08-05-2005, 03:44 AM
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Who was Jalal al Din Rumi? He would have been the first person to laugh out loud at the impossibility of ever answering this question. Rumi spent his life looking for Rumi. When he finally found him, he concluded that he did not exit. Rumi is a paradoxical conundrum. He is religious teacher who taught that all spiritual philosophers are inadequate. He is a great poet who regarded poetry as trifling entertainment. He is sophisticated scholar who delighted in colloquial jokes. He is a teetotaller who wrote enthusiastically about drunkenness. He is a narrator of fables who saw himself as a fictional character. He is a venerated sage who regarded himself as devil. He is a moral man who claimed to be God incognito.
Rumi is famous as a Sufi poet. The Sufis are Islamic mystics. Their doctrines are practically indistinguishable from those of other mystical traditions. This has led to the claim that Sufism is a syncretism mix of Islam, Hinduism, Neo-platonic Paganisam, and Christian Gnosticism. These traditions influenced the Sufis but this doesn’t mean that Sufism is a later deviation from original Islam of Muhammad. Although they have often found themselves horribly persecuted by orthodox Muslim authorities, the Sufis see themselves as maintaining the genuine Islamic tradition. They claim to possess secret mystical teaching handed down through a line of enlighten master from the Prophet himself.
Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh in what today is Afghanistan. At early age, his family settled in Turkey. His father was well-respected Sufi teacher and author of a mystical treaty called Gnosis or “Mystical Knowledge”. As a boy, Rumi is said to have met with many Sufi masters, including the great Farid al-Din Attar, who gave him a copy of his book of secrets – a powerful mystical poem from which Rumi quoted in later life. Attar immediately recognized Rumi’s greatness. As the child left with his illustrious father, he commented, “[color=red] There goes a river dragging an ocean behind it”.
Rumi raved on until his death in 1273 at the age of sixty-six, leaving behind two great works of inspirational poetry – the Diwan –I Shams-I-tabriz, and the Mathnawi-I-Maanawi, or “ Couplets of Inner Meaning”- as well as prose work called the Fihi Ma Fih, generally referred to as the Discourse. Rumi Wisdom contains extracts from his masterwork, the Mathnawi, which he begun in his fifties and continued to compose until his death. It is a monumental poem of 25700 verses – longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined!
The eminent Islamic scholar R.A. Nicholson described the Mathnawi as “ a trackless ocean”. It is rambling and anarchic in structure – a fascinating mixture of funny allegorical stories, profound insights, and intoxicated devotion In his discourses, Rumi compares “reason” to a moth flying around a candle flame. It is drawn to the light of the Beloved, flying closer until eventfully it is consumed through communion. Rumi uses ideas to take us beyond ideas. He wants us to burn, not to think. To understand Rumi is to catch a feeling, not to understand a philosophical system.
In the Mathnawi he writes:
The meaning of poetry doesn’t travel in one direction.
It’s like slingshot over which you have no control.
Unlike prose, poetry by its very nature does not have single meaning, but resonates in different ways for different listeners. This was its attraction for Rumi. Here was a form of communication that could speak of many levels at once. Listeners can take form his words what they are capable of understanding – from mild entertainment to sublime insight.
Today Rumi is routinely described as the greatest of all mystical poets. Yet he himself was dismissive of his poetry. What mattered to Rumi was not the words and form, but the sublime understanding from which they originated. In the Discourse, he explains:
I love the friends that come to me so much that, concerned they may get bored, I speak poetry to entertain them. Otherwise, poetry is of no concern to me. By Allah, I really couldn’t give a damn about poetry. I can’t think of anything less interesting. It has become necessary for me to be a poet, just as when a guest wants to eat tripe it is incumbent upon the host to feed him tripe.
By all means let Rumi’s words amuse you. but also reach beyond them to the hidden of meaning, which they can only partly expressed . let the words be signposts pointing away from themselves to an ineffable destination – an intuitive apprehension of truth. Never forget that, although Rumi is an entertainer, he is first and foremost a sage.
In this thread, I’ll keep posting his wisdoms on daily basis as a “thought-for-the-day”. Hope you’ll enjoy.
[/color]Rumi is famous as a Sufi poet. The Sufis are Islamic mystics. Their doctrines are practically indistinguishable from those of other mystical traditions. This has led to the claim that Sufism is a syncretism mix of Islam, Hinduism, Neo-platonic Paganisam, and Christian Gnosticism. These traditions influenced the Sufis but this doesn’t mean that Sufism is a later deviation from original Islam of Muhammad. Although they have often found themselves horribly persecuted by orthodox Muslim authorities, the Sufis see themselves as maintaining the genuine Islamic tradition. They claim to possess secret mystical teaching handed down through a line of enlighten master from the Prophet himself.
Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh in what today is Afghanistan. At early age, his family settled in Turkey. His father was well-respected Sufi teacher and author of a mystical treaty called Gnosis or “Mystical Knowledge”. As a boy, Rumi is said to have met with many Sufi masters, including the great Farid al-Din Attar, who gave him a copy of his book of secrets – a powerful mystical poem from which Rumi quoted in later life. Attar immediately recognized Rumi’s greatness. As the child left with his illustrious father, he commented, “[color=red] There goes a river dragging an ocean behind it”.
Rumi raved on until his death in 1273 at the age of sixty-six, leaving behind two great works of inspirational poetry – the Diwan –I Shams-I-tabriz, and the Mathnawi-I-Maanawi, or “ Couplets of Inner Meaning”- as well as prose work called the Fihi Ma Fih, generally referred to as the Discourse. Rumi Wisdom contains extracts from his masterwork, the Mathnawi, which he begun in his fifties and continued to compose until his death. It is a monumental poem of 25700 verses – longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined!
The eminent Islamic scholar R.A. Nicholson described the Mathnawi as “ a trackless ocean”. It is rambling and anarchic in structure – a fascinating mixture of funny allegorical stories, profound insights, and intoxicated devotion In his discourses, Rumi compares “reason” to a moth flying around a candle flame. It is drawn to the light of the Beloved, flying closer until eventfully it is consumed through communion. Rumi uses ideas to take us beyond ideas. He wants us to burn, not to think. To understand Rumi is to catch a feeling, not to understand a philosophical system.
In the Mathnawi he writes:
The meaning of poetry doesn’t travel in one direction.
It’s like slingshot over which you have no control.
Unlike prose, poetry by its very nature does not have single meaning, but resonates in different ways for different listeners. This was its attraction for Rumi. Here was a form of communication that could speak of many levels at once. Listeners can take form his words what they are capable of understanding – from mild entertainment to sublime insight.
Today Rumi is routinely described as the greatest of all mystical poets. Yet he himself was dismissive of his poetry. What mattered to Rumi was not the words and form, but the sublime understanding from which they originated. In the Discourse, he explains:
I love the friends that come to me so much that, concerned they may get bored, I speak poetry to entertain them. Otherwise, poetry is of no concern to me. By Allah, I really couldn’t give a damn about poetry. I can’t think of anything less interesting. It has become necessary for me to be a poet, just as when a guest wants to eat tripe it is incumbent upon the host to feed him tripe.
By all means let Rumi’s words amuse you. but also reach beyond them to the hidden of meaning, which they can only partly expressed . let the words be signposts pointing away from themselves to an ineffable destination – an intuitive apprehension of truth. Never forget that, although Rumi is an entertainer, he is first and foremost a sage.
In this thread, I’ll keep posting his wisdoms on daily basis as a “thought-for-the-day”. Hope you’ll enjoy.
