Jalal al-Din Rumi

Jalal al-Din Rumi

 

 

(1207-1273)

The greatest mystical poet of Persia, famous for his didactic epic Mathnawi (or Masnavi-ye Ma'navi; Spiritual Couplets), a treasure-house of Sufi mysticism. The theme of Rumi's ghazals is sacred love. After Rumi's death his disciples were organized as the Mawlawiyah order, called in the West the "Whirling Dervishes".

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all. (in 'Who says words with my mouth?', tr. Coleman Barks)

Jalal al-Din Rumi, known to his disciples as Mawlana Rumi, "the learned master of Anatolia", was born in Balkh, Ghurid empire (now in Afghanistan). His father, Baha'uddin Walad, was a Muslim preacher and jurist. He named his son Muhammad but later called him by the additional name Jalalu-'d-din (The Glory of the Faith). In the West, he is usually known as Rumi, Rum referring to the Anatolian peninsula, "the Greek-occupied lands". The family moved from place to place, perhaps because political reasons or because Baha'uddin Walad did not have success as a preacher. Also the times were violent.

 The Mongols had turned against the Islamic states. They destroyed Balkh in 1221, and eventually conquered Baghdad in 1258.Some sources tell that Rumi was visiting Baghdad just before it was sacked by the Mongols. The family settled for some time in Aleppo and Damascus, where Rumi is said to have studied. Rumi  was educated in the traditional Islamic sciences. He perhaps met the great mystic Ibn al-Arabi (d.1240) or his students. From Syria the family travelled to Laranda, where Rumi's mother, Mu'mine Khatun, died. Eventyally they settled in Konya, in Anatolia, a rare haven during the Mongol invasion. According to an Arab legend, the remains of the Greek philosopher Plato were buried in the city.

Rumi married at the age of eighteen. His first son, Sultan Walad, was born in Laranda. After the death of his father in Konya, Rumi continued there as a teacher and religious authority issuing opinions (fatwas) pertaining to the Islamic law (Shariah).

Although Baha'uddin Walad had been known for his visionary powers, and he had written about spiritual love, at that time Rumi was not interested in the mystical tradition. Late in October 1244 (in some sources on November 30), Rumi met the wandering dervish called Shamsuddin of Tabriz (Shams ad-Din). Shams did not observe the Shariah, and he believed that he is united with the Muhammadan Light. The encounter was the turning point in Rumi's life. Shams asked, "Who was greater, Mohammad the Prophet or the Persian mystic Bayezid Bistami?" Bistami could cry in ecstasy that he and the Godhead were one; Mohammad was the Messenger of God.

"You are either the light of God or God," Rumi wrote of Shams later in one poem. He neglected his teaching duties and family, and spent all his time with the dervish, whom he would compare to Jesus. The holy man left the town as mysteriously as he had appeared. "But suddenly God's jealousy appeared, / And whispering filled all the mouths around," explained Sultan Walad in his book Waladnama. The disappearance of Shams turned Rumi into a poet.

Shams returned again to Konya, was married to a young girl who had been brought up in Rumi's family, but in 1248 he vanished completely. It was rumored that he was murdered with the connivance of Rumi' second son Ala'uddin (Alaeddin). Rumi searched his friend without results, and went again to Damascus. Describing this period as the search of his own identity he wrote: "Indeed I sought my own self, that is sure, / Fermenting in the vat, just like the must." Rumi saw himself as a man who was created from the wine of Love, but Love was also something that was beyond letters, it was eternal life, fire, tower of light, black lion, an ocean with invisible waves – love was limitless. "Pass beyond form, escape from names!" he said. "Flee titles and names toward meaning!" Rumi's poetry is full of images of Love.

Rumi's association with Shams has been compared to the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, but it also has psychological similarities with the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist – or even with  James Boswell's worship of Dr. Johnson. Rumi wrote some 30,000 verses about his love, longing, and loneliness. They were collected in Diwan-i Shams-i Tabriz (Divan of Shams of Tabriz), in which he appended Shams's name as the author. Rumi used often the traditional form of love lyric, the ghazal, which consists generally of five to twelve lines and employs one single rhyme through the poem.

After the death of Shams, Rumi met an illiterate goldsmith, Salahuddin Zarkub (Salah ad-Din Zarkub), and wrote some poems under Salahuddin's name. This was another scandal but in spite of the public reaction Rumi also married Sultan Walad to Salahuddin's daughter. After the death of his first wife, Rumi married Kira Khatum of Christian background; they had two children. Rumi had cordial relations with Christians, but in accordance with the Qur'an, he did not belive that Jesus is a God: "How could it be allowed as a possibility that a frail person . . . with a bodfy shorter that two cubits could be the keeper and preserved of the seven heavens . . .?"
Salahuddin Zarkub died in 1258. Hasamuddin Chelebi (Husam ad-Din Chelebi), one of Rumi's students, became for him a new mirror of Love in the world, which is the mirror of God. "The wine is one; only the vessel's changed – " Rumi said in a poem. During the following years, he composed the nearly 26,000 couplets of the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, but he did not mention Shams's name anymore. The work, published in six volumes, was never completed. His other major works include Ruba'iyyat, whose Istanbul edition consists of 3318 verses, Fihi ma fihi (The Discourses), Makatib (a collection of letters), and Majalis-i sab-ah, which consists of sermons and lectures. Rumi died in Konya on December 17, 1273. Christians and Jews joined his funeral procession, too. Rumi's cat died a week later and was buried close to his master.

