Provincialising Rumi

Important events in history not only change the course of the future, but also bring about a change in our outlook towards the characters and ideas of the past. Among the events of late modernity that directly affect Muslims at every level is the ‘war on terror’. This war has brought everything related to the cultures of Muslim societies within the broader discussion about elements of good and evil within Islam as a religion and civilisation.

In the cosmic war of good and evil in the age of terror, Sufism is proposed as an antidote to the poison of extremism gnawing Muslim societies. Being the epitome of mysticism, Moulana Jalaluddin Rumi has naturally become a messiah for a certain segment of Muslim societies today.

Rumi wrote in an age which was marked by anarchy and strife within Muslims, and the invasions of Mongols and Crusaders from outside. When a society is faced with cataclysmic events, it loses the glue that gels heterogeneous actors and people together. As a result, society plunges into anarchy where the whole disintegrates into incompatible parts.

Such moments produce extraordinary minds that tackle spiritual chaos, social turmoil and political anarchy with their holistic approach and by questioning the dominant paradigm. It is by rising above the prevalent prides and prejudices of his time that Rumi developed an eclectic vision of humanity and his idea of love.

However, ideas also cannot remain immune from the broader historical forces which pit parts against each other and cause the whole to disintegrate.  This is also the case with Rumi, whose universal message has been broken into pieces. These pieces are cherry picked by its purported disciples to lend legitimacy to their nationalist, linguistic, ideological and racial narratives. This is not to deny that Rumi’s message has never been appropriated in history before, rather the purpose is to unravel the modern web of relations in which the discourse of Rumi is taking shape.

Ironically, the man who wrote Rumi with his name has been reduced to a Persian nationalist by the linguistic group whose language he elevated to revelatory status. Persian speakers present Moulana Rumi as the epitome of Persian culture and give the impression that the Persian language enabled him to write the Quran in Persian (hast Quran dar zaban-i       Pahlavi). The reality is that besides Persian, Moulana Rumi also wrote Turkish, Arabic and even Greek with equal ease. That shows the catholicity of his mind but that mind is being fit within the straitjacket of a nationalist mindset.

Even within Persian-speaking countries, there is wrangling to prove Rumi to be either Afghan or Tajik. Once a Tajik student brought forward the thesis to a faculty member of an institute in London that Rumi was originally Tajik because he was born in an area that is now part of Tajikistan. Being a renowned scholar on Sufism, the professor was not pleased with this approach, but he responded with the typical English sense of humour with: “You are right. Indeed, even before Tajikistan came into being, Moulana Jalal-ud-Din Rumi was called Moulana Jala-ud-Din Rusi (Russian).”

And then there are people who try to prove Rumi’s Afghan provenance, calling him Maulana Jalal-ud-Din Balkhi. These acts of appropriation are diametrically opposite to what Rumi clearly declared himself in these words, “I do not know myself. I am neither Christian nor Jew, neither Magian nor Muslim, I am not from east or west”. The very act of compartmentalising him is an act of the undoing of Rumi’s universality. Verily! Only a blind lover is capable of tarnishing the beauty his beloved.

In the post-9/11 period, various translations, anthologies, novels, music and other material related to Rumi hit book shelves in the West as well as in Muslim societies. While reengaging with Rumi via translations in native languages, people also read him in a context that is shorn of the historical settings in which Rumi was writing. The gap in that context is filled by modern warfare for hearts and minds that is being fought at a cultural level with the help of the apparatus of the cultural industry. For an understanding of Rumi, modern consumers rely on the Rumi produced by this industry. Thus, they engage not with the primary Rumi, but with a mediated Rumi. This helps those people who try to remain culturally Muslim without being religiously Muslim.

For ideological reasons, Rumi is the best tool to win callous hearts. Also it is conducive for the long-held tradition in the West to find spiritual enlightenment sans religion from the East. This provides a fertile ground for the emergence of messiahs and cults with pop and punk appeal respectively. By doing so, they try to address the contemporary issues of identity and alienation faced by individuals and societies. Hence, in the postmodern culture and imagination Rumi seems closer to Madonna than to an ascetic in Qoniya. It can be said that the meaning of Rumi’s thoughts is changed when a modern reader internalises and represents him in the worldview of the time and space of the postmodern world. 

Even societies which remained under the strong influence of Sufism, Rumi in particular, have lost the capacity to directly interact with his works and practices owing to political and social changes in the modern age. In Muslim societies, the geographical and political space for Sufism has shrunk significantly. For instance, in the Indian subcontinent the Persian language gradually disappeared after the demise of the Mughal Empire. Similarly, Ataturk’s revolution created a rupture in the continuity of the mediums through which people engaged themselves with the intellectual and spiritual tradition of Rumi because modern Turkey rescinded the Arabic script of Turkish and opted for the Latin script. This changed the whole universe of meaning of Turkish society.

The same was the case with Tajikistan where the USSR introduced the Cyrillic script for reading and writing Persian language. Turkey banned the Mawlaw’iyya and other Sufi orders in 1925. Ataturk went to the extent of banning Sufi music. As a consequence, within two generations the corpus of writings on Sufism and Rumi has become gibberish for people. The Wahhabi states of the Middle East have effaced Sufism by clearly terming it un-Islamic in their theology and state.

In cases where Sufism witnessed rejuvenation, it is not due to religious fervour but because of market forces. The dance of the whirling dervishes was allowed in the 1950s as entertainment for tourists. Also, from the early 1990s books on Rumi have proliferated in Western markets. These books include various translations of his poetry, autobiographies and fiction – including Annemarie Schimmel’s ‘I Am Wind You Are Fire’, Muriel Maufroy’s ‘Rumi’s Daughter’, Connie Zweig’s ‘A Moth to the Flame’, Tajadod’s ‘Rumi: The Fire of Love’ and the novel, ‘The Forty Rules of Love’,     by Elif Shafak.

A salient feature of these publications is the divorce of the theological worldview that informed Rumi’s poetry and the content permeated with the spirituality of Rumi. This non-theological spirituality basically caters to the postmodern culture of pastiche where incongruous parts interact with each other but are unable to form a holistic view. These fictionalised works help the modern reader internalise Rumi’s message and form an idea of love in post-normal times.

The aforementioned tendencies show that Moulana Rumi has taken umpteen shapes and hues like his beloved who takes myriad shapes every time it appears. In the world of today, it is not from the purified heart that Rumi’s message emanates, rather it is the collusion of market and mass culture that determines the contours of the mystical meaning of Rumi. Although these developments help bring Rumi to the masses and to everyday life, they also rob Rumi of its universal message which was essential for creating a peaceful coexistence for the diverse people inhabiting the world.

Filling existential holes in societies through a truncated Rumi and exploiting him for ideological wars will reduce his status to a provincial poet, which is an oxymoron.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Gilgit.

Email: azizalidad@gmail.com