Selections from the Persian Mystics
Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273 C.E.)
Persian literature
Although Rumi was born in Afghanistan and lived in Turkey, his poetry was written mostly in Persian, and his Sufi religious beliefs transcended national boundaries. Afghanistan was on the edge of the Persian Empire, and Rumi’s father was a traditional Islamic religious teacher who trained his son to follow in his footsteps. When he was forty, Rumi had a religious epiphany when he met Shams, a wandering Sufi, who was about sixty. Rumi became a Sufi, and the outpouring of poetry that followed was staggering. Sufism combines ideas from Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism, and it attempts to achieve union with God: not by logical means (which is beyond the ability of the human mind), but by emotional means. Rumi founded the Mevlevi order of dervishes, sometimes called whirling dervishes because of the spinning dance that they do to achieve a trance-like state. Despite the loss of Shams, who may have been murdered by Rumi’s jealous disciples, Rumi continued to write, amassing over forty thousand couplets of poetry over his lifetime. The Divani Shamsi Tabriz is a collection of individual poems, including poems in the ghazal form and the rubaiyat form (which are different ways to group couplets). The Masnavi (also spelled Mathnavi or Mathnawi) is referred to as the “Quran in Persian”; it was meant to teach his followers the spirit of Sufi Islam, drawing on the Quran, folktales, and anecdotes (among other forms) for the prose sections between the poems. Unlike the Divani Shamsi Tabriz, the Masnavi is a cohesive collection, with a moral to each story. Today Rumi is the most important medieval Persian poet and one of the most widely-read mystical poets. Perhaps in part because of his emphasis on the positive, and his embrace of all religions, Rumi is now the best-selling poet in the United States (Ciabattari).
Written by Laura J. Getty
Selections from the Persian mystics
Jalálu’d-Dín Rúmí, edited by F. Hadland Davis, L. Cranmer-Byng, and S. A. Kapadia
License: Public Domain
Sorrow Quenched In The Beloved
Through grief my days are as labour and sorrow.
My days move on, hand in hand with anguish.
Yet, though my days vanish thus, ‘tis no matter.
Do Thou abide, Incomparable Pure One.
The Music Of Love
Hail to thee, then, O love, sweet madness!
Thou who healest all our infirmities!
Who art the Physician of our pride and self-conceit!
Who art our Plato and our Galen!
Love exalts our earthly bodies to heaven,
And makes the very hills to dance with joy!
O lover, ‘twas Love that gave life to Mount Sinai,
When “it quaked, and Moses fell down in a swoon.”
Did my Beloved only touch me with His lips,
I too, like a flute, would burst out into melody.
n The Rose Has Faded
When the rose has faded and the garden is withered,
The song of the nightingale is no longer to be heard.
When the lover feels no longer love’s quickening,
He becomes like a bird who has lost its wings. Alas!
How ca