RUMI : HIS MYSTIC LIFE AND SUFISM.
by Jubairul Hasan Arif
What shall I say in praising this lofty personality?
He is not a prophet,
but he has a book!
| Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273) |
This is how Jami, the famous Persian poet, praisedp
Muhammad Jalaluddin Rumi, the mystic Islamic poet whose
impact on Sufism is difficult to overstate. Teacher, preacher,
poet, humanist, pious Muslim and mystic visionary, Rumi
came to be a powerful spiritual influence not only in the
Persian-speaking world, including Afghanistan and Central
Asia, but also amongst the Turks, and in South Asia. Rumi’s
sobriquet — he is called “Mawlawi” by the Persians,
“Mevlana” by the Turks and “Mawlana” in the Indo-Pakistan
subcontinent — derives from the Arabic for “our leader”.
Born in 1207 in Balkh, Afghanistan, he settled in Iconium,
now Konya, Turkey. Sage and poet, his tomb in Konya is a
place of pilgrimage for the pious and questing. Because of
the Byzantine past of this Anatolian region, it retained the
name Rum (“Rome”) amongst the Turks; and it was from
this that Jalaluddin came to be known as ar-Rumi, “the man
from Rum”. He was so transformed by Shams-e Tabrizi that
he transcended his allegiance to traditional Islam, became a
universal mystic who was knowledgeable about other
religions, was indifferent to the distinctions between forms
of worship, and cared little about the religious adherence of
people who were attracted to him. However, there is little
evidence that he knew much about other religions, other than
what he learned from a traditional Islamic education.
His doctrine advocates unlimited tolerance, positive
reasoning, goodness, charity and awareness through love. To
him and to his disciples all religions are more or less truth.
Looking with the same eye on Muslim, Jew and Christian
alike, his peaceful and tolerant teaching has appealed to
people of all sects and creeds. Like Shakespeare’s sonnets
and plays, Rumi’s writing maintains a vitality no matter how
often it’s tweeted, instagrammed, or recited as part of a pop
song.
The general theme of Rumi's thought, like that of other
mystic and Sufi poets of Persian literature, is that of
tawhid — union with the Beloved, from whom he sees
himself as being cut off and aloof. His longing and desire to
attain it is evident in the following poem from his book the
Mathawi:
I died to the mineral state and became a plant,
I died to the vegetable state and reached animality,
I died to the animal state and became a man,
Then what should I fear? I have never become less from
dying.
At the next charge (forward) I will die to human nature,
So that I may lift up (my) head and wings (and soar)
among the angels,
And I must (also) jump from the river of (the state of) the
angel,
Everything perishes except His Face,
Once again I will become sacrificed from (the state of) the
angel,
I will become that which cannot come into the imagination,
Then I will become non-existent; non-existence says to me
(in tones) like an organ,
Truly, to Him is our return.
What do we need to know to receive the knowledge that
Rumi offers us?
First of all, it needs to be understood that Rumi's tradition
is not an "Eastern" tradition. It is neither of the East nor of
the West, but something in between. Rumi's mother-tongue
was Persian, an Indo-European language strongly influenced
by Semitic (Arabic) vocabulary, something like French with
a smattering of Hebrew.
Furthermore, the Islamic tradition, which shaped him,
acknowledges that only one religion has been given to
mankind through countless prophets, or messengers, who
have come to every people on earth bearing this knowledge
of Spirit. God is the subtle source of all life, Whose essence
cannot be described or compared to anything, but Who can
be known through the spiritual qualities that are manifest in
the world and in the human heart. It is a deeply mystical
tradition, on the one hand, with a strong and clear emphasis
on human dignity and social justice, on the other.
Islam is understood as a continuation of the Judeo-Christian
or Abrahamic tradition, honoring the Hebrew prophets, as
well as Jesus and Mary. Muslims, however, are very
sensitive to the issue of attributing divinity to a human
being, which they see as the primary error of Christianity.
although Jesus is called the in the Qur'an "the Spirit of
God," it would be thought a blasphemy to identify any
human being exclusively as God. Muhammad (sm) is viewed
as the last of those human prophets who brought the
message of God's love.
high level of spiritual awareness among the general
population. The average person would be someone who
performed regular ablutions and prayed five times a day,
fasted from food and drink during the daylight hours for at
least one month a year, and closely followed a code which
emphasized the continual remembrance of God, intention,
integrity, generosity, and respect for all life. Although the
Mathnawi can appeal to us on many levels, it assumes a
rather high level of spiritual awareness as a starting point
and extends to the very highest levels of spiritual
understanding.
