A Rumi of One’s Own Essay

Several years ago Kabir Helminski, a sheikh of the Mevlevi Order of Sufism, save a call from Madonnas producer, who wanted to hire his party of whirling dervishes for a music video inspired by the 13th-century Iranian poet Rumi. Helminski read the script, learned that a guy would be lying on top of Madonna while she sang Lets pound unconscious, honey, and wrote a polite letter declining the request. He also sent a package of books so that the singer might get a meliorate sense of Rumis teachings.Like many Persian literary scholars, Helminski, who runs the scepter Society, a Sufi study center in California, has had little victor in convincing the Statesns that Rumi is well-nigh more than than transcendent sex. (Madonna later recited Rumis poems on a CD, A Gift of go to sleep, along with Goldie Hawn and Martin Sheen.) One of the five-spot best-selling poets in America, Rumi, who was born 800 years ago in what is at once part of Afghanistan, has frame famous for his ability to convey mystical resentment his lovers are frequently merging into one, forgetting who they are, and crying out in pain. just his religious workone book is popularly called the Koran in Persianis often ignored.To uncover and celebrate his heritage, UNESCO has declared 2007 the Year of Rumi conferences about his work are being held in Istanbul, Kabul, Tehran, Dushanbe, and Ann Arbor. One of the featured speakers in Ann Arbor this fall will be Coleman Barks, an American poet who is largely creditworthy for Rumis American popularity as well as his re indueation as an erotic soul-healer. Born in Tennessee, Barks freely admits to non knowing Persian (scholars call his best-selling works from the translations of others re-Englishings). While his poems are far more elegant and accessible than any previous English renditions, they tend to enlistment holy scenes into moments of sexual passion. Some clock he takes out references to God and replaces them with love. As he explained in the introduction to his 2001 collection of poems, The Soul of Rumi, I reverse God-words, not altogether, but wherever I can, because they seem to take international the freshness of experience and put it inside a specific system. exclusively Rumi, who spent most of his adult conduct in Konya, Turkey, based his life and poetry around that system. The son of an Islamic preacher, he prayed five times a day, made pilgrimages to Mecca, and memorized the Koran. Under the influence of an older dervish, Shams of Tabriz, he given up his life to Sufism, an ancient, mystical branch of Islam. Sufis are less concerned with the codes and rituals of Islam than with make direct contact with God as one scholar puts it, Sufism is the heart and soul of the religion, the nut without the shell. Still, the traditional Islamic texts are central to the creed. I am the slave of the Quran and dust under the feet of Muhammad, Rumi writes.Anyone who claims otherwise is no friend of mine. Rumi put forth an alarming quantity of writingabout 70,000 verses in 25 yearswhich affords translators the luxury of leaving out poems that might alienate the come American reader. In the introduction to his 2003 Rumi The Book of Love,Barks jokes that his previous book of translations achieved the pagan status of an empty Diet Coke can. He gives the language a Southern hominess and an almost childlike simplicity Love comes sailing finished and I scream. Love sits beside me like a private supply of itself. Love puts away the instruments and takes off the silk robes. Our nakedness together changes me completely.Starting with 50-year-old prose translations by the British scholar A.J. Arberry, Barks takes liberties to make Rumis language more accessible and universal. on occasion this results in more than subtle changes in meaning. In one mistake, attested by the independent scholar Ibrahim Gamard, Barks mistranslates the word blind as nordic due to a typo in Arberrys version unwittingly turning a s cene about the abandonment of those who dont know God (Bright-hearted companions, haste, despite all the blind ones, to home, to home) into a part about resisting sexual lures (I know its tempt to stay and meet these blonde women). In Rumis time, its dense to imagine that there were many women with yellow hair there wasnt even a word for it.Barkss whole almost soulfulness should be credited for bringing Rumis work to popularity, but in the offshoot he leaves behind perhaps the most important part of the poems. Rumi is not a salient poet in spite of Islam, says William Chittick, a Sufi lit scholar at Stony Brook University. Hes a great poet because of Islam. Its because he lived his religion fully that he became this great expositor on beauty and love.Theres a sense in Rumis poems that he is at his emotional limits, simultaneously ecstatic and exhausted. His faith seems desperate, and almost tangible. Such devotion is striking because its inspired by God, not by the promise of se x as it roundtimes appears in the translations. He was the most important religious figure of his day, says Jawid Mojaddedi, an Afghan-born Rumi scholar at Rutgers, whose translation of Book Two of Rumis Masnavi came out this month. And yet good deal are shocked to find out Rumi was Muslim they assume he must have spent his life persecuted for his beliefs, hiding in some cave in Afghanistan. We talk of clash of civilizations, and yet theres this link that needs to be spelled out. (Rumis success in America has actually boosted his popularity, Mojaddedi says, in parts of the Middle East.)But for many readers, Rumis Persian background has little bearing on the force of his poems. He has come to embody a kind of free-for-all American spiritualty that has as much to do with Walt Whitman as Muhammad. Rumis work has become so universal that it can mean anything readers use the poems for recreational self-discovery, purpose in the lines whatever they wish. Its impossible to take Rumi ou t of context, says Shahram Shiva, a Rumi translator and performance poet who regularly gives readings of Rumis poems, often in yoga studios. gravid art doesnt need context, he says. The best thing for van Beethovens popularity was when they put a disco beat behind unison no. 5. Shiva recites Rumi to the accompaniment of flute, piccolo, piano, conch shell, and harmonica and belts out the lines in a deep, sultry Broadway voice. Rumis one of the great creative beings on this planet, he says, a mixture of Mozart and Francis of Assisi, with a little Galileo thrown in, and maybe some Shakespeare and Dante.In his most anthologized poems Rumi comes off as a saintly Tony Robbins, gad people to break barriers, stop worrying, touch the sky, make love, never surrender. Its as if publishers worry that reading poetry is such a svelte enterprise that too much weight and context and not plentiful sex will scare everyone away. Helminski, who used to run a publication company that put out Barkss early books, noticed a consistent sensibility in the lines readers were requesting permission to quote those suggesting that theres no conventional morality, no such thing as honest failure.The number one requested line was Out beyond ideas of erroneousness and rightdoing / there is a field. Ill meet you there. Our culture is so shame-ridden that when soul comes along and says, Youre OK, its a great relief, says Helminski. Americans still have an adolescent relationship with Rumi. It will take some maturing before we proceed beyond the clichs.