Rumi

Jalal al-Din Rumi

The great poem of Rumi's life opens with a sound. A reed has been cut from the reed-bed and hollowed into a flute, and when a breath passes through it, what comes out is a complaint: "Hearken to the reed-flute, how it complains, lamenting its banishment from its home." The reed cries because it has been torn from the bed where it grew, and its music is nothing but that longing made audible. You are the reed, Rumi tells the reader. The soul is a fragment of the divine that has been severed from its source and set down in the world, and everything it calls music, art, love, religion, is the sound of its ache to return. The whole of his philosophy is folded into that first image, and the rest of the Masnavi unfolds it.

Exile and return. Rumi's metaphysics is a metaphysics of separation. All things flow out from the One and yearn to flow back, and the human soul is the place where that yearning becomes conscious of itself. Existence, for the separated soul, is exile, and the pain of being cut off is not a problem to be solved but the very evidence of where one came from and the engine that drives the return. A reader who has spent time with Plotinus will recognize the shape, the going-out from the source and the climbing back to it, but Rumi sets it to music and makes the longing itself the path. The ache is not in the way of the journey; the ache is the journey.

Love moves the worlds. The force that draws the exile home Rumi calls love, and he means by it not a feeling but the deepest principle of the cosmos. Love is the gravity of the universe, the pull by which everything leans toward the One, and it turns the spheres and stirs the smallest atom. God is the Beloved, the soul is the lover, and the lover is consumed by the longing for a union in which the distance between the two is finally undone. Where the philosophers reasoned their way toward the first cause, Rumi insists that only love arrives, because only love is willing to be burned away in the approach. The intellect, he says in a famous image, is a donkey stuck in the mud when the road turns toward the Beloved.

Die before you die. The union the soul longs for has a price, and the price is the soul's own separateness. The Sufi name for it is fana, the passing-away of the ego, the annihilation of the little self that stands like a veil between the lover and the Beloved; and beyond it lies baqa, the abiding in God that remains when the veil is gone. Rumi compresses the teaching into a maxim, die before you die: undo the grasping, defended self now, while you live, so that what is left can be filled with the divine. This is not despair of life but its intensification, the conviction that the self we cling to is exactly the thing keeping us from the only union worth having.

Shams. The turn from scholar to poet has a name: Shams of Tabriz. Rumi was a respected jurist and teacher in Konya, learned and settled, when a wandering dervish named Shams arrived and set his whole ordered life on fire. In the friendship that followed, Rumi found divine love mirrored in a human face, and when Shams vanished from his life, the grief and the longing poured out as thousands of ecstatic lyrics, gathered in the Divan named not for their author but for the beloved who had awakened them, the Divan-i Shams-i Tabriz. The encounter is Rumi's living proof of his own doctrine, that the love of the Beloved seen in another is a window onto the love of the One.

The turning. Rumi's followers became the Mevlevi order, the dervishes the West knows for their whirling, and the dance is not decoration but doctrine in motion. The dervish turns because the cosmos turns, because the planets and the atoms are already dancing their circles around the center, and to spin with one hand raised to the sky and one turned to the earth is to take one's place in that cosmic revolution, a remembrance of God carried out by the whole body until the separate self loosens and falls away. Theology, for the Mevlevis, is something you do with your feet.

What this room reads. The corpus carries two public-domain translations. E. H. Whinfield's abridged Masnavi i Ma'navi (1887) is the great didactic poem, the vast weave of stories, parables, and teaching that later readers called the Qur'an in the Persian tongue. R. A. Nicholson's Selected Poems from the Divan-i Shams-i Tabriz (1898) is the ecstatic lyric side. Both come from Internet Archive scans with some OCR noise, and citations run by work and, where possible, book or poem. Rumi wrote in Persian, and the room reads him in these early English versions; Nicholson's later complete Masnavi and modern translations are only partly in the public domain, and the chat says when it reaches past the corpus.

By some measures Rumi is the best-selling poet in America, but the figure on the calendars and in the wedding readings is a sanitized ghost, the Islam and the rigorous mysticism scrubbed away until only a soft glow remains. The real Rumi is a Muslim sage steeped in the Qur'an and the Sufi tradition, a philosopher of love and union as demanding as any thinker of the medieval world. He stands downstream of Ghazali, who had made it possible to be at once a Sufi and an orthodox Muslim, and of the philosophical tradition of Avicenna that he by turns mocked and used; his arc of exile and return rhymes with Plotinus, and his union of the soul with God rhymes with Meister Eckhart in the Christian West. Muhammad Iqbal, the great modern philosopher and poet of the Muslim world, took Rumi as his master and made him the guide of his own long poems. Read whole, and in something closer to his own voice than the mugs allow, Rumi is the reed still sounding its way home, and the sound is a complete metaphysics.