The unenlightened human state is one of "faithlessness" in
which an individual lives in slavery to the false self and the
desires of the materials world. The spiritual practices which
Rumi would have known were aimed at transforming the
compulsiveness of the false self and attaining Islam or
"Submission" to a higher order of reality. Without this
submission the real self is enslaved to the ego and lives in a
state of internal conflict due to the contradictory impulses of
the ego. The enslaved ego is cut off from the heart, the
chief organ for perceiving reality, and cannot receive the
spiritual guidance and nourishment which the heart provides.
Overcoming this enslavement and false separation leads to
the realization and development of our true humanity.
spiritual maturity is the realization that the self is a
reflection of the Divine. God is the Beloved or Friend, the
transpersonal identity. Love of God leads to the lover
forgetting himself in the love of the Beloved.
His poetry is filled with references to the Quran and the
Traditions of the Prophet Muḥammad. For example, he wrote
about his masterpiece, the Mathnawi, as “the roots of the
roots of the roots of ‘the Religion’ (of Islam) in regard to
unveiling the secrets of obtaining connection (with God) and
(spiritual) certainty (of the Truth)… it is the remedy for
hearts, the brightening polish for sorrows, the revealer of
(the meanings of) the Quran …”. He said, “I am the servant of the Quran as long
as I have life. I am the dust on the path of Muḥammad, the
Chosen one. If anyone quotes anything except this from my
sayings, I am quit of him and outraged by these words”. And
he also said, “Now, you should know that Muḥammad (sm)
is the leader and guide. As long as you don’t come to
Muḥammad first, you won’t reach us”.
Pakistan's National Poet, Allama Iqbal , was inspired by
Rumi's works and considered him to be his spiritual leader,
addressing him as "Pir Rumi" in his poems. “I’m a
mountain. You call, I echo.” He said Rumi was a great
messenger, who used the language of love. He said it had
been seven centuries since the poet passed away but his
verses penetrated centuries to reach our time. He said his
voice was waiting for the right person to convey his
message and then came Iqbal to convey that.
In a recent article of The New Yorker ,
The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi, Rozina Ali
traces how Rumi’s Western translators, beginning from the
Victorian era, have extracted Islamic references and
sensibilities from Rumi’s canon of work.
Here the author's contention is that Rumi’s poetry has been
decoupled by his English translators from its
Islamic context, and that way they have effaced “historical
dynamism” within the Muslim scholarship. Because “Rumi’s
works reflected a broader push and pull between religious
spirituality and institutionalised faith” in the Islamic
civilization.
Omid Safi, a professor of Islamic studies at Duke University,
who believes that reading Rumi without the Holy Quran is
akin to reading Milton without the Bible; and, while one can
appreciate Rumi’s heterodoxy but at the same time that
heterodoxy has to be contextualised within the Islamic
history. And such contextualisation allows readers to
appreciate that the Islamic culture in the thirteenth century
“had room for such heterodoxy”. And, that an Islamic
scholar of Sharia could also write widely read poetry of love.
The first thing that we need to understand is that
Islamophobia is well-entrenched in the West’s psyche, the
reasons for which goes far back to its Orientalist tradition
which viewed Islam with some degree of suspicion.
As Edward Said brilliantly explained in his book Orientalism ,
the certain negative representation of the oriental people
(including Muslims) and their cultures served to justify
colonial imperialism and to build a positive self-image of
Europeans as enlightened and cultured. In the present times,
such negative representations of Muslims have a market (it
is more exciting and sellable for corporate media) and
geopolitical utility (to make militaristic Middle East policies
more palatable to the public). Anti-Muslim views persist,
because the media and academia plays a big role in it.
in 2017, my university friend, Hakim, walked into the park
and he, surprised on seeing my another friend Mahmud
Shihab's newly grown beard, remarked with a toothy grin:
“Now you look like a terrorist. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Of course he said this in jest, but I was deeply offended.
However, the lesson this episode brought to me was this:
your ardently secular, Rumi-loving friend may be nurturing
racist, bigoted views without even realizing it.
