Rumi, Jalal al-Din

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Jalal al-Din Rumi

Personal

Born Jalal al-Din Mohammad-e Balkhi, September 30, 1207, in Balkh, Afghanistan; emigrated to Konya, Turkey, 1229; died December 17, 1273, in Konya, Turkey; son of Baha' al-Din-e Valad (a Hanafi Islam scholar and theologian) and Mo'mena Khatun; married Gauhar Khatun, 1224; children: two sons. Education: Educated by father, Baha' al-Din-e Valad; trained in Aleppo and Damascus; mentored by Shams al-Din Tabrizi, 1244-46. Religion: Sufi Muslim.

Career

Preacher and teacher, Konya, Turkey, 1241-73.

Writings

IN MODERN TRANSLATION

Mystical Poems of Rumi; First Selection, Poems 1-200, translated by A. J. Arberry, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1968.

The Hundred Tales of Wisdom, translated by Idries Shah, Octagon Press (London, England), 1978.

The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi, six volumes in three, translated and edited by Reynold A. Nicholson, Trustees of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial (Cambridge, England), 1990.

Mystical Poems of Rumi 2: Second Selection, Poems 201-400, translated by A. J. Arberry, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1991.

A Garden beyond Paradise, edited by Jonathan Star and Shahram Shiva, Bantam Books (New York, NY), 1992.

The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, Harper (San Francisco, CA), 1995.

The Illuminated Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, Broadway Books (New York, NY), 1997.

The Love Poems of Rumi, edited by Deeprak Chopra, Harmony (New York, NY), 1998.

The Glance: Songs of Soul-Meeting, translated by Coleman Barks, Viking/Arkana (New York, NY), 1999.

The Rumi Collection: An Anthology of Translations of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, selected and edited by Kabir Helminski, Shambhala (Boston, MA), 1999.

Teachings of Rumi, translated by Andrew Harvey, Shambhala (Boston, MA), 1999.

This Longing: Poetry, Teaching Stories, and Letters of Rumi, versions by Coleman Barks and John Moyne, Shambhala (Boston, MA), 2000.

The Illustrated Rumi: A Treasury of Wisdom from the Poet of the Soul, translated by R. A. Nicholson and Philip Dunn, HarperSanFrancisco (San Francisco, CA), 2000.

Love Is a Stranger: Selected Lyric Poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Kabir Edmund Helminski, Shambhala (Boston, MA), 2000.

The Pocket Rumi Reader, edited by Kabir Helminski, Shambhala (Boston, MA), 2000.

Discourses of Rumi, translated by A. J. Berry, Samuel Weiser (York Beach, ME), 2001.

Selected Poems from the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi: Along with the Original Persian, translated by Reynold A. Nicholson, Ibex (Bethesda, MD), 2001.

The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, translated by Coleman Barks, HarperSanFrancisco (San Francisco, CA), 2001.

Rumi: The Book of Love, translated by Coleman Barks, HarperSanFrancisco (San Francisco, CA), 2003.

Sidelights

The shelf life of a poet is long. That can be proved by the works of Persian and Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, whose works, composed in the thirteenth century, finally made inroads in the West in the late twentieth century. "It may be surprising to learn that one of the most popular and best-selling poets in the United States is . . . Rumi," wrote Carol Tell in Social Education. Time International reviewer Ptolemy Tompkins also commented on this phenomenon, noting that only the "rarest and luckiest of American poets" has had sales in the hundreds of thousands. But that is exactly what was happening with this "Muslim mystic born in Central Asia almost eight centuries ago," Tompkins added. The same critic also commented on the irony of such popularity for a Muslim poet after the September, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. But, according to Tompkins, "Rumi was, among many other things, a lover of irony, of the odd and absurd juxtapositions that life creates," so he may well have appreciated such a situation.

Rumi translator and scholar A. J. Arberry, writing in the foreword to his Mystical Poems of Rumi, called the Persian a "supreme genius of Islamic mysticism." Founder of the Sufi dancers popularly called Whirling Dervishes in the West, Rumi came to poetry late in life, experiencing something of a mid-life crisis of consciousness, and thereafter composing thousands of lines of poetry. Booklist contributorJohn Green dubbed Rumi the "poet laureate of Sufism," referring to the mystical branch of Islam. However, according to Tell, "like all great writers, Rumi's genius transcends specific labels." Tell further noted that a study of Rumi's life and work is "sheer aesthetic pleasure." For Tell, "Even students who espouse to 'hate poetry,' will come away with a newfound interest, even delight, in its ability to speak to universal themes, such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a chaotic age."

