SOF 43 / September 2000 = ln ei SOF 43 / September 2000 RAFICQ ABDULLA is a Muslim, a barrister, a writer and a translator of the poetry of the 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi. This is an edited extract from his address to the 13th annual SoF Conference Rumi “a conspiracy of the sensual and the spiritua Jalaluddin Rumi, one the greatest practitioners of Islamic mysticism, was born in 1207 in a town called Balkh in what is today known as Afghanistan. When he was still a child his family decided to leave Balkh because the Mongols were threatening it. Soon after they left, Balkh was indeed razed to the ground.
For several years Rumi and his family travelled from city to city looking for a place to set down roots. During the course of these travels, Rumi’s father, Bahauddin Veled, met with many people on the way. Bahauddin was highly regarded by other Muslim scholars for his knowledge of Islamic law and also the Islamic spiritual path of Sufism. He took Rumi to meet Attar, the famous Muslim mystic who wrote the Conference of the Birds, a mystical allegory which one day would influence Chaucer in Parlement of Foules.
Attar was so impressed by the young Rumi that he gave the boy a copy of a work of his entitled A Book of Mysteries. It is said that when Attar saw the father leading the son away from the city in which he lived to continue on their travels, he said to a friend: “What an astonishing sight - there goes a river dragging a mighty ocean behind it”. Even at such a young age Rumi's potential was recognised by this sage.
After some years of wandering, Rumi and his father settled in Rum in Anatolia, known as Konya in presentday Turkey. The father gathered around him students who came from many parts of the Middle East to study Islamic law and mysticism. Rumi himself was taught the fundamentals of Islam and attended universities in Aleppo and Damascus, where he studied Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Greek. Greek philosophers played a crucial role in the development of Islamic philosophical thought at the time. Rumi, set to become a respected scholar in his own right, began to have his own students and to bed build a reputation amongst Muslim scholars in the region.
When his father died he took over his school and continued the family tradition of teaching Islamic law, philosophy and mysticism. He married and had two sons. He was not only a respected scholar but a citizen of some standing in the city of Rum. But then he was struck down by a catastrophe that was to turn, his life upside down and destroy everything he had striven to create and maintain. He was 37 years old at the time, in good health and at the height of his considerable mental powers, when Shamsuddin e Tabriz entered his life.
We do not know much about this mysterious character. We do know that he was a mystic, but one who did not belong to any school. He wandered from place to place as if he was searching for something or someone.
Other Sufis regarded him as an acerbic and wild person given to eccentric and unpredictable behaviour.
However, when Rumi met Shams by accident in the streets of Rum, he was hooked, and it is evident that Shams in turn was drawn to Rumi.
Both men withdrew from daily life, Rumi abandoning his responsibilities as a teacher and family man, and spent hours, days and months cloistered together talking, meditating, singing, praying. No one knows exactly what Rumi learnt from Shams nor what Shams learnt from Rumi - it is possible that Shams taught Rumi movements which had symbolic and esoteric meaning, the precursors of the dignified dance which is performed by the whirling dervishes. But it would seem that Shams acted as a catalyst in Rumi's personality. The respected scholar was disappearing and in his place a new man was beginning to come into existence.
Rumi's family and followers were not happy with Shams’ presence and one day he left Rumi as cig Words of Paradise SELECTED POEMS OF RUMI New Interpretations by Rafica Abdulla Mlustrated with Persian and Isl; unexpectedly as he had arrived. Rumi was distraught.
He searched for Shams all over Rum, accosting strangers who had just arrived in the city from other parts of the Middle East and asking them if they had seen Shams.
His behaviour caused much embarrassment to his family and his students. At last, Rumi’s elder son was sent to seek out Shams. He found him in Damascus and persuaded him to return. The two men were reconciled and again retired into solitude.
Rumi seemed to be restored to a sort of equilibrium, but it was fragile. He was not the respected and respectable scholar he used to be. He was nervous, on edge, on the look out as if he was discovering new ways of looking at life and himself which disturbed and excited him.
