RUMI
A New Translation
of Selected Poems
Also by Farrukh Dhondy:
East End at Your Feet
Siege of Babylon
Come to Mecca
Poona Company
Trip Trap
Bombay Duck
Black Swan
Janaky and the Giant
CLR James, a Biography
Run
The Bikini Murders
Adultery and Other Stories
London Company
RUMI
A New Translation
of Selected Poems
Translated and with an Introduction by
Farrukh Dhondy
Copyright © 2011, 2013 by Farrukh Dhondy
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
First published in India by HarperCollins Publishers India
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ISBN: 978-1-61145-783-4
Printed in the United States of America
To Mala
Contents
Rumi, Sufism and the Modern World
THE WORD
GOING TO MECCA
THE WALL
VULTURES
RENEWAL FROM THE FALL
THE DANCE
LOVERS
BY HIS WILL
QUATRAINS
GROWING UP
THE BRIGHTER
TWO WINES
CAUSE AND EFFECT
FORM
REACH OUT
DESTROY TO BUILD
PHARAOH THE RICH
THE FURNACE
LOVE IS SURRENDER
LOGIC AND DESIRE
THE BLASPHEMERS
TODAY
PRAYER AND PRIDE
THE KNOWLEDGE
FLEAS
THE DUMB CAN SPEAK
MIRRORS
KINSHIP
TONGUE
SOLOMON AND SHEBA
USE WHAT HE HAS GRANTED YOU
DOUBT
LIKE THIS
SCIENCE
LOVE IS ALL
VOICES
POURING RAIN
SAMARITANS
NASUH
DON’T ASK
THE WILL TO DROWN
LOSE ALL DESIRE
HOME
BE UNSUBTLE
BROTHERS
SKEPTIC
EQUALS
THE WORD IS ALL
ON THE JOURNEY
BE PATIENT
OPPOSITES
WEAR THE CROWN LIGHTLY
DEATH IS THE THIEF
HE KNOWS
DEATH BE NOT PROUD
IN THE BEYOND
MATERIAL THE EARTH
ASS
QUARANTINE
EARTHLY KNOWLEDGE
FINAL ECSTASY
THE MOTE
LOVE, THE MOTHER AND CHILD
FLY
SECRET LOVE
UNSCHOOLED PROPHET
THIEVING EYES
DO NOT GO
HE LIVES
IN DISGRACE
BE STILL
EXPERIMENT
THE PRISON
TRUE MOSQUE
ATTRIBUTES
THE FRIEND
MESSAGE TO A STAR
ELEMENTS
LIGHT ON LIGHT
ROSES
MAJNUN
CAPACITY
MOSES AND THE SHEPHERD
THE POWER OF LOVE
AYAZ AND THE PEARL
THE LIGHT INSIDE
THE FIERCEST BEAST
BLUSHES
THE COURT
POWER OF A PRAYER
SUFI’S WISDOM
WOMAN
LIFE
TONGUE
LIGHT ON RUBBISH
WISEST SCHOLAR
FIND THE ONE
THE FISH-HOOKED LINE
DAVID’S MUSIC
ENMITY OF THE WISE
THE ASS
CONTRARY
THE BEYOND
THE HEART SINGS
SEED
THE EVIL PLANTER
BEAUTY
SURROUNDINGS
THE LOAD
DISGUISE
MOSES IN THE REEDS
ENVY
GRAVITY
ALEPPO
THE COMPASSIONATE EYE
CLEANSED
ONENESS
HE LISTENS
CHILD’S PLAY
WILD DOG
TO EACH IS GIVEN
NAMES
PEARLS
THROUGH A GLASS
PAINTERS
IN HIS WORKS
THE MAN WHO CRIED
ROMANCE
THE DIFFERENCE
THE CAP
WHEN IT IS REVEALED
KINGS AND SLAVES
BEHIND THE VEIL
THE TRANCE
LAND OF LOVE
CATASTROPHES
AT THE PARTY
SOUNDS
THE PEARL
ISSAH AND THE FOOLS
THE WANDERER
BUTTERFLY WINGS
ONLY IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT
POUR OUT THE WINE
EVIDENCE
THE KING AND THE SLAVE GIRL
ROOT OF PRIDE
TRUTH AND LIES
THE IRON AND THE FLAME
LOVE DIVINE
I AM YOU
THE SONG OF THE REED
ON HIS DEATH
APPENDICES: TRANSLATING RUMI
A Personal Note
Q & A with Farrukh Dhondy
Rumi, Sufism and the
Modern World
This can’t be a literary or historical introduction to Sufism, nor an adequate biography of Rumi, or even just a foreword to a clutch of poems I’ve translated.
This is intended partly as all of these, and as a contention that in our times the identification of Sufism as the enduring interpretation of Islam is a political duty.
Sufism is mystical, philosophical and aspirational Islam with deep roots in the history of nearly half the world. It has a vital role to play in our times, when other interpretations of Islam openly challenge and terrorize the East and the West. Even though, as a culture of poets, philosophers and savants, Sufism has never had a political center, it is time it asserted its dominant voice and manifested its popularity in the Muslim world.
