Trying to Raise Human Consciousness

By Kelly Perkins - Prague Daily Monitor - Prague, Czech Republic

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Rumi Returning: a review of the documentary, screened in Prague 8 November

"Rumi discovered [that] at the heart of everything is love. That's what he loved and that's what he wrote about," says Kearns, co-producer and -director of Rumi Returning, a documentary about 13th-century Sufi theologian and poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi and the phenomenon of his modern-day rediscovery.

"For us it's clear. It's this real hunger right now for humanity to come together as one."

From interviews with Rumi experts, to performances by the ancient order of Whirling Dervishes founded by his followers, to scenes of the landscape in which he lived, Rumi Returning focuses on the themes that dominated the poet's writings: love, unity and tolerance.

In an interview in the film, Coleman Barks, the American poet and translator largely responsible for introducing Rumi to English-speaking audiences in the early 1990s, calls him "probably the only planetary poet we have".

"This is the first generation where we can really have a planetary poet," Kearns elaborates. "This is the only time in history where we really are all together as one people on the planet.
We are literally in each other's backyards. We are a mouse click away from each other."

Rumi's faith is another important element of his appeal, the filmmaker says.

"It's important that Rumi's Islamic, that he's Muslim to the core," Kearns says. "He belies the whole notion that Islam is a religion of war and subjugation and that sort of thing. Because he really realised the very heights of what Islam is all about, which is peace, reconciliation and an understanding of the basic unity of all humankind."

Rumi Returning posits that spirit of tolerance as a legacy of Rumi's life in a region that was central to multiple faiths and civilisations. If we ourselves lived in such a heterogeneous society, among various cultures, identities and religions, the film suggests, many of our present-day problems would vanish.

"If there's one motto that the post-9/11 world needs to adopt, it should be a line from Rumi in which he says, 'I go to the synagogue, I go to the church, I go too the mosque, I see the same altar, I feel the same spirit,'"
Akbar Ahmed, the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University and one of the world's leading authorities on modern Islam, declares at the end of the film.

"The universal spirit without which I'm afraid in the 21st century – and I say this with great confidence – we as a world civilization are lost. We do not have a choice. We must re-discover the spirit of the universal mystics."

"We put that at the end of the film very deliberately," Kearns says. "For us that entirely sums up the entire message of Rumi right there."

That message is also in keeping with Kearns and Lukas' past film work. Their last documentary, In the Consciousness of the Christ: Reclaiming Jesus for a New Humanity, also turned on the belief that humankind's purpose is to achieve a loving union with the divine.

"All of our films have been trying to raise human consciousness, through these universal figures of one-ness," Kearns says. "Rumi is right at home with those people – with Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi and Buddha."