Then Shams disappeared for a second time, this time never to return. It could be that Rumi’s students, who were outraged by the effect that he had had on their teacher, murdered him. Rumi became deranged. He was devastated, wracked with grief, plunged into psychic night: a total breakdown.
From this immense turmoil a new man emerges - a poet (Rumi had not written much in the way of poetry before he encountered Shams), an ecstatic, an active seeker of the Divine. He had undergone profound psychological and spiritual change, a metanoia that is to be experienced and not talked about, from which welled | up this amazing, ecstatic and transformative poetry which is still read and recited today, 700 years after his death. jamic Manuscripts Rumi's poetic outpouring is vast. In one work alone - the Mathnavi-e-Manavi, the Book of Inner Meanings - he produced over 25,000 verses. The poetry is incantatory, to be heard with others as much, perhaps more, than to be read in private; it is song, bewitchment through the sound, a preparation for the journey towards the Beloved and the Beautiful, two names for the Divine.
Rumi's poetry speaks of grief and loss; of longing and yearning to return to the Beloved - towards that mystery that Goethe calls the All-One; of the liberating loss of the self in the greater whole. He created a vision of the mythic, androgynic theme of the Return; the remembering of the undivided self which belonged to the greater self. His poetry has an erotic, surging power which endeavours to reconstitute or re-enact lost unity or identity; it expresses a sexuality which is an aspiration toward re-union of the divided and separated being who is assailed by his or her own mortality and finitude.
As Freud pointed out, this drive to return to the primordial condition of wholeness is well expressed by the ancient myths which allow us to understand at a non-rational level aspects of the real which are not explained by rational expression.
Only the images and a primordial narrative born of myth can bring together the complexity of these insights and their inevitable contradictions. In Islamic cosmology, everything is derived from the One and shall return to the One: there is a cataclysmic dispersion and then a gathering back to the source - the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (whose ideas would have been known to Rumi) called God “the great Re-assembler”.
This yearning for unity, the androgynous drive of the two halves to join together to form the primordial whole, was known in Greek thought, where it underlies the Orphic dream and the dignified speculations of Plotinus.
Thus the history of the universe begins with the creation of duality - the I and the other. It is the rupture of the original non-distinction and it is also, in a sense, a degradation. It is degradation by dispersion from the whole, a condition for which we still have a nostalgia - a return symbolized by the desire and union of the sexes.
Rumi's original disciples left him, disconcerted with the new alien man who demanded new attitudes and visions from them. New disciples joined him, a new school was in the process of being created which would learn from Rumi's poetry and participate in a dance or movement of the body which acted as a centring of consciousness, a sacred dance called in Arabic “Sam‘a”, which aimed to join the body and the soul together in a journey to a deeper psychic awareness. Such a theophany, which suggests that the divine spark within the human being can be located and brought out to shine through the opacity of the body, implies a conspiracy of SOF 43 / September 2000 SOF 43 / September 2000 the sensual and the spiritual in a sort of invocatory dance which culminates in a mysticism of love.
Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, is not a stranger to the notion of androgyny which becomes a metaphysical conception of the uniting of two lovers through a mystical marriage into a single essence. The male and the female join in a mystical union for the divine to shine through the human.
Rumi wrote two major works of poetry. The Mathnavi Ihave already referred to - a book of allegorical tales, lyrical and ecstatic utterances, epigrams, Qur’anic exegesis, moral stories which aimed to change its readers These poems are amongst the most powerful invocations of longing, yearning and love that one can find in any culture and at any time in our history.
Se and listeners. The second work is the Divan-e-Shams-eTabriz, the odes to Shams (whose name means “Sun” in Persian). These are poems of love and longing, of the most delicate and at the same time ecstatic urge towards union with the Beloved. Shams the man had disappeared and in his place came the Sun, the Godhead, the Divine who waits and beckons us to recognise and lose ourselves in the Presence. Those who love each other, Rumi seems to be saying, recognise each other and know with the privilege of mythic awareness, that they have loved each other from all eternity.