Roots in Central Asia

Born in 1207, the man the West came to call Rumi was born Jalal al-Din Mohammad-e Balkhi. In the Muslim world he is known as Maulana, Maulavi, or Mevlana, which means "my master." He was apparently born in the city of Balkh, near Maza-e Sharif in modern-day Afghanistan, though one source put his birth in a small town in what is now Tajikistan. Whichever the case, Central Asia was his homeland, the eastern shores of what was once the Persian Empire. He came from a long line of Islamic scholars. His father, Baha' al-Din-e Valad—also known as Baha' Walad—was supposedly descended from the first caliph, or religious leader, Abu Bakr. A Sunni Muslim, he was an expert in Hanafi law. An itinerant preacher and religious scholar, he was also a noted Sufi teacher with a small group of devoted students.

Rumi was born into a turbulent age, caught in the pincer between Crusaders to the west and the Mongol hordes to the east. It was from the latter that the family fled Afghanistan in about 1209, seeking safer shelter in Samarkand. However, with the Khwarazami siege of that city in 1212, it was clear to Baha' al-Din that they needed to seek safety in more distant lands. Thus, at about 1216 or perhaps later, the family moved further west into Anatolia, then ruled by the Seljuk Turks and where Persian was the court language. In Karaman, or the ancient Laranda in what is now south-central Turkey, Rumi's mother died. At about age seventeen, Rumi married and subsequently had two sons. Trained by his father, Rumi was also destined for a life of preaching and teaching. In 1229 the sultan of the Seljuks invited Baha' al-Din to the capital, Konya, to teach theology, and his son accompanied him. With his father's death a few years later, Rumi was sent off to Aleppo and Damascus in Syria to complete his own religious training, perhaps studying with the philosopher Ibn al-Arabi in the latter city. Meanwhile his father's protege, Borhan al-Din Mohaqqeq, took over Baha' al-Din's duties and disciples. With the death of Borhan in 1241, Rumi was next in line to assume the position of teacher in Konya.

Midlife Transformation

There had been nothing yet in Rumi's life to mark him for greatness. Yet, as a critic for Publishers Weekly explained, "When a pious professor in Anatolia underwent a series of ecstatic friendships in midlife, he produced some astounding mystical poetry." The first of these friendships was with an itinerant religious scholar and mystic named Shams al-Din Tabrizi, who arrived in Konya in 1244. Shams was a strong believer in non-pretentious spirituality and, despite the strong education and disciplines taught to him by his father, Rumi became a disciple to Shams. The two were seldom out of each other's company for months, and Shams' insistence on a direct experience of God, unfiltered through books, resonated with his new follower. From this point on Rumi became a disciple of the ecstatic; for him the path to real enlightenment was via an intensely personal

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relationship with God. However, after about eighteen months, Shams disappeared. Legend here engulfs history: it was said that Shams returned only to disappear again, or that Rumi's students, jealous of the new interloper, had Shams killed.

Whatever the case, by about 1248 Rumi was mourning the loss of his great friend in verse and in dance. His whirling and circling dance, accompanied by pipes and drums, began as an attempt to alleviate the anguish of loss; it was later adapted by Rumi's disciples, the Mevlevi. A religious group in part founded by Rumi's patron, the Sultan Valad, the Mevlevi became known as the order of the Whirling Dervishes. Rumi transformed almost overnight, moving from being a quiet and painstaking religious scholar to becoming an ecstatic visionary who, for the rest of his days, devoted himself to mystical writing and worship.At first, Rumi's literary production was expressed as the voice of Shams; indeed one of Rumi's major verse works, Diwan-e Shams-e Tabiz, or "The Collected Poems of Shams," is dedicated and partially written in the voice of his mentor. However, Rumi soon found his own voice, and his greatest work, Mathnawi, or "Spiritual Couplets," has often been called a Persian Koran. This work was inspired by Rumi's relationship with another mystic, Husam al-Din Chelebi. A series of three volumes of over 25,000 lines, the Mathnawi is a collection of learning and teaching fables, parables, tales, and allegories, some no more than a page in length. Rumi ranges in his subject matter from the saints of Islam to mystical interpretations of life, as well as commentaries on the Koran, all done in his clear and ecstatic prose verse. Dictated to a scribe, the volumes have the feel of the spoken word. The Mathnawi is still the most widely read poem in the Muslim world. For Tompkins, this "masterpiece" is a "fantastical, oceanic mishmash of folktales, philosophical speculation and lyric ebullience in which the worldly and the otherworldly, the secular and the sacred, blend constantly."

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Rumi's Diwan-e Shams-e Tabriz, on the other hand, is a collection of lyrical, mystical poems of more than 40,000 lines. Here are gathered love poems and devotionals, including two thousand of the quatrains called rubaiyat. These books of verse, though different in content, have a common thread, as Rumi scholar and translator Reynolds A. Nicholson noted in Rumi: Poet and Mystic: they all suggest the "very madness of divine experience." Additionally, there are several prose works attributed to Rumi, recorded and transcribed by his students and disciples from his lectures and sermons. These include Fihe ma fih, or "Discourses," Majales-e sab'a, seven sermons designed for formal occasions, and Maktubat, or "Letters."

