Text highlighted in bold simply reinforces the point of sanitizing Rumi from his Islamic context. By "freeing" him in this fashion, his words cease to have root and mean what we what them to mean.
Ms. Tippett: Welcome back to Speaking of Faith, public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. I'm Krista Tippett. Today, "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi," the 13th-century Persian poet and mystic.
In recent years, English translations of Rumi's poetry by the American poet Coleman Barks have sold more than half a million copies in the U.S. UNESCO has declared 2007 International Rumi Year to honor the 800th anniversary of his birth. Rumi has been the subject of creative work by contemporary artists from composer Philip Glass to pop icon Madonna.
But such popular renditions of Rumi often give little hint of his Islamic identity. He was the son of a Muslim teacher, born in the center of Persian Islamic civilization. He spent time as the head of a madrassa, religious schools which were centers of great learning, at the same time that Western Europe had fallen into the dark ages.
Rumi's themes of separation and longing come straight from the heart of Islamic theology. There is no idea of original sin, but rather of a human tendency to forget and thus become separated from Allah or God. Islam imagines faith as zikr or remembrance of a knowledge that is embedded in human beings. My guest, Fatemeh Keshavarz, finds resonance in Rumi for the deepest challenges before the world and Islam today.
Ms. Tippett: I'd like to talk about Rumi's Islamic grounding and identity. That gets lost in 21st-century translations.
Ms. Keshavarz: Absolutely.
Ms. Tippett: Coleman Barks' translations are the ones that many people have read, that became popular, I assume. I was reading his introduction to The Essential Rumi. You know, he suggested that with a mystical writer like this, you know, he suggested that placing this person in historical and cultural context is simply not a central task. And he wrote, "My more grandiose project is to free his text into its essence."
Ms. Keshavarz: I think one thing that Coleman Barks has done, he has written Rumi's ideas in the American poetic idiom. He's made it accessible to the broad readership, and that should definitely be valued. And, you know, don't hear me saying anything else on that.
But I don't think you can free people from the context in which they live, and I don't think even if you try to do that, that that serves a useful purpose. I don't see Rumi as detached from the Islamic context at all.
In fact, I see his work as actually and completely immersed in the Islamic tradition. I tell you, it would be hard to read a single ghazal, not even the Masnavi, which is expressly a work with theological and mystical intentions, but even a ghazal, it would be hard to read a ghazal and not find quite a few illusions to Qur'anic verses, to sayings of the prophet, to practices in the Muslim world, so I don't think we need to separate him from his Islamic context.
The way first I visualize this myself is that he goes through the religion, he lives it, absorbs it, and uses it in his way. So in the process, he self-births a lot of things. He changes a lot, reinterprets a lot of things, but he does not step outside of it. He lives in it. Let me give you an example.
Ms. Tippett: Good.
Ms. Keshavarz: You know that in his discourses — I try not to use the word "sermons" because "sermon" brings such a specific connotation that's probably not there. But the discourses are when Rumi is sitting in a local mosque, in the local gathering, talking to people. It's very interactive, it's very informal, and he kind of steps down the pulpit in a way and reaches out to the people and it's very poetic even though it's in prose and he didn't write it down. His students and, you know, people around him took it down.
On one of these occasions, he quotes a Qur'anic verse, if I might quote the Arabic, is (recites Qur'anic verse in Arabic). We — this is the royal "we," God — we stand down the zikr and we will be its protector. Now, the word zikr in Arabic means "remembers" and traditionally the commentators have defined the word zikr as the Qur'an itself, and they have good reason to do so because elsewhere in the Qur'an, the Qur'an refers to itself as zikr and remembrance, in part because humanity is described as forgetful, so the Qur'an is a way of remembering.
Now, he says the commentators have said that this verse refers to the Qur'an itself, that God says we have given you the Qur'an and we are — that I am the protector of it. And he said (foreign language spoken). That's fine. (Foreign language spoken), but there is this interpretation, too, that God says (foreign language spoken). "We have put in you a desire and a quest, and I, God, am the protector of that desire." That's a very different interpretation. First of all, it opens it immediately to all humanity.
Ms. Tippett: I think that there is something in Rumi's writing which is so large, so generous. I don't like the word "universal" because I think in some ways it waters things down. Ms. Keshavarz: I agree with you. "Generous" is a very good…
Ms. Tippett: Yeah. But it's easy to read this and also I think people from many different religious traditions can read this poetry or his discourses, or people who are not people of faith can read it and feel themselves addressed and feel their spiritual lives addressed.
Ms. Keshavarz: Yes. And I think sometimes people feel that if they take away or overlook the Islamic flavor of it, maybe that makes him more accessible, more theirs. I think generosity and openness is a very good way of putting it. If you're not rooted in the specific and in the small, in the local, you can never see the broader vision. You have to love a tradition and to be completely immersed in it before you can subvert it and transcend it. You have to…
Ms. Tippett: Before you can subvert it from the inside.
Ms. Keshavarz: Exactly. And you have to love it for you to think that I want to open it up, I want to make it better, and then go forward with it. And, you know, you can't break laws in an acceptable way unless you know them really well and practice them with tradition. That's the only time. And that's what I think he does. He's so well rooted in the Islamic tradition, so completely aware of the nuances, that he says, you know, 'Hey guys, we can open it up here. Look. Look at this. This is what you always thought, but now look one step beyond.' And he can do that precisely because he's rooted in the tradition.
Ms. Tippett: And I think it's true also that around the same time that Rumi was entering popular imaginations by way of poetry, there were images of Islam suddenly in the news in this post-9/11 world which were so very different from that. I mean — and, you know, you've written that Rumi is a true child of an adventurous and cosmopolitan Islam. And, you know, those are not two words that you would associate with headline Islam that we've had these past years.
Ms. Keshavarz: I'm actually, you know, really glad you bring this up because I think one thing that's desperately needed at this point, to show the adventureness, the surprise, the play, the aspects of his work that now are not normally associated with that part of the world. You kind of think that, you know, people just — it's all religion, and it's religion followed in a fairly institutionalized and stylized and, you know, planned form. Not at all. I mean, he's playing with it all the time. So I think another contribution he could do for us right now, exactly in this post-9/11 environment, is to bring out that side of the Muslim culture, that contribution to the world."
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