The Middle East is toughly the world’s most harmonious area, and it solely will get extra fractious in case you add in South Asia and the Mediterranean. However there’s one factor on which many residents of that huge geographical span can agree: Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī. One may at first imagine {that a} thirteenth-century poet and mystical philosopher who wrote in Persian, with occasional forays into Turkish, Arabic, and Greek, can be a distinct segment figure as we speak, if identified in any respect. Actually, Rumi, as he’s commonly identified, is now one of the popular writers in not simply the Middle East however the world; English reinterpretations of his verse have even made him the best-selling poet within the United States.
“The transformative second in Rumi’s life got here in 1244, when he met a wandering mystic often called Shams of Tabriz,” writes the BBC’s Jane Ciabattari. She quotes Brad Gooch, writer of Rumi’s Secret: The Lifetime of the Sufi Poet of Love, describing them as having an “electric buddyship for 3 years,” after which Shams disappeared. “Rumi coped by writing poetry,” which incorporates 3,000 poems written for “Shams, the prophet Muhammad and God. He wrote 2,000 rubayat, four-line quatrains. He wrote in couplets a six-volume spiritual epic, The Masnavi.” He did all this work in service of what, in the animated TED-Ed lesson above, Stephanie Honchell Smith calls his ultimate purpose: “the reunification of his soul with God by means of the experience of divine love.”
How is such a like to be accessed? “Love resides not in studying, not in knowledge, not in pages in books,” Rumi declared. “Wherever the debates of males might lead, that’s not the lover’s path.” He pursued it by means of devotion to Shams’ Sufism, “participating in ritualized dancing and preaching the religion of affection by means of lectures, poetry, and prose.” Later in life, he shifted “from ecstatic expressions of divine like to verses that information others to discover it for themselves,” incorporating “concepts, stories, and quotes from Islamic religious texts, Arabic and Persian literature and earlier Sufi writings and poetry.” Perhaps there will be no full appreciation of Rumi’s work without a scholar’s belowstanding of the languages and cultures he knew. But when his gross sales figures are anyfactor to go by, the lengthying into which his complex work faucets is universal.
Related content:
The Mystical Poetry of Rumi Learn By Tilda Swinton, Madonna, Robert Bly & Coleman Barks
The Complex Geomestrive of Islamic Artwork & Design: A Brief Introduction
500+ Beautiful Manuscripts from the Islamic World Now Digitized & Free to Download
The Beginning and Speedy Rise of Islam, Animated (622‑1453)
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee book.