The commodification of mysticism

The 800-year-old poetry of Sufi saint, Rumi, who was born in Afghanistan, lived in Turkey and wrote in Persian is being used today for geopolitical propaganda

Mehru Jaffer Vienna

Displayed on the same shelf as Tarot cards and books promising five steps to health and only three steps to wealth, the poetry of Rumi is said to make mystics out of millionaires. Now, Oliver Stone wants to film him, Material Girl likes to sing him, academics teach him, and publishers continue to print him.

“New age non-Islamic interpretation of Rumi's mysticism has given rise to a readership of strange bedfellows. Read both by Madonna and Muslims, ayatollahs and Americans, scholars and soccer moms, Rumi has sold more than half-a-million copies, dazzling the publishing industry and setting a 'Rumi phenomenon' that has spread like wildfire,” says Sheila Sheeren Akbar of Indiana University, USA.

Speaking at 'Wondrous Words: The Poetic Mastery of Jalal al-din Rumi', a conference hosted by the Iran Heritage Foundation in London last month, Akbar discussed Coleman Barks, the West's most prolific translator of Rumi, and his spiritual alignment with the work of the Persian poet who has always been precious to the Sufi tradition of the East ever since his birth 800 years ago.

The popularity of Rumi in the United States is recent and it is largely due to Barks whose The Essential Rumi was the first spark to light up hearts in America when it was published in 1995. Today, the interest in Rumi is varied. It ranges from genuine mysticism to the commercial and political. Quoting from Rumi: Past and Present, East and West, by Frank Lewis, Akbar says the West has a history of interpreting and using Rumi to different ends.

However, this behaviour is not confined to the West or to the past. UNESCO's participation in this year's celebration of Rumi's 800th birthday inspired a tug of war between Afghanistan, Turkey and Iran regarding Rumi's cultural and national affiliations.  “For purely political motives, each country has laid claim to Rumi using a logic that is faulty for several reasons, not least of which is that Rumi lived at a time before any of these countries existed and, moreover, at a time that pre-dated the idea of a nation-state or a corresponding national identity,” says Akbar.

In 2005, Barks travelled at the expense of the US State Department to Afghanistan as part of a public outreach speaker programme. In the birthplace of Rumi, Barks read his version in English. This was translated and followed by recitations of the original Rumi. In the following year, Barks was invited to Iran to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Tehran for spreading Rumi to the West. The three countries, otherwise at such odds with each other, agreed that Barks is their best cultural ambassador.

The 'essentialisation' and 'commoditisation' of Rumi, both in the West and the East, by people who differ politically, culturally and religiously, is a problem for some. What many imagine they know as Rumi is often only one interpretation of the poet. The Rumi that Americans enjoy through Barks, for example, is said to be different from the Rumi of the Muslim world.

Poetry does not play the same role in other cultures as it does in the USA. To many Muslims, Rumi does not offer poetry for enjoyment at leisure time but spiritual guidance to be practised at all times.   Of the ideal man of God, Rumi has this to say:

He is drunk without wine,

He is full without roast meat.

He is all confused, distraught,

He needs neither food nor sleep.

He is a king in a dervish frock,

He is a treasure in the dust.

He is not of air nor earth,

He is not of water, nor fire.

He is a boundless sea,

He rains pearls without cloud…

Akbar is uncertain if Barks himself is aware of this difference. The Rumi scholar suggests that having taken on the role of Rumi's mouthpiece and public relations person, Barks ought to be at least aware of how he and his translations are used as geopolitical propaganda.  “The current resurgence in the West clearly has to do with the accessibility of Rumi in a globalised world,” adds Nargis Virani, Assistant Professor, Arabic and Islamic Studies, New School, USA.

Rumi talks of human relationships in a world overawed by the corporate world and obsessed with contracts and copyrights. The poet talks of love in a loveless existence. He talks of love between human beings and, later, love between human beings and the divine.