These poems are amongst the most powerful invocations of longing, yearning and love that one can find in any culture and at any time in our history. They have a universal quality which makes them relevant today and ina culture that is very different from the mediaeval Islamic society in which Rumi lived.
Rumi's poetry speaks of a very intense longing for the Greater - what Muslims call Allahu Akbar, something of the spirit rather than the law and dogma. To understand Rumi and his fellow-mystics we must find the key in ourselves to become visionaries. We must be prepared to take risks and challenge our conventional perceptions. When the outer certainties melt away, when our identities - our sense of gender, ethnicity, class and national belonging - cease to be dominant, then we may begin to yearn for something deeper, greater than what we perceive to be ourselves. For most of us this is a fearful and awesome experience. We do not want to let go of what we perceive to be us. Our identity is sown onto our being like the mask of Nessus.
For Rumi this experience of annihilation was what he craved for and which he attained in a state of divine intoxication. He longed for union with the Divine - this implacably transcendent God who is nearer to us than our jugular vein. It is in the annihilation of the self that Rumi found his real home. Here he no longer stood isolated and alone, enclosed by the stubborn surface of his identity. For him the Beloved, the God who is the only true being from which we all spring, is a place and a time where we all belong and into which the seeker willingly melts. We are like the reed flute cut from its bed made hollow for the breath of the musician who, as Rumi writes in the Masnavi, sings out:
Listen oh listen to my plaintive cry Listen to my longing or else I die.
From the sweet home of my bed I was torn So my pain and crucial longing was born.
With so many secrets I sing aloud But none sees nor hears in this crowd.
Oh for a friend to know my burning state That our souls may mingle and contemplate.
The flame of Love discourses in me The wine of Love so enforces me.
Do you want to know the fire, the flow Listen my listener, then you will know.
Ecstatic language itself is not enough. Rumi’s poems overflow with praise and longing for the ultimately ineffable union with the Beloved who is so beyond our reach and yet so close. He writes with stunningly surrealistic images of the passionate rapture of the mystic in a ghazal or song of longing:
Dawn - conceived light: the pregnant moon rises concave Into the bloodstream sky casting off the face of fading light.
Hovering over my uplifted eyes, it showers me with legendary Silver, then like a falcon hunting its prey, it swoops down to take Me in its talons and rise, rise again in a great signatured curve Naming God, high into the breaking sky. My soul in flight Straining gravity sees naught save the mythic eye of the moon Which fills my paltry body with cool grace of silver light refining The unlettered soul from dross; it grows tenderly transparent with The teeming height, transparent as the mercy of flowing water; Polished by the fire of Being - felt not spoken - until the lens Of my unskinned soul opening to the Void is carelessly dissolved.
The poems in my book Words of Paradise aim to convey the lyricism, the ecstatic and erotic quality of Rumi’s sensibility, where eros is a charge of energy towards the Beloved. The pagan eros was in fact the love of the Divine, an essentially lucid mode of knowing or seeking; it was also a memory, a longing to return home; an awareness of untamed beauty; an amorous urge that is also grace. Rumi's poetry is both serene and turbulent, an outpouring of energy and a powerful distillation of the universal language of our psyche - the ability to connect with each other and thus learn to connect with that imagined mystery we call “God”.
When Rumi was broken and re-assembled into a visionary poet he understood with the very pores of his skin that love was both an erotic charge towards the Beloved and sacred at the same time. Love registers the sacred, it makes everything possible, it allows everything provided that the lovers acknowledge sexuality in all its mystery, its grace, its aliveness, its legitimate animality, its totality. That is Rumi’s legacy for us, his message of faith in the future.
Edited text of Raficq Abdulla's address to the Sea of Faith conference on the 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi.