All you need is love: Why Rumi lives inside everyone in times of gloom
There may not be a Shams around to guide us and lend a helping hand, but there is a bit of Rumi inside each one of us. He resides in every heart that's loved and lost, and understands that a man who knows no love knows no sorrow. He resides in a heart that confides, 'I once had a thousand desires but in my one desire to know you, all else melted away.'
Each heart reverberates to Rumi. Ask Coleman Barks, whose works on Rumi can light up the gloomiest of evenings besides filling up your bookshelf. As Robert Bly once wrote, recommending Barks' The Essential Rumi, 'Coleman Barks has brought an immense gift to the study of Islamic poetry. His versions, witty and touched by Southern courtesy, support an exuberant Rumi never achieved before in English.'
Room for conversation
A few pages into the book, and one realises there is a bit of Rumi to take away from each poem. For instance, 'The Far Mosque', where Rumi, alluding to Suleiman, one of the prophets of Islam, writes, 'The place that Solomon made to worship in, called the Far Mosque, is not built of earth and water and stone, but of intention and wisdom and mystical conversation and compassionate action/Every part of it is intelligence and responsive to every other.'
Called Jelaluddin Balkhi by the Afghans, where he was born in 1207, the fear of the rampaging Mongols forced his family to migrate to Konya in Turkey. The son of a well-respected theologian father, Rumi was initially an orthodox scholar of Islam. It all changed with a chance meeting with a wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz. The two became inseparable.
Even as a debate rages about the nature of their relationship, most agree that Shams did become Rumi's mentor. So much so that even after Shams was probably murdered, Rumi continued to believe that Shams was now part of him, and when he wrote his poetry, it was Shams writing through him.
The making of a mystic
Brad Gooch, an authority on Rumi, writes in Rumi's Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love, 'of the disruptive appearance of Shams' who 'taught him to whirl and transformed him from a respectable Muslim preacher into a poet and a mystic'. Such indecipherable love led to millions reading Rumi to turn a mirror to their inner selves. A Rumi reader is an explorer, a seeker. Rumi, writes Gooch, 'made claims for a religion of love' that went beyond organised faith.
Rumi was a font from which everyone drank and came back richer, wiser. Today, he is the best-selling poet in the U.S. and his words have soothed musicians like Madonna and Chris Martin during challenging times in their lives with the latter often quoting one of Rumi's poems, 'This being human is a guest house/Every morning a new arrival/ A joy, a depression, a meanness/some momentary awareness comes/ as an unexpected visitor.'
Unsurprisingly, the Rumi books keep coming. Noted author-translator Farrukh Dhondy has just penned Rumi: A New Selection (HarperPerennial), wherein he explains the reason for the abiding love for Rumi. Dhondy writes in a book itself deserving of much love and re-reading, 'The sales of his books in American translation surpass those of William Shakespeare, John Keats, T.S. Eliot...Why? Rumi's great work, the 'Masnavi', is sometimes dubbed 'the Quran in verse'. It certainly is devoted to Islam, but to a version and interpretation of Islam with a long and widely adopted history loosely referred to in all its variations as 'Sufism'.'
Dedicated to the divine
Interestingly, most of his ardent fans are not followers of Islam. They come to Rumi for mystical self-realisation. And for love. Dhondy analyses, 'Rumi's verse doesn't celebrate explicit Romeo and Juliet interaction. The 'love' it celebrates can never be interpreted as the desperate emotion one has for the girl next door. The love expressed in Rumi's works, the six volumes and twenty-four thousand verses of the Masnavi, his Diwan-i-Shams dedicated to his inspiration and 'lover' Shams-u-Tabrez, and in his discourses and lectures, is a dedication to the divine....When Rumi openly professes 'love' for his inspiration and spiritual partner, Shams, it's not an expression of a gay relationship, but rather a metaphor for a divine bond, a union of individual souls in a universal soul.'
Not known to many, Shams himself had great respect for Rumi's acumen, learning and intellect. And Shams, as Dhondy quotes Franklin Lewis, 'specifically says that there was no question of him being the master and Rumi the pupil'.
Let the scholars agree to disagree; the joy is in discovering Rumi all over again, with each new book, each new author. Whether one is seeking love or languishing without it, Rumi's words provide a fine accompaniment. As disclosed in Rumi's Little Book of Life by Maryam Mafi and Azima Kolin, 'Do not grieve over past joys, be sure they will reappear in another form. A child's joy is in milk and nursing but once weaned, it finds new joy in bread and honey... In sleep when the soul leaves the body you may dream of yourself as a tall cypress or as a beautiful rose, but be warned, my friend, all these phantoms dissolve into thin air once the soul returns to the body'.
Of dreams, love, past and present, body and soul, Rumi's works encapsulate them all. Never quite like a Persian miniature garden, more like a walk in the wilds, full of the joy of the unseen.
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