“Above all, Rumi conveys the feeling that he understands love and is able to give love,” Virani says, confessing that the poetry of Rumi holds a magnetic attraction for her. And this magnet is so powerful that it pulls people to it like no other tradition is able to. This eternal power of Rumi's poetry coincides with the accessibility of his verses, now available in numerous languages.

“Rumi produced the finest Sufi poetry in Persian and was the master of disciples who later named their order after him. By virtue of the intense devotion he expressed towards his own master, Rumi has become the archetypal Sufi disciple. From that perspective, the unprecedented level of interest in Rumi's poetry over the last couple of decades in North America and Europe does not come as a total surprise,” writes Jawid Mojaddedi, Assistant Professor of Religion at Rutgers University in an introduction to a new translation by him of Rumi's Masnawi.

The Masnawi holds an exalted status in an already rich canon of Persian Sufi literature. It is the greatest mystical poem ever written and Mojaddedi's translation of Rumi's idea of a mentor is most beautiful:

The guide's the summer, others autumn's blight,

He's like the moon, while they're the dark at night.

According to Virani, in today's globalised world there is no East and West anymore. Urban Indians, she says, consume Rumi the same way as the West does. Extensive materialism and consumerism have fuelled an enormous sense of spiritual hunger everywhere. Rumi supplies this desperate demand for spirituality in a material world, where the pockets of the powerful are full but the souls empty.

Rumi's poetry is said to make the body feel that its soul has returned to it:

The Prophet said, 'The breaths that God exhales

In our own present time that's what prevails,

So always be attentive with your ears

To catch a breath before it disappears.'

A breath came, saw you, slowly travelled on,

Gave life to whom it wanted, then was gone,

Another breath will come soon, be prepared

So you don't miss this other one He's spared…

Rumi expresses universal thoughts that burst with pride for traditions rooted in time. He was born in Afghanistan, lived in Turkey and wrote in Persian. Amongst his numerous disciples were Arabs, Armenians and Greeks.

This was difficult to understand a few decades ago but large populations migrating in recent times from one continent to settle in another, like Rumi, identify with the plurality of his spirit and cosmopolitanism of his wondrous words:

Why think this way pious men

I am sober

I am neither a Muslim nor a Hindu

I am not Christian, Zoroastrian, nor Jew

I am neither of the West nor the East.

Not of the ocean, nor an earthly beast

I am neither a natural wonder

Nor from the stars yonder…

My place is the no place

My image is without face

Neither of body nor the soul

I am of the Divine Whole.

However, the host culture is often uncomfortable with the way Rumi is understood in different parts of the world. Barks, feel some, has uprooted Rumi out of his religious and cultural context. Yet, it is the universal interpretation of Rumi that popularised the poet in the western world and that same popularity returns, ironically, to haunt people of the poet's own culture.

“Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey could get the United Nations to declare 2007 as the Year of Rumi only because the poet is already well known today. A few decades ago this was unimaginable as few at UNESCO were familiar with Rumi,” says Virani.

The central theme of Rumi is simple as far as Professor Abdulkarim Soroush is concerned. The unassuming, soft-spoken Iranian thinker's views on Rumi are so lucid that they prick the conscience of the audience like deadly daggers.

Soroush says that if human beings are able to love the beloved creator unconditionally, the viciousness unleashed upon our world by selfish love will eventually evaporate and only selfless love will remain.

Is it not strange that a 13th century mystic from Balkh who worked in Anatolia and who was totally enraptured in a mystical love, the strength of which we can barely imagine, could have relevance for modern people in the 21st century?

“I do not think so,” the late Professor Annemarie Schimmel, foremost Rumi scholar who died in 2003 at the age of 80 years, answered her own question. For Schimmel, Rumi is anything but irrelevant because she found in his work so many guidelines for life. She found there the deep philosophy of prayer. When asked to sum up Rumi's life and philosophy in one of his verses, she chose the lines:

I have prayed so much that I have myself become prayer,

Whoever sees me wants a prayer from me.

Rumi is the master of prayer, of loving prayer, a prayer he knows that does not come from him but is, like everything else, a gift of the divine.