The great work of Jalal ad-Din Rumi, the Mathnawi, has been referred to as the “Koran in Persian,” and it stands in direct contrast to the interpretations of Islam which give rise to terrorism and to ideologies of political dominance.
Sufism and juridical, “literal” Islam, have been in conflict since the martyrdom of Hazrat Ali. Their differences have burst into war and dissension in several parts of the Islamic world. Today, the world sees a violent assertion of what its followers call “political Islam.” However, as Edmund Burke said, “the crickets may be the loudest, but are not the largest creatures in the field,” and so Sufism
, though not a combative philosophy, has fought its philosophical and eschatological battles within the enclosed polity of the Muslim world, in which young men choose to fly planes into American buildings in New York and subsequently kill three thousand strangers.
The response of the United States is to go to war, and several devastating terrorist incidents and restraining arrests follow. The tendency professing to be the champion of Islam claims responsibility. They are waging a jihad: it is an attack on the values, the democracies and the government policies of the West. The terrorists profess to pose the question: “What kind of a civilization do you want?” The world responds by not recognizing their authority to question, and by questioning back.
What do the terrorists, who act in the name of Islam, want? There is no clear answer.
Books are published and TV programs are aired. These have come to the not-so-remarkable conclusion that there are conflicting trends in Islam between the fundamentalists and what the West calls “the moderates.” The governments of the West—Europe and the USA—repeatedly assert that they are not anti-Islamic or anti-Muslim, though within the Muslim world the suspicion remains that there indeed is a clash of civilizations.
Sufi Islam has participated neither in the dissension nor in the debate. From the time of the Prophet, the Sufi tradition, without that name, has asserted itself as the truth, but, by its nature cannot see itself as a political formation.
Contemporary translations of the works of Rumi—the greatest single work of Sufism in history—have not interpreted his work as a seminal document asserting the “moderation” of Islam, nor as a counterbalance to the world-negating tendencies of the terrorists. A reading of Rumi’s work today and its dissemination can go towards demonstrating to those within the Muslim world and those outside it the object of the quest of Sufi Islam.
However, the translations that have become popular—through international publications and the internet—have treated his work as “hippy freakishness,” the pretentious and reader-flattering “philosophy” of the likes of Kahlil Gibran, or prosaic titbits to flatter the fans of pop divas who want to turn their attention to acclaimed poetry.
A transliteration of Rumi’s work should have a more serious intention in our times. The philosophical stance he fought for in the thirteenth century AD and the survival of the Sufi tradition, extended and developed by him, are vital to our world.
Jalal ad-Din, the poet and savant we know as Rumi, acquired his second name from the Arabic word rum, for Rome. He wasn’t born with the honorific that became his name and only acquired it when traveling with his father who was exiled, or chose exile, from their native town of Balkh, and settled finally in Konya, now in western Turkey. The west of Turkey, though not ruled from Constantinople at the time, was still known as part of the Eastern Roman Empire, the territory of Rome.
Rumi was born in 1207 and died in 1273 AD. He was an older contemporary of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was born in 1225 and died in 1274 in Florentine, Italy. The fact is significant, as Aquinas is to the Catholic world the most prestigious interpreter of Jesus’ gospel, and Rumi’s work, the Mathnawi is, as I noted earlier, referred to as the Koran in verse. The fact that both Aquinas and Rumi found a following and such great claims were made for each would indicate that the theologies of the thirteenth century, Christian and Muslim, were ready for or receptive to reformation and reformulation. This was at a time when these faiths were at war with each other. The Crusades, the European–Christian endeavor to regain the Holy Land from Islam, began in the eleventh century and ended only two centuries later.
From the point of view of the Muslims who had conquered and converted Persia, parts of Central Asia, most of the Middle East, North Africa and southern Spain, the Crusades became a battle for ownership of the Holy Land and, symbolically, for religious survival.
In the same century, 1220 AD onwards, came the assault from the east and the north, when the Mongol chieftain Temujin proclaimed himself Genghis Khan and, with his fast-moving cavalry, devastated and looted the Muslim kingdoms of Central Asia and Iran.
Rumi lived in troubled times and his boyhood was far from peaceful. His father, Baha ud-Din Muhammad ibn al-Husain al-Kahtib al-Baqri, a scholar, philosopher and lecturer whose tribulations were as extensive as his name, was forced to leave Balkh, an exile in the cause of belief. Baha ud-Din was a Sufi and follower of the eleventh-century Sufi savant Ghazali. He was known among his followers as Sultan al-Ulama, the “king of scholars.” As such, in Balkh, he came up against the more orthodox followers of scholastic Islam, whom he and Ghazali characterized as decadent and hollow jurists rather than Muslims. His Sufi faction was defeated in the court of Balkh, or it may have been that Baha ud-Din, content in his certainties, was indifferent to the politics of Islamic courts and left of his own accord.
His grandson and Rumi’s son, Sultan Walad, records in the annals of the family that Baha was offended by the people of Balkh and received a divine message that enjoined him to leave the city, on which God’s punishment was about to fall.
