BY MATEIN KHALID - Khaleej Times Online
Dubai, 18 February 2006
THE clash of civilisation has now turned ghoulish. An imbecilic newspaper cartoon in Copenhagen triggered riots in Pakistan, gutted Danish embassies in Beirut and Damascus, deepened the chasm between the West and the Islamic world, inspired geopolitical accusations in the White House and the Shia seminaries of Qom.
Amid this surreal nightmare, the miasma of evil and suspicion that now seems to have swept this world, I seek refuge in the transcendent poetry of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, the Sufi mystic poet who is probably the most sympathetic Muslim figure in the West, a spiritual New Age icon.
“The sounds of prayer drifts across the dawn. It is Muslim, Jew and Christian, all merged together” Rumi wrote 700 years ago, a message alien to venomous fanatics in the Middle East who preach jehad against the West (or anybody else who does not share their cosmology of hate). There is a gentle, syncretic tradition in Islam whose nuances the shrill hacks at Fox News and the Islamophobe oracles of Western culture know nothing about. The voice of Osama bin Laden and the sectarian mullahs of Iran has mesmerised the West after the horror of 9/11. Yet, there is another gentler, far wiser voice steeped in the Islamic past. The voice of Rumi, the spiritual healer whose poetry of anguish and sorrow can help us find the compassion and empathy to build bridges, to heal wounds that, if untreated, could mean that the ultimate act of violence in the Middle East will be a nuclear Armageddon. We need to recreate the song of the nightingale.
“When the rose is gone and the garden fades, you will no longer hear the nightingale.” This is vintage Rumi in his ‘Masnavi’, arguably the most seminal book in the Islamic world after the Holy Quran. It is impossible to overstate the Sage of Konya’s influence on the consciousness of generations of people in the Islamic world, on the literary traditions of Turkish, Persian and Urdu. The world of the Middle East was so different and yet so eerily similar to our own in the age of Rumi (1206-1273 AD). The Abbasid Empire in Baghdad was in its death throes. The Mongol terror had decimated Islamic civilisation, forced the Valad family (Rumi’s Dad was the scholar Bahuddin) to flee their native Balkh for Baghdad and settle in the Anatolian town of Konya, a spiritual entrepot where his garden tomb now is one of the greatest tourist pilgrimages in Turkey.
In the sixth century of the Hijra, the twelfth century after Christ, Persia’s population was staunchly Sunni and the Shia (Ismaili) Fatimid caliphs ruled Egypt. The Anatolian heartland was still Seljuk, although the House of Osman would catapult itself into the centrestage of the Islamic and world history a mere generation after Rumi’s death. Andalusia was the only haven of religious tolerance in Christian Europe but the tolerant courts of Cordoba, Sevilla and Grenada, the fabled ornament of the world, were living on borrowed time as the dark shadow of the Reconquista and the Holy Inquisition loomed nearer.
In Levant, the Crusader kingdom was still in a permanent state of war, assisted by its Maronite vassals in Lebanon with the Ayyubid princes of Syria, the sons and grandsons of Sultan Salahuddin, the Kurdish warrior who had beaten the Franks at Hittin Cross to take Jerusalem. It was the world of itinerant Muslim scholars (the medival Internet), the assassins of Alamut (the prototype of Al Qaeda’s suicide killers), the Silk Road (the globalisation wave), of madrassas and Sufi lodges and warrior kings and magnificent empires and epic sword battles.
Why does Rumi evoke such a visceral empathy, touch the souls so many millions who know nothing of the Persian poetic tradition, let alone the history or laws of Islam? I believe the story of the Mewlana’s life is an inspiration, an antidote to the rat race, the rapid materialism that celebrates shopping malls as the new cathedrals of culture. Rumi’s anguish for his murdered beloved Shams of Tabriz, the humble dervish who ignited his mystical imagination, for whom he renounced his academic chair, is so universal. Yet anguish, sorrow and loss enables Rumi to penetrate the ‘veil of the soul’, to grasp that ultimate divine reality that Muslims call the ‘nur’, the light that is the grace of Allah.
