Rumi
Person · Sufism · 1278
Rūmī
Muslim Preacher, American Bestseller
Qurʾanic teaching by story, plain enough for a shopkeeper; the popular English versions cut the Islam out.
Who they wereThe Masnavi gives its own instruction for reading it: the story is the husk and the meaning the kernel, and a listener who stops at the tale has eaten the shell. He preached in stories because a shopkeeper could follow one, and the Qurʾan is under almost every page.
The FindingThe Rumi who sells in English is Coleman Barks's — versions begun in 1984 and made without Persian from Nicholson and Arberry, in which īmān and kufr become 'wrongdoing and rightdoing' — while the poet himself was a Hanafi jurist whose verse runs on the Qurʾan.
Book · Sufism · the 1250s
Fīhi Mā Fīhi
Taken Down, Not Written
Rumi's table talk: seventy-one Persian prose discourses taken down by listeners, read as him thinking aloud.
SignificanceThe title means 'it is what is in it' — a refusal to summarise, attached to a book Rumi did not write. These are his listeners' notes of him talking, so the teaching arrives unarranged, and the tradition values it for exactly that: doctrine caught before it was tidied.
The FindingThe one book of Rumi talking is thin at seventy-one discourses, and thick with statesmen, because — Jawid Mojaddedi argues from the text itself — his own disciples could rarely reach his conversation except when distinguished guests were in the room.
Poem · Sufism · 1984
Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing
Persian Desert, American Field
— Version by Coleman Barks, 1984, after Furūzānfar quatrain 395Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,there is a field. I'll meet you there.
Coleman Barks's 1984 version of a Rumi quatrain, read as release from judgement; the field is Barks's own.
What it meansThe field beyond right and wrong has been read for forty years as permission — a place where judgement is suspended. Rumi's ethics are not suspended anywhere; in the Persian the meeting place is beyond the categories, not beyond the law, and the softening is Barks's.
Poems from the Masnavi 38
- ‘Allah’ and ‘Here Am I’Sufism
- Ayāz and His SheepskinSufism
- Daqūqī and the Seven CandlesSufism
- I Died as a MineralSufism
- Moses and the ShepherdSufism
- Muʿāwiya and IblīsSufism
- The Bear and the FoolSufism
- The Bird's Three CounselsSufism
- The Chickpea to the CookSufism
- The Chinese and the Greek PaintersSufism
- The Dream of the Treasure in CairoSufism
- The Elephant in the DarkSufism
- The Embryo in the WombSufism
- The Faqir and the Hidden TreasureSufism
- The Four Men and the GrapesSufism
- The Garden WithinSufism
- The Grammarian and the BoatmanSufism
- The Greengrocer and the ParrotSufism
- The Journey Through the KingdomsSufism
- The King and the HandmaidenSufism
- The Lion and the HareSufism
- The Lover and the Night PatrolSufism
- The Man Who Planted ThornsSufism
- The Merchant and the ParrotSufism
- The Moaning PillarSufism
- The Mouse and the CamelSufism
- The Old HarperSufism
- The Ruby and the SunSufism
- The Sage and the PeacockSufism
- The Snake-Catcher and the Frozen SnakeSufism
- The Song of the ReedSufism
- The Sufi's DonkeySufism
- The Tanner in the Perfume MarketSufism
- The Three FishSufism
- The Three TravellersSufism
- The Turkish Amir and the MinstrelSufism
- Who Is at the Door?Sufism
- ʿAlī and the KnightSufism
Poems from the Dīvān-e Shams-e Tabrīzī 11
- Every Form You SeeSufism
- Every Moment the Voice of LoveSufism
- Neither Christian nor JewSufism
- On the Day of My DeathSufism
- Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and RightdoingSufism
- Seek Him in the PlacelessSufism
- Show Thy FaceSufism
- The Man of GodSufism
- Up, O Ye LoversSufism
- When the Names Were NotSufism
- Why Does Not the Soul Take WingSufism