The exact dates and circumstances of his exile and travels are still disputed by chroniclers, but it is thought that Baha ud-Din left Balkh with his family somewhere between 1213 and 1220 AD and went to Nishapur. Sure enough, the vengeance of God fell upon Balkh in the shape of the Mongol armies under Genghis Khan.
Baha ud-Din and his son traveled to Baghdad and thence to Mecca and Syria.
In his eighteenth year, Jalal ad-Din went with his father to Erzincan and Larinda. In this town, a marriage was arranged for the young Jalal ad-Din, and a year later Sultan Walad was born. And yet Baha ud-Din was unsettled.
We may assume he traveled because he was offered posts of scholarship in different cities—just like a modern-day visiting lecturer—by the sultans and governors of those places. The ruler of Erzincan, Fakhr-ud-din Bahram Shah, a patron of learning, invited Baha to his kingdom to deliver discourses. After four years in Erzincan, the Seljuq Sultan of Konya, persuaded by the fame of Baha ud-Din, invited him to settle as his intellectual-in-residence. Baha accepted the invitation and, at the age of twenty-two, Jalal ad-Din settled in Konya.
The mantle of “king of scholars” fell on Jalal ad-Din’s twenty-four-year-old shoulders when, two years later, Baha died and the patronage of the sultan, Ala’ ud-Din Key-Qobad, was extended and renewed.
Rumi had been born into the tradition and teachings of Ghazali. Known by the magnificent title of Hajat-ul-Islam or the “Proof of Islam,” Ghazali was a revivalist and a reformer of Islam. The influence of Greek philosophy, the pre-Christian, Platonic and Aristotelian thought, had penetrated the minds and methods of scholastic Islam, and Ghazali saw this as a negation of the founding spirit of Islam itself.
The origins of Sufism are disputed. Scholars such as Andrew Rippin1 point to the birth of Sufism as a product of a religious contradiction. By the eighth and ninth centuries, Islam had spread to cultures other than the Arab tribes of the Middle East. It had, most significantly, conquered Persia and subdued the prevalent state religion of Zoroastrianism. The split between Shia and Sunni Islam was already established, with the Shias, predominantly Persian, following the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali, who opposed the usurper Muawiyah who had named himself Caliph or successor to the Prophet. Their enmity, though springing from internecine quarrels and murder in the camps and Caliphate of early Islam, could be attributed to a rejection by Ali’s followers of the materialistic Islam of Muawiyah and his son Yazid, pretenders to the throne and the tradition.
By the eighth century, according to some scholars, the spiritual traditions of the pre-Islamic Persians began to assert themselves and took the form of a spiritual quest that then sought the legitimacy of Islam. It needed this legitimacy, as otherwise it would be seen as a heresy and eradicated. The early Sufis had to demonstrate with reference to Koranic text that “Islam as a religion contained within it a spiritual-ascetic tendency from the very beginning . . . To suggest that Islamic mysticism is, in fact, a
borrowing from outside raises the spectre of denial of the intrinsically spiritual nature of Islam and thence the spiritual nature of Muslims themselves.”2
1. Andrew Rippin, Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 1990).
This was a real danger. As it is, the Shias of Persia had inherited the Zoroastrian structures of a priestly caste, the dasturs, who now exist in the form of ayatollahs as separate from the lay Muslim, a tradition that doesn’t exist in Sunni Islam. The Shias still celebrate the Zoroastrian Navroz (Nowruz) or New Year on March 21, the vernal equinox prescribed by Persian astronomers. If their mystical inclinations owed anything to the old religion, they had to find legitimacy with the current power.
Sufis quote the suras of the Koran as evidence of the origin of their faith.
Sura 24:35:
Allah is the Light of Heaven and earth! . . . A glittering star kindled from a blessed olive tree which neither Eastern nor Western, whose oil will almost glow though the fire has never touched it. Light upon Light, Allah guides anyone he wishes to his light.
2. Rippin, Muslims, Their Religious Beliefs and Practices.
And then again in sura 50:6,
We (Allah) are nearer to him (man) than his jugular vein.
Undoubtedly these and other verses of the Koran can be interpreted as the Sufis do, contending that man is a part of God and vice versa, and to Him he shall return, that the essence is effulgence, the “light upon light.” Added to the specific suras is the Sufi conviction that the Koran has an outward and an inward meaning. They state that Sufi thought or “tasawwuf is the esoteric or inward (batin) aspect of Islam.”3
Throughout the history of Islam, there have been scholars from various schools who have opposed Sufism. Some, such as the Wahabi, go so far as to regard Sufism as an outright heresy. Sufi beliefs have been argued over by these scholars, “their practices condemned, their dervishes ridiculed and occasionally executed, and their sheikhs castigated.”4 And yet vast numbers of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, in Iran and all over the non-Arab Muslim world are adherents of or sympathetic to this spiritual quest.
3. Titus Berckhardt, An Introduction to Sufism (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1990).
4. J. Spence Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1998).
Did Sufism use Islam as a cover, a legitimizing insurance policy while pursuing, developing and incorporating beliefs that emanate from Christian mystics, Buddhism and almost certainly from pre-Islamic Zoroastrianism? Many scholars believe this to be true.