{"id":163622,"date":"2020-07-20T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2020-07-20T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=163622"},"modified":"2020-06-26T06:59:31","modified_gmt":"2020-06-26T05:59:31","slug":"the-erasure-of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/07\/the-erasure-of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumi\/","title":{"rendered":"The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>

Rumi<\/p><\/div>\n

A few years ago, when Coldplay\u2019s Chris Martin was going through a divorce from the actress Gwyneth Paltrow and feeling down, a friend gave him a book to lift his spirits. It was a collection of poetry by Jalaluddin Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, translated by Coleman Barks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt kind of changed my life,<\/em>\u201d Martin said later<\/a>, in an interview. A track from Coldplay\u2019s most recent album features Barks reciting one of the poems<\/a>: \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Rumi has helped the spiritual journeys of other celebrities\u2014Madonna, Tilda Swinton\u2014some of whom similarly incorporated his work into theirs. Aphorisms attributed to Rumi circulate daily on social media, offering motivation. \u201cIf you are irritated by every rub, how will you ever get polished,\u201d one of them goes. Or, \u201cEvery moment I shape my destiny with a chisel. I am a carpenter of my own soul.\u201d Barks\u2019s translations, in particular, are shared widely on the Internet; they are also the ones that line American bookstore shelves and are recited at weddings. Rumi is often described as the best-selling poet in the United States<\/a>. He is typically referred to as a mystic, a saint, a Sufi, an enlightened man. Curiously, however, although he was a lifelong scholar of the Koran and Islam, he is less frequently described as a Muslim.<\/p>\n

The words that Martin featured on his album come from Rumi\u2019s \u201cMasnavi,\u201d a six-book epic poem that he wrote toward the end of his life. Its fifty thousand lines are mostly in Persian, but they are riddled with Arabic excerpts from Muslim scripture; the book frequently alludes to Koranic anecdotes that offer moral lessons. (The work, which some scholars consider unfinished, has been nicknamed the Persian Koran.) Fatemeh Keshavarz, a professor of Persian studies at the University of Maryland, told me that Rumi probably had the Koran memorized, given how often he drew from it in his poetry. Rumi himself described the \u201cMasnavi\u201d as \u201cthe roots of the roots of the roots of religion\u201d\u2014meaning Islam\u2014\u201cand the explainer of the Koran.\u201d And yet little trace of the religion exists in the translations that sell so well in the United States. \u201cThe Rumi that people love is very beautiful in English, and the price you pay is to cut the culture and religion,\u201d Jawid Mojaddedi, a scholar of early Sufism at Rutgers, told me recently.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Rumi was born in the early thirteenth century, in what is now Afghanistan. He later settled in Konya, in present-day Turkey, with his family. His father was a preacher and religious scholar, and he introduced Rumi to Sufism. Rumi continued his theological education in Syria, where he studied the more traditional legal codes of Sunni Islam, and later returned to Konya as a seminary teacher. It was there that he met an elder traveller, Shams-i-Tabriz, who became his mentor. The nature of the intimate friendship between the two is much debated, but Shams, everyone agrees, had a lasting influence on Rumi\u2019s religious practice and his poetry. In a new biography of Rumi, \u201cRumi\u2019s Secret<\/a>,\u201d Brad Gooch describes how Shams pushed Rumi to question his scriptural education, debating Koranic passages with him and emphasizing the idea of devotion as finding oneness with God. Rumi would come to blend the intuitive love for God that he found in Sufism with the legal codes of Sunni Islam and the mystical thought he learned from Shams.<\/p>\n

This unusual tapestry of influences set Rumi apart from many of his contemporaries, Keshavarz told me. Still, Rumi built a large following in cosmopolitan Konya, incorporating Sufis, Muslim literalists and theologians, Christians, and Jews, as well as the local Sunni Seljuk rulers. In \u201cRumi\u2019s Secret,\u201d Gooch helpfully chronicles the political events and religious education that influenced Rumi. \u201cRumi was born into a religious family and followed the proscribed rules of daily prayer and fasting throughout his entire life,\u201d Gooch writes. Even in Gooch\u2019s book, though, there is a tension between these facts and the desire to conclude that Rumi, in some sense, transcended his background\u2014that, as Gooch puts it, he \u201cmade claims for a \u2018religion of love\u2019 that went beyond all organized faiths.\u201d What can get lost in such readings is the extent to which Rumi\u2019s Muslim teaching shaped even those ideas. As Mojadeddi notes, the Koran acknowledges Christians and Jews as \u201cpeople of the book,\u201d offering a starting point toward universalism. \u201cThe universality that many revere in Rumi today comes from his Muslim context.\u201d<\/p>\n

