How the Thirteenth-Century Sufi Poet Rumi Turned One of many World’s Most Fashionable Writers
The Middle East is toughly the world’s most harmonious area, and it solely will get extra fractious for those who add in South Asia and the Mediterranean. However there’s one factor on which many residents of that vast geographical span can agree: Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī. One would possibly at first imagine {that a} thirteenth-century poet and mystical philosopher who wrote in Persian, with occasional forays into Turkish, Arabic, and Greek, could be a distinct segment figure right now, if identified in any respect. In actual fact, Rumi, as he’s commonly identified, is now probably the most popular writers in not simply the Middle East however the world; English reinterpretations of his verse have even made him the best-selling poet within the United States.
“The transformative second in Rumi’s life got here in 1244, when he met a wandering mystic often known as Shams of Tabriz,” writes the BBC’s Jane Ciabattari. She quotes Brad Gooch, writer of Rumi’s Secret: The Lifetime of the Sufi Poet of Love, describing them as having an “electric good friendship for 3 years,” after which Shams disappeared. “Rumi coped by writing poetry,” which incorporates 3,000 poems written for “Shams, the prophet Muhammad and God. He wrote 2,000 rubayat, four-line quatrains. He wrote in couplets a six-volume spiritual epic, The Masnavi.” He did all this work in service of what, in the animated TED-Ed lesson above, Stephanie Honchell Smith calls his ultimate aim: “the reunification of his soul with God by means of the experience of divine love.”
How is such a like to be accessed? “Love resides not in studying, not in knowledge, not in pages in books,” Rumi declared. “Wherever the debates of males might lead, that isn’t the lover’s path.” He pursued it by means of devotion to Shams’ Sufism, “participating in ritualized dancing and preaching the religion of affection by means of lectures, poetry, and prose.” Later in life, he shifted “from ecstatic expressions of divine like to verses that information others to discover it for themselves,” incorporating “concepts, stories, and quotes from Islamic religious texts, Arabic and Persian literature and earlier Sufi writings and poetry.” Perhaps there could be no full appreciation of Rumi’s work without a scholar’s belowstanding of the languages and cultures he knew. But when his gross sales figures are anyfactor to go by, the lengthying into which his complex work faucets is universal.
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee-book.
