, and drawing some peals of laughter from audience. I see a scholarly polite rebuke to such critics and experts in Keshavarz in Reading Mystic Lyric: “The expert critic has not come to terms with Rumi the Poet” and that while the Masnavi and Fihi Ma Fihi use “rhetoric of centuries passed.. wearing the garb of their age” his poems in the Divan sound “as familiar as a contemporary poet in the neighbourhood.”
What Rumi “Actually Meant”
The #RumiwasMuslim variety of critics seem to privilege the Masnavi over the Divan, and prefer a literal translation of Islamic terms in Rumi’s poetry. This approach then fuels accusations of ‘erasure of Islam.’ The Divan, as noted above, hasn’t received critical attention yet. Only a fraction of approximately 3,300 ghazals (lyric poems) and over 44,000 couplets have been translated so far. Dabashi argues that in the Persian poetic tradition, which Rumi inherited and enriched, the human and the divine, sacred and profane, spiritual and carnal are often tantalisingly mixed. What the poet ‘actually meant’ often remains a mystery, which a reader can decipher according to his/her beliefs. “The mystics may mean divine beauty as a metaphysical referent, but once they have submitted it to the open- ended semiosis of Persian poetic metaphors, they must admit, and they will admit, that this beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the face of the beheld.”
Rumi and Islamophobia: Politics Trumps Poetics
Is it fair to clutch at the coattails of a poet dead for more than 700 years, tag all his poems with his piety and showcase him as the tolerant and liberal face of Islam? This attempt is especially reprehensible if in the process, you ignore Rumi’s creative genius as a lyrical poet, trash his popularity, and scorn his modern day lay and secular admirers. Yet, this is what Azadeh, Rozina and other critics of Rumi’s popularity are trying to do.
It’s almost as if they are saying: “OK, so you like Rumi? First, acknowledge Rumi was Muslim; then understand Islam and Qura’n; also, stop being racist and colonial; acknowledge that Islamic culture can produce such a genius (“A Muslim can be like this, too”); also, stop demonising Muslims.” It is one thing to keep the context of history, culture, and politics in mind sometimes; it is quite another to let it overshadow or diminish poetics. Similarly, sources and inspiration for Rumi's ecstatic poems on Love (Ishq) and longing is a separate topic of discussion. Whether the source lies in Sunni Muslim roots/Qura’n/Islam (Azadeh, Rozina, et al), or his devotion to Shams; or the madhhab-i ‘ishq that transcends all religions, including Islam (essay by Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei), or ideas akin to Advaita Vedanta (Mostafa Vaziri): the key question is not “Was he a Muslim scholar or spiritual pundit?” Rather, it is whether he was a great lyrical poet we can all read and appreciate.
Out of ‘Two Thousand’ Rumis, A Rumi of One’s Own
Many fake and unverified Rumi quotes float around on the internet (“What you are seeking is seeking you”) with no reference to sources. This is a problem, but of a much different kind. Most well-known translators of Rumi’s Divan offer extensive notes, context and references to the original sources. Franklin Lewis, Brad Gooch & Maryam Mortaz, Geoffrey Squires, and Haleh Liza Gafori, have all rendered translation of a wide range of Rumi’s lyric poetry. Franklin Lewis, cited by Azadeh for Rumi’s piety, has presented a complex Rumi, a tormented soul. His critique of Coleman Barks is not about ‘erasure of Islam’ but of turning Rumi into a kind of Guru, “capable of resolving, panacea like, all our ontological ailments.” Instead, for Lewis, Rumi’s lyrical poems are ‘excited, full of sonorous urgent sound play and rhythm’; they ‘constantly toy with unresolved paradoxes’ of ‘overpowering longing’, and are full of ‘frenetic search, and longing to understand.’ In Rumi’s own words, “There is no edge to my vast desert; There is no peace for my heart and soul” (Divan # 239:1); and “Out of these two thousand ‘we’s and I’s, I wonder which me is me?” [Divan # 1397:1. Thanks to the modernists' interest in Rumi’s Divan and his poetics, Rumi the lyric poet along with some of his “two thousand” personas, has just started to emerge from his “Sufi’’ and “Islamic Mystic” garb, despite the attempts of his #RumiWasMuslim advocates to confine him there. Like Walt Whitman, Rumi is large and contains multitudes.
A recent biography by Brad Gooch is titled “Rumi’s Secret.” Rumi expertly and tantalisingly veiled his secrets in some of his best lyrical poems. Many of these do not require any specialised knowledge of, or reference to Islam or Qura’n, while others do. Geoffrey Squires has noted the ‘double-edged’ nature of Rumi’s popularity, i.e. some loss of Rumi’s piety in a few translations, but the popularity itself, he argues, is “all for the good,” as it attracts more people to his lyric poetry. The exclusivist, reductionist, and literal approach to Rumi’s poetry, directed primarily at non-Muslim readers in the West, risks having the opposite effect. Directed primarily at non-Muslim readers in the West, such one-dimensional portrayal may discourage exploration of his lyrical poems in the Divan by those who have less interest in, or need for, understanding Rumi's piety or Islam. How do I know? I was one of them.