The erasure of Islam from Rumi\u2019s poetry started long before Coldplay got involved. Omid Safi, a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at Duke University, says that it was in the Victorian period that readers in the West began to uncouple mystical poetry from its Islamic roots. Translators and theologians of the time could not reconcile their ideas about a \u201cdesert religion,\u201d with its unusual moral and legal codes, and the work of poets like Rumi and Hafez. The explanation they settled on, Safi told me, was \u201cthat these people are mystical not because of Islam but in spite of it.\u201d This was a time when Muslims were singled out for legal discrimination\u2014a law from 1790 curtailed the number of Muslims who could come into the United States, and a century later the U.S. Supreme Court described the \u201cintense hostility of the people of Moslem faith to all other sects, and particularly to Christians.\u201d In 1898, in the introduction to his translation of the \u201cMasnavi,\u201d Sir James Redhouse wrote, \u201cThe Masnavi<\/em> addresses those who leave the world, try to know and be with God, efface their selves and devote themselves to spiritual contemplation.\u201d For those in the West, Rumi and Islam were separated.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the twentieth century, a succession of prominent translators\u2014among them R. A. Nicholson, A. J. Arberry, and Annemarie Schimmel\u2014strengthened Rumi\u2019s presence in the English-language canon. But it\u2019s Barks who vastly expanded Rumi\u2019s readership. He is not a translator so much as an interpreter: he does not read or write Persian. Instead, he transforms nineteenth-century translations into American verse.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s verse of a very particular kind. Barks was born in 1937 and grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He received his Ph.D. in English literature and published his first book of poetry, \u201cThe Juice,\u201d in 1971. The first time he heard of Rumi was later that decade, when another poet, Robert Bly, handed him a copy of translations by Arberry and told him that they had to be \u201creleased from their cages\u201d\u2014that is, put into American free verse. (Bly, who has published poetry in The New Yorker<\/em><\/a> for more than thirty years\u2014and whose book \u201cIron John: A Book About Men,\u201d from 1990, greatly informed the modern men\u2019s movement\u2014later translated some of Rumi\u2019s poems himself.) Barks had never studied Islamic literature. But soon afterward, he told me recently, over the phone from his home in Georgia, he had a dream. In the dream, he was sleeping on a cliff near a river. A stranger appeared in a circle of light and said, \u201cI love you.\u201d Barks had not seen this man before, but he met him the following year, at a Sufi order near Philadelphia. The man was the order\u2019s leader. Barks began spending his afternoons studying and rephrasing the Victorian translations that Bly had given him. Since then, he has published more than a dozen Rumi books.<\/p>\n

In our conversation, Barks described Rumi\u2019s poetry as \u201cthe mystery of opening the heart,\u201d a thing that, he told me, \u201cyou can\u2019t say in language.\u201d In order to get at that inexpressible thing, he has taken some liberties with Rumi\u2019s work. For one thing, he has minimized references to Islam. Consider the famous poem \u201cLike This.\u201d Arberry translates one of its lines, rather faithfully, as \u201cWhoever asks you about the Houris, show (your) face (and say) \u2018Like this.\u2019 \u201d Houris<\/em> are virgins promised in Paradise in Islam. Barks avoids even the literal translation of that word; in his version, the line becomes, \u201cIf anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look, lift your face and say, Like this.\u201d The religious context is gone. And yet, elsewhere in the same poem, Barks keeps references to Jesus and Joseph. When I asked him about this, he told me that he couldn\u2019t recall if he had made a deliberate choice to remove Islamic references. \u201cI was brought up Presbyterian,\u201d he said. \u201cI used to memorize Bible verses, and I know the New Testament more than I know the Koran.\u201d He added, \u201cThe Koran is hard to read.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

Like many others, Omid Safi credits Barks with introducing Rumi to millions of readers in the United States; in morphing Rumi into American verse, Barks has dedicated considerable time and love to the poet\u2019s works and life. And there are other versions of Rumi that are even further removed from the original\u2014such as the New Age books by Deepak Chopra and Daniel Ladinsky which are marketed and sold as Rumi but bear little resemblance to the poet\u2019s writing. Chopra, an author of spiritual works and an alternative-medicine enthusiast, admits that his poems are not Rumi\u2019s words. Rather, as he writes in the introduction to \u201cThe Love Poems of Rumi,\u201d they are \u201c \u2018moods\u2019 we have captured as certain phrases radiated from the original Farsi, giving life to a new creation but retaining the essence of its source.\u201d<\/p>\n