The Mevlevi Sufi lodge founded by Rumi’s son Sultan Valad was a major force in Ottoman culture and politics. Khalil Pasha, the agha of the Janissaries, visited the tomb of the Mevlana in Konya three centuries after his death and introduced the Mevlevi order’s sheikhs to the Sublime Porte. Centuries later, Sultan Selim III, a fellow poet and mystic, was a member of the Mevlevi order of Galata. Kemal Ataturk banned the Mevlevi order to erase its Ottoman roots. In Iran, Rumi is venerated by the young and the ‘avant garde’, though the Shia establishment of Qom and Mashad tried to camouflage his Sunni heritage. In Mughal India, where Arabic was the language of the legal scholars, but Persian was the language of the emperors, descendants of the same Genghis Khan whose Mongol hordes (ironically, the linguistic origin of the word ‘Urdu’ a language that so venerates Rumi) forced Rumi’s family to flee for their lives from Khorasan. Iqbal, possibly the greatest poet of modern Islam and the literary founding father of Pakistan, admired Rumi. In Iqbal’s ‘Javidnama’, the Book of Eternity, Maulana Rumi guides the Sialkoti Cambridge educated on mysticism on his cosmic journey. Bahaullah, the founder of the Bahai faith, borrows from Rumi. Even Emperor Aurangzeb, the symbol of austere Sunni orthodoxy, was moved to tears by Rumi’s couplets, as were Hegel, Goethe, Schimmel, Arberry and generations of Persian scholars and Sufi poets.
The genius of Rumi was that he was a spiritual alchemist, a symbol of the human spirit that transcends all barriers of race, sect and tribe. He is a planetary healer, a reminder that Islam was once a gentle, tolerant civilisation that united, not divided the world. He teaches us to love, to forgive, to fear not even death, to abandon the illusion of ego and embrace all the beauty and pain of human existence. Beyond dogma or theology, Rumi’s paeans of love swirl across time to heal my wounded soul.
Matein Khalid is a Dubai based investment banker
Thursday, October 05, 2006
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Thursday, October 05, 2006
Sufi poet, mystic and a planetary healer
BY MATEIN KHALID - Khaleej Times Online
Dubai, 18 February 2006
THE clash of civilisation has now turned ghoulish. An imbecilic newspaper cartoon in Copenhagen triggered riots in Pakistan, gutted Danish embassies in Beirut and Damascus, deepened the chasm between the West and the Islamic world, inspired geopolitical accusations in the White House and the Shia seminaries of Qom.
Amid this surreal nightmare, the miasma of evil and suspicion that now seems to have swept this world, I seek refuge in the transcendent poetry of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, the Sufi mystic poet who is probably the most sympathetic Muslim figure in the West, a spiritual New Age icon.
“The sounds of prayer drifts across the dawn. It is Muslim, Jew and Christian, all merged together” Rumi wrote 700 years ago, a message alien to venomous fanatics in the Middle East who preach jehad against the West (or anybody else who does not share their cosmology of hate). There is a gentle, syncretic tradition in Islam whose nuances the shrill hacks at Fox News and the Islamophobe oracles of Western culture know nothing about. The voice of Osama bin Laden and the sectarian mullahs of Iran has mesmerised the West after the horror of 9/11. Yet, there is another gentler, far wiser voice steeped in the Islamic past. The voice of Rumi, the spiritual healer whose poetry of anguish and sorrow can help us find the compassion and empathy to build bridges, to heal wounds that, if untreated, could mean that the ultimate act of violence in the Middle East will be a nuclear Armageddon. We need to recreate the song of the nightingale.
“When the rose is gone and the garden fades, you will no longer hear the nightingale.” This is vintage Rumi in his ‘Masnavi’, arguably the most seminal book in the Islamic world after the Holy Quran. It is impossible to overstate the Sage of Konya’s influence on the consciousness of generations of people in the Islamic world, on the literary traditions of Turkish, Persian and Urdu. The world of the Middle East was so different and yet so eerily similar to our own in the age of Rumi (1206-1273 AD). The Abbasid Empire in Baghdad was in its death throes. The Mongol terror had decimated Islamic civilisation, forced the Valad family (Rumi’s Dad was the scholar Bahuddin) to flee their native Balkh for Baghdad and settle in the Anatolian town of Konya, a spiritual entrepot where his garden tomb now is one of the greatest tourist pilgrimages in Turkey.
In the sixth century of the Hijra, the twelfth century after Christ, Persia’s population was staunchly Sunni and the Shia (Ismaili) Fatimid caliphs ruled Egypt. The Anatolian heartland was still Seljuk, although the House of Osman would catapult itself into the centrestage of the Islamic and world history a mere generation after Rumi’s death. Andalusia was the only haven of religious tolerance in Christian Europe but the tolerant courts of Cordoba, Sevilla and Grenada, the fabled ornament of the world, were living on borrowed time as the dark shadow of the Reconquista and the Holy Inquisition loomed nearer.
In Levant, the Crusader kingdom was still in a permanent state of war, assisted by its Maronite vassals in Lebanon with the Ayyubid princes of Syria, the sons and grandsons of Sultan Salahuddin, the Kurdish warrior who had beaten the Franks at Hittin Cross to take Jerusalem. It was the world of itinerant Muslim scholars (the medival Internet), the assassins of Alamut (the prototype of Al Qaeda’s suicide killers), the Silk Road (the globalisation wave), of madrassas and Sufi lodges and warrior kings and magnificent empires and epic sword battles.
Why does Rumi evoke such a visceral empathy, touch the souls so many millions who know nothing of the Persian poetic tradition, let alone the history or laws of Islam? I believe the story of the Mewlana’s life is an inspiration, an antidote to the rat race, the rapid materialism that celebrates shopping malls as the new cathedrals of culture. Rumi’s anguish for his murdered beloved Shams of Tabriz, the humble dervish who ignited his mystical imagination, for whom he renounced his academic chair, is so universal. Yet anguish, sorrow and loss enables Rumi to penetrate the ‘veil of the soul’, to grasp that ultimate divine reality that Muslims call the ‘nur’, the light that is the grace of Allah.
The Mevlevi Sufi lodge founded by Rumi’s son Sultan Valad was a major force in Ottoman culture and politics. Khalil Pasha, the agha of the Janissaries, visited the tomb of the Mevlana in Konya three centuries after his death and introduced the Mevlevi order’s sheikhs to the Sublime Porte. Centuries later, Sultan Selim III, a fellow poet and mystic, was a member of the Mevlevi order of Galata. Kemal Ataturk banned the Mevlevi order to erase its Ottoman roots. In Iran, Rumi is venerated by the young and the ‘avant garde’, though the Shia establishment of Qom and Mashad tried to camouflage his Sunni heritage. In Mughal India, where Arabic was the language of the legal scholars, but Persian was the language of the emperors, descendants of the same Genghis Khan whose Mongol hordes (ironically, the linguistic origin of the word ‘Urdu’ a language that so venerates Rumi) forced Rumi’s family to flee for their lives from Khorasan. Iqbal, possibly the greatest poet of modern Islam and the literary founding father of Pakistan, admired Rumi. In Iqbal’s ‘Javidnama’, the Book of Eternity, Maulana Rumi guides the Sialkoti Cambridge educated on mysticism on his cosmic journey. Bahaullah, the founder of the Bahai faith, borrows from Rumi. Even Emperor Aurangzeb, the symbol of austere Sunni orthodoxy, was moved to tears by Rumi’s couplets, as were Hegel, Goethe, Schimmel, Arberry and generations of Persian scholars and Sufi poets.
The genius of Rumi was that he was a spiritual alchemist, a symbol of the human spirit that transcends all barriers of race, sect and tribe. He is a planetary healer, a reminder that Islam was once a gentle, tolerant civilisation that united, not divided the world. He teaches us to love, to forgive, to fear not even death, to abandon the illusion of ego and embrace all the beauty and pain of human existence. Beyond dogma or theology, Rumi’s paeans of love swirl across time to heal my wounded soul.
Matein Khalid is a Dubai based investment banker
Dubai, 18 February 2006
THE clash of civilisation has now turned ghoulish. An imbecilic newspaper cartoon in Copenhagen triggered riots in Pakistan, gutted Danish embassies in Beirut and Damascus, deepened the chasm between the West and the Islamic world, inspired geopolitical accusations in the White House and the Shia seminaries of Qom.
Amid this surreal nightmare, the miasma of evil and suspicion that now seems to have swept this world, I seek refuge in the transcendent poetry of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, the Sufi mystic poet who is probably the most sympathetic Muslim figure in the West, a spiritual New Age icon.
“The sounds of prayer drifts across the dawn. It is Muslim, Jew and Christian, all merged together” Rumi wrote 700 years ago, a message alien to venomous fanatics in the Middle East who preach jehad against the West (or anybody else who does not share their cosmology of hate). There is a gentle, syncretic tradition in Islam whose nuances the shrill hacks at Fox News and the Islamophobe oracles of Western culture know nothing about. The voice of Osama bin Laden and the sectarian mullahs of Iran has mesmerised the West after the horror of 9/11. Yet, there is another gentler, far wiser voice steeped in the Islamic past. The voice of Rumi, the spiritual healer whose poetry of anguish and sorrow can help us find the compassion and empathy to build bridges, to heal wounds that, if untreated, could mean that the ultimate act of violence in the Middle East will be a nuclear Armageddon. We need to recreate the song of the nightingale.
“When the rose is gone and the garden fades, you will no longer hear the nightingale.” This is vintage Rumi in his ‘Masnavi’, arguably the most seminal book in the Islamic world after the Holy Quran. It is impossible to overstate the Sage of Konya’s influence on the consciousness of generations of people in the Islamic world, on the literary traditions of Turkish, Persian and Urdu. The world of the Middle East was so different and yet so eerily similar to our own in the age of Rumi (1206-1273 AD). The Abbasid Empire in Baghdad was in its death throes. The Mongol terror had decimated Islamic civilisation, forced the Valad family (Rumi’s Dad was the scholar Bahuddin) to flee their native Balkh for Baghdad and settle in the Anatolian town of Konya, a spiritual entrepot where his garden tomb now is one of the greatest tourist pilgrimages in Turkey.
In the sixth century of the Hijra, the twelfth century after Christ, Persia’s population was staunchly Sunni and the Shia (Ismaili) Fatimid caliphs ruled Egypt. The Anatolian heartland was still Seljuk, although the House of Osman would catapult itself into the centrestage of the Islamic and world history a mere generation after Rumi’s death. Andalusia was the only haven of religious tolerance in Christian Europe but the tolerant courts of Cordoba, Sevilla and Grenada, the fabled ornament of the world, were living on borrowed time as the dark shadow of the Reconquista and the Holy Inquisition loomed nearer.
In Levant, the Crusader kingdom was still in a permanent state of war, assisted by its Maronite vassals in Lebanon with the Ayyubid princes of Syria, the sons and grandsons of Sultan Salahuddin, the Kurdish warrior who had beaten the Franks at Hittin Cross to take Jerusalem. It was the world of itinerant Muslim scholars (the medival Internet), the assassins of Alamut (the prototype of Al Qaeda’s suicide killers), the Silk Road (the globalisation wave), of madrassas and Sufi lodges and warrior kings and magnificent empires and epic sword battles.
Why does Rumi evoke such a visceral empathy, touch the souls so many millions who know nothing of the Persian poetic tradition, let alone the history or laws of Islam? I believe the story of the Mewlana’s life is an inspiration, an antidote to the rat race, the rapid materialism that celebrates shopping malls as the new cathedrals of culture. Rumi’s anguish for his murdered beloved Shams of Tabriz, the humble dervish who ignited his mystical imagination, for whom he renounced his academic chair, is so universal. Yet anguish, sorrow and loss enables Rumi to penetrate the ‘veil of the soul’, to grasp that ultimate divine reality that Muslims call the ‘nur’, the light that is the grace of Allah.
The Mevlevi Sufi lodge founded by Rumi’s son Sultan Valad was a major force in Ottoman culture and politics. Khalil Pasha, the agha of the Janissaries, visited the tomb of the Mevlana in Konya three centuries after his death and introduced the Mevlevi order’s sheikhs to the Sublime Porte. Centuries later, Sultan Selim III, a fellow poet and mystic, was a member of the Mevlevi order of Galata. Kemal Ataturk banned the Mevlevi order to erase its Ottoman roots. In Iran, Rumi is venerated by the young and the ‘avant garde’, though the Shia establishment of Qom and Mashad tried to camouflage his Sunni heritage. In Mughal India, where Arabic was the language of the legal scholars, but Persian was the language of the emperors, descendants of the same Genghis Khan whose Mongol hordes (ironically, the linguistic origin of the word ‘Urdu’ a language that so venerates Rumi) forced Rumi’s family to flee for their lives from Khorasan. Iqbal, possibly the greatest poet of modern Islam and the literary founding father of Pakistan, admired Rumi. In Iqbal’s ‘Javidnama’, the Book of Eternity, Maulana Rumi guides the Sialkoti Cambridge educated on mysticism on his cosmic journey. Bahaullah, the founder of the Bahai faith, borrows from Rumi. Even Emperor Aurangzeb, the symbol of austere Sunni orthodoxy, was moved to tears by Rumi’s couplets, as were Hegel, Goethe, Schimmel, Arberry and generations of Persian scholars and Sufi poets.
The genius of Rumi was that he was a spiritual alchemist, a symbol of the human spirit that transcends all barriers of race, sect and tribe. He is a planetary healer, a reminder that Islam was once a gentle, tolerant civilisation that united, not divided the world. He teaches us to love, to forgive, to fear not even death, to abandon the illusion of ego and embrace all the beauty and pain of human existence. Beyond dogma or theology, Rumi’s paeans of love swirl across time to heal my wounded soul.
Matein Khalid is a Dubai based investment banker
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1 comment:
A wonderful article :) Thank you for posting it.
Ya Haqq!
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