figure
Rūmī
The best-selling poet in America is a thirteenth-century Muslim jurist, read almost entirely in versions that removed the Islam.
Who they were
Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207–1273) was a Persian-language poet, Islamic jurist, preacher and Sufi teacher, and by several measures the best-selling poet in the United States.
He is also the clearest case on this site of a figure whose reception has been substantially detached from what he was.
Where they came from
He was born in Balkh, or nearby Vakhsh, in what is now Afghanistan or Tajikistan. His family fled west ahead of the Mongol advance while he was a child, and eventually settled in Konya, in Anatolia — the region called Rūm, the old Roman East, from which his name comes.
His father, Bahāʾ al-Dīn Walad, was a respected preacher and mystic, and Rūmī inherited his position: a Hanafi jurist, teaching Islamic law, leading a madrasa, delivering sermons. For most of his life he was, in modern terms, a respectable religious professor.
Then he met Shams-i Tabrīzī in 1244, a wandering dervish of formidable and disruptive personality, and something happened that reorganised his life. The two spent months in intense seclusion together. Rūmī's students resented Shams bitterly. In 1248 Shams disappeared — possibly murdered, possibly having simply left, the sources disagree — and Rūmī never recovered from it.
Out of that loss came the poetry. The Divān-e Shams-e Tabrīzī, some forty thousand lines of ghazals, is attributed to Shams rather than to himself: Rūmī signed his beloved's name to his own work.
The Mas̱navī, twenty-five thousand couplets in six books, was dictated over the last decades of his life to his disciple Ḥusām al-Dīn. The poet Jāmī called it "the Qurʾān in the Persian tongue" — a description that indicates both its standing and its content.
He did not found the whirling order. The Mevlevi were organised after his death, largely by his son Sultan Walad.
What they taught
Love as the engine of the cosmos and as the route to God — but love understood within Islam, not as a substitute for it. Separation from the divine as the condition of existence, and longing as its signature. The opening lines of the Mas̱navī are about a reed cut from the reed bed, crying for what it was cut from.
His work is saturated with Qurʾānic reference, hadith, Islamic legal and theological vocabulary, and the practice of dhikr. He was a practising Muslim writing for practising Muslims about the God of Islam.
What we can and cannot say
We can say the popular English Rūmī has had the Islam removed, and this is documented rather than alleged.
The versions that sell in enormous numbers are largely Coleman Barks's. Barks does not read Persian. He works from earlier English translations, principally Nicholson's, and produces free renderings in contemporary American idiom. He has never claimed otherwise.
What has been widely noted — Rozina Ali's 2017 essay in The New Yorker set it out at length — is that the Islamic content systematically disappears in the process. Qurʾānic allusions vanish. References to prayer become generic spirituality. Where the Persian names God, the English says "the Beloved". A poem grounded in a specific religious practice becomes a poem about universal love.
The result is that millions of readers admire a Muslim theologian's devotional poetry without knowing he was Muslim, and frequently while holding views about Islam that his work would complicate.
We can say the scholarly translations exist and are not difficult to obtain. Reynold Nicholson's complete Mas̱navī, A.J. Arberry's work, and Jawid Mojaddedi's more recent verse translations are all available, and Franklin Lewis's Rumi: Past and Present, East and West is the standard biography.
We can say this is not a complaint about translation licence as such. Free rendering has produced great poetry before. It is a complaint about a specific and consistent removal, of one religion, in a culture where that religion is regarded with suspicion — which is the pattern cultural appropriation describes, operating on a figure rather than a practice.
We cannot say what happened between Rūmī and Shams, and neither could his contemporaries. What can be said is that the poetry came out of grief, and that reading it as serene is reading it wrong.
Further reading
- The Mas̱navī, in Jawid Mojaddedi's translation — accurate and readable, which was not always available.
- Franklin Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (2000) — the standard scholarly biography.
- Rozina Ali, "The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi" (The New Yorker, 2017).