Discussing these New Age \u201ctranslations,\u201d Safi said, \u201cI see a type of \u2018spiritual colonialism\u2019 at work here: bypassing, erasing, and occupying a spiritual landscape that has been lived and breathed and internalized by Muslims from Bosnia and Istanbul to Konya and Iran to Central and South Asia.\u201d Extracting the spiritual from the religious context has deep reverberations. Islam is regularly diagnosed as a \u201ccancer,\u201d including by\u00a0General Michael Flynn<\/a>, President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s pick for national-security adviser, and, even today, policymakers suggest<\/a> that non-Western and nonwhite groups have not contributed to civilization.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For his part, Barks sees religion as secondary to the essence of Rumi. \u201cReligion is such a point of contention for the world,\u201d he told me. \u201cI got my truth and you got your truth\u2014this is just absurd. We\u2019re all in this together and I\u2019m trying to open my heart, and Rumi\u2019s poetry helps with that.\u201d One might detect in this philosophy something of Rumi\u2019s own approach to poetry: Rumi often amended texts from the Koran so that they would fit the lyrical rhyme and meter of the Persian verse. But while Rumi\u2019s Persian readers would recognize the tactic, most American readers are unaware of the Islamic blueprint. Safi has compared reading Rumi without the Koran to reading Milton without the Bible: even if Rumi was heterodox, it\u2019s important to recognize that he was heterodox in a Muslim context\u2014and that Islamic culture, centuries ago, had room for such heterodoxy. Rumi\u2019s works are not just layered with religion; they represent the historical dynamism within Islamic scholarship.<\/p>\n

Rumi used the Koran, Hadiths, and religion in an explorative way, often challenging conventional readings. One of Barks\u2019s popular renditions goes like this: \u201cOut beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. \/ I will meet you there.\u201d The original version makes no mention of \u201crightdoing\u201d or \u201cwrongdoing.\u201d The words Rumi wrote were iman<\/em> (\u201creligion\u201d) and kufr<\/em> (\u201cinfidelity\u201d). Imagine, then, a Muslim scholar saying that the basis of faith lies not in religious code but in an elevated space of compassion and love. What we, and perhaps many Muslim clerics, might consider radical today is an interpretation that Rumi put forward more than seven\u00a0hundred years ago.<\/p>\n

Such readings were not entirely unique back then. Rumi\u2019s works reflected a broader push and pull between religious spirituality and institutionalized faith\u2014though with a wit that was unmatched. \u201cHistorically speaking, no text has shaped the imagination of Muslims\u2014other than the Koran\u2014as the poetry of Rumi and Hafez,\u201d Safi said. This is why Rumi\u2019s voluminous writings, produced at a time when scribes had to copy works by hand, have survived.<\/p>\n

\u201cLanguage isn\u2019t just a means of communication,\u201d the writer and translator Sinan Antoon has said. \u201cIt\u2019s a reservoir of memory, tradition, and heritage.\u201d As conduits between two cultures, translators take on an inherently political project. They must figure out how to make, for instance, a thirteenth-century Persian poet comprehensible to a contemporary American audience. But they have a responsibility to remain true to the original work\u2014an act that, in the case of Rumi, would help readers to recognize that a professor of Sharia could also write some of the world\u2019s mostly widely read love poetry.<\/p>\n

Jawid Mojaddedi is now in the midst of a years-long project to translate all six books of the \u201cMasnavi.\u201d Three<\/a> of<\/a> them<\/a> have been published; the fourth is due out this spring. His translations acknowledge the Islamic and Koranic texts in the original by using italics to denote whenever Rumi switches to Arabic. His books are also riddled with footnotes. Reading them requires some effort, and perhaps a desire to see beyond one\u2019s preconceptions. That, after all, is the point of translation: to understand the foreign. As Keshavarz put it, translation is a reminder that \u201ceverything has a form, everything has culture and history. A Muslim can be like that<\/em>, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/p>\n

Rozina Ali<\/a> is a member of <\/em>The New Yorker\u2019s editorial staff.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – newyorker.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rumi was born in the early thirteenth century, in what is now Afghanistan and later settled in Konya, in present-day Turkey, with his family. His father was a preacher and religious scholar, and he introduced Rumi to Sufism. Rumi\u2019s works reflected a broader push and pull between religious spirituality and institutionalized faith\u2014though with a wit that was unmatched. \u201cHistorically speaking, no text has shaped the imagination of Muslims\u2014other than the Koran\u2014as the poetry of Rumi.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":163624,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[900,1177,742,634,2008,335,2007,308,868,2006,805],"class_list":["post-163622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-biography","tag-inspirational","tag-iran","tag-islam","tag-koran","tag-muslims","tag-persia","tag-philosophy","tag-poetry","tag-rumi","tag-spirituality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}