The Rumi Industry

Rumi died on December 17, 1273, in Konya, and so well known was he in his day that representatives of all major religions attended his funeral. He was not the first great Sufi poet, but his wholehearted embrace of the ecstatic set him apart. While Rumi did not invent the Whirling dance of the Dervishes—a similar dance was known to exist in Baghdad a century earlier—he adapted this spinning motion by putting it to music and verse, turning the dance into an ecstatic celebration. What appealed to the Muslims of his day, and to Muslims and non-Muslims alike in the modern world, appears to be his use of sensual symbols. Metaphors involving wine and taverns often show up in the poems, and allusions to drunkenness represent how a person might become drunk also with the love of God. As Tell noted, "In Rumi's work, wine often symbolizes such divine love; a cup is the mind and body of man; and the cupbearer is God, who fills our empty souls with wine." Other metaphors include the use of the nightingale for the soul, the sun for enlightenment or a teacher, and winter for a soul cut off from God. Rumi, in his verses, eternally questions orthodoxy. Sufis, in fact, believe in a direct connection to God; they also believe in the teachings of the Koran, but for them the mystical, direct experience is most important. Knowing love in all its manifestations and seeing God in everything and everybody is the primary goal of Sufism.

In many ways it is this insistence on the personal connection that has made Rumi so popular in the West. More than seven hundred years after his death, his popularity in countries such as the United States eclipses that of homegrown contemporary poets. Coleman Barks, a poet and retired professor, has been credited, among others, with bringing Rumi to a wide international audience. Though he does not speak Persian or Farsi, Barks works from direct literal translations of the poems and then styles them into more contemporary language. Rumi's earthiness and his questioning of authority—in this case traditional Islam—are both part of what has become a winning formula for this Sufi master's works. Over a quarter million copies of Rumi's works adapted by Barks are in print.

Such a resurgence of interest has not come without costs, however. Rumi scholars such as Franklin D. Lewis have warned that taking Rumi out of context dilutes his true meaning. While Rumi, as Tompkins noted, "invited his listener or reader to leave the yesses and nos of conventional belief behind, he did so as a card-carrying member of a culture that unquestionably accepted Muhammad as the Seal of the Prophets, and the Koran as God's last work, dictated verbatim by the angel Gabriel." To lose this context is also to lose "a certain tension," according to Tompkins, and to present instead a series of "harmless ecstatic bonbons that soothe and mirror contemporary Western tastes and sensibilities rather than potentially enlarging or changing them."

If you enjoy the works of Jalal al-Din Rumi

If you enjoy the works of Jalal al-Din Rumi, you may also want to check out the following books:

Sania, The Walled Garden of Truth, 1974.

Farid Ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, 1984.

Hafiz, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master, 1999.

Such criticism aside, the Rumi resurgence was credited with bringing a large number of new readers to poetry. His simple, direct message, has been compared to the work of nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, in fact, was supposedly influenced by the works of Rumi in creating his transcendentalist philosophy. Rumi's meditations on the meaning of life and God speak across the centuries and helped to bridge the gulf in cultures and religions that was increasingly apparent by the turn of the twenty-first century.

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Chittick, William, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, State University of New York (Albany, NY), 1983.

Harvey, Andrew, The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam (New York, NY), 2001.

Iqbal, Afzal, The Life and Work of Muhammad Jalal-ud-Din Rumi, 3rd edition, Institute of Islamic Studies (Lahore, India), 1974.

Lewis, Franklin D., Rumi Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teaching and Poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi, Oneworld (Boston, MA), 2000.

Nicholson, Reynolds A., Rumi: Poet and Mystic, Allen and Unwin (London, England), 1950, p. 25.

Schimmel, Annemarie, The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi, revised edition, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1993.

Wines, Leslie, Rumi: A Spiritual Biography, Crossroad 8th Avenue (New York, NY), 2001.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 1999, Patricia Monaghan, review of The Glance: Songs of Soul-Meeting, p. 218; February 1, 2001, John Green, review of The Illustrated Rumi: A Treasury of Wisdom from the Poet of the Soul, p. 1034; October 1, 2001, John Green, review of The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems, p. 278.

Geographical, June, 2002, Kamin Mohammadi, "Spin City," p. 84.

Publishers Weekly, October 26, 1992, review of A Garden beyond Paradise: The Mystical Poetry of Rumi, p. 60; July 12, 1999, review of Teachings of Rumi, p. 91.

Social Education, May-June, 2002, Carol Tell, "A Poet and a Mystic: Jalaluddin Rumi," p. 204.

Time International, October 7, 2002, Ptolemy Tompkins, "Rumi Rules!," p. 62.