Rumi remained a major influence upon Sufism. His followers have sometimes claimed to have experienced his nearness. In the English-speaking world  The Mathnawi of Jalalud'din Rumi (1925-40) by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson was the first major work on the Mathnawi. Nicholson's student, A.J. Arberry, translated its stories in lucid prose (Tales from the Masnavi, 1968). The translations of the American free verse poets Robert Bly and Coleman Barks have been immensely popular. Kabir Helminki's and Daniel Liebert's collections  embrace Rumi's ecstatic experience in free verse.

It is believed that Rumi created his poems in a state of ecstasy, accompanying his verses by a whirling dance. After Shams's death Rumi had started in his grief to circle a pole in his garden, and speak the poetry, which was written down by scribes. However, listening to music and ecstatic prayer rituals were already before Rumi features of Sufism. In the 12th century dervishes emerged throughout the Islamic world. Dance was a rhythmic expression of dhikr, an Arabic word meaning 'remembrance'. The repetition of religious formulas, the dhkir, was based on Gur'an: "O believers, remember God often and give him glory at dawn and in the evening."

In the simple reed flute Rumi saw the metaphor for himself: "Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale, complaining of separateness." The sama', the mystical dance, was for Rumi more than a technique for meditation, it was the cosmic truth, the manifestation of the secret power of God. The sun dances on the sky, the Eternal is the axis, and the entire universe is dancing and whirling around Him. "Whatever there is, is only He, / your foot steps there in dancing: / The whirling, see, belongs to you, / and you belong to the whirling."

Some of his poems

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks

This We Have Now

This we have now

is not imagination.

This is not 

grief or joy.

Not a judging state,

or an elation,

or sadness.

Those come and go. 

This is the presence that doesn't.

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks

There is a way between voice and presence

where information flows.

In disciplined silence it opens.

With wandering talk it closes.

     Moving Water

When  you do things from your soul, you feel a river

moving in you, a joy.

When actions come from another section, the feeling

disappears.  Don't let

others lead you.  They may be blind or, worse, vultures.

Reach for the rope

of God.  And what is that?  Putting aside self-will.

Because of willfulness

people sit in jail, the trapped bird's wings are tied,

fish sizzle in the skillet.

The anger of police is willfulness.  You've seen a magistrate

inflict visible punishment.  Now 

see the invisible.  If you could leave your selfishness, you

would see how you've

been torturing your soul.  We are born and live inside black water in a well.

How could we know what an open field of sunlight is? Don't

insist on going where

you think you want to go.  Ask the way to the spring.  Your

living pieces will form

a harmony.  There is a moving palace that floats in the air

with balconies and clear

water flowing through, infinity everywhere, yet contained

under a single tent.

From The Glance

by Coleman Barks

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.  I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn't make any sense.

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks

      Light Breeze

As regards feeling pain, like a hand cut in battle,

consider the body a robe

you wear.  When you meet someone you love, do you kiss their clothes?  Search out

who's inside.  Union with God is sweeter than body comforts.

We have hands and feet

different from these.  Sometimes in dream we see them.

That is not

illusion.  It's seeing truly.  You do have a spirit body;

don't dread leaving the

physical one.  Sometimes someone feels this truth so strongly

that he or she can live in

mountain solitude totally refreshed.  The worried, heroic

doings of men and women seem weary

and futile to dervishes enjoying the light breeze of spirit.

From Soul of Rumi

by Coleman Barks

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,

no light and no land anywhere,

cloudcover thick. I try to stay

just above the surface, 

yet I'm already under 

and living with the ocean.

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks

If you want what visible reality

can give, you're an employee.

If you want the unseen world,

you're not living your truth.

Both wishes are foolish,

but you'll be forgiven for forgetting

that what you really want is 

love's confusing joy.

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks

Only Breath

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu

Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East

or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not

composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or in the next,

did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace

of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two

worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that

breath breathing human being.

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks

Birdsong brings relief

to my longing

I'm just as ecstatic as they are,

but with nothing to say!

Please universal soul, practice

some song or something through me!

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks

Not Intrigued With Evening

What the material world values does

not shine the same in the truth of

the soul.  You have been interested

in your shadow.  Look instead directly

at the sun.  What can we know by just

watching the time-and-space shapes of

each other?  Someone half awake in the night sees imaginary dangers; the

morning star rises; the horizon grows

defined; people become friends in a

moving caravan.  Night birds may think

daybreak a kind of darkness, because

that's all they know.  It's a fortunate

bird who's not intrigued with evening,

who flies in the sun we call Shams.

From Soul of Rumi

by Coleman Barks

For awhile we lived with people, but we saw no sign in them of the faithfulness we wanted.  It's better to hide completely within 

as water hides in metal, as fire hides in rock.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.