One of my favorite poets is Jalaludin Rumi, a medieval Islamic scholar, Sufi mystic, jurist and, by most accounts, good dancer, who lived in 13th century Turkey. For some years now, Rumi has been gaining a following in the United States, thanks in part to the free verse translations of Coleman Barks. And while thousands of Americans like myself have come to love Rumi's poetry, I started to wonder how Rumi's legacy fares in the land of his birth, Afghanistan, from whence he fled at the hooves of Mongol hordes, and which, as you may have noticed, is still having problems with authoritarian fanatics.
I also was curious to see how popular Rumi is in the land of his language, Persia, which has likewise tended towards the brute and un-poetic for a couple of decades.
These questions while perhaps only of interest to those hip enough to appreciate Rumi seem to have wider ramifications that touch common human concerns. Can poetry survive under the heel of death squads and fundamentalism? And can a great Sufi poet like Rumi instead of so many petty Jihadist diehards be made to speak once again for the true spirit of Islam?
I stumbled across a BBC News Service article titled "The Roar of Rumi, 800 Years On," that dealt with this very topic. As of two years ago, at least, Rumi was regaining massive popularity in the newly democratic and liberated Afghanistan, according to the article.
In the 1980s, poetry was discouraged in Afghanistan due to its reactionary, backward qualities. More recently, during the truly reactionary rule of the Taliban, music was banned, Sufi mystics were persecuted and Rumi was made anathema.
But in today's society, as more bright faces are being freed from the mandatory hijab, Rumi is ascendant. According to the BBC's report, as economic conditions in Afghanistan improved, and the threat of imminent death subsided, people found themselves with more leisure time to dig into poetry.
I ran into Professor Gene Garthwaite, the College's Persian historian, at a history department open house, and I queried him on Rumi's status in Iran. He told me that the Ayatollahs generally look down on Sufism and on Rumi, but that the two are so ingrained in popular culture that they are impossible to eradicate. There is a strong oral tradition of reciting Rumi's works even Ayatollah Khomeini tried his hand at mystic poetry (though he was later embarrassed by his attempt). Although Iranian clerics would probably like to eradicate Sufism, they have been far less successful than the Taliban once was.
The ascendancy of such repressive fundamentalists as those formerly in Afghanistan, and those currently in Iran, is due in part to the tendency of religious believers to follow the group that offers the most brute and literal interpretation of a faith. I recall reading an interview with Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens), in which he explained that he would only do music with vocals and percussion, and that he embraced Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence of Salman Rushdie, because his conservative friends had told him that this was the most safely Islamic route. But who are these pompous men to presume to have the franchise on Muhammad? Who says that executing blasphemers and stringed-instrument-free music are truly Islamic?
Although fundamentalists speak garbage, we cannot allow them to sour us on entire religions. Rumi and his fellow Sufis are far older than modern radical Jihadists, who have undeserved influence over those seeking Islam. These reactionaries are really just recent 19th to 20th century perversions of the faith the true soul of Islam is not inimical to art, but celebrates instead the divine through many forms of praise. Unfortunately, I rarely see this positive side of Islam recognized by anyone at all.
Perhaps Rumi himself put the true Islamic spirit best: "Come, come, whoever you are, / Wanderer, idolater, worshiper of fire, / Come even though you have broken your vows a thousand times, / Come, and come yet again. / Ours is not a caravan of despair."
Why then do we presume such caravans of despair to carry the weight of a religion, when they really hold nothing but bags of dust? The peaceful Sufi side of Islam should be more widely understood.
