An original hand drawn and painted illustration of Rumi
created by Debra Styer with watercolor and gouache.
On Tuesday the 19th
of November Ann Rochford conducted a Spiritual Reading Group in the Carmelite
Library on the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi. Here is Ann’s introductory paper to
that session.
Rumi is not an obscure
topic. He is a great thirteenth century
mystic, and is universally known across all major religions. Much has been written about him and I will
only reach the tip of the iceberg in the one and a half hours we have
today. I want to start from a personal
contemporary position.
I first learnt about Rumi in
any depth in 2000, when I went to offer my services to the Kilbride Centre. Rumi was having a very serious revival at the
time and we seemed to be running endless seminars about his work.
In 2012, my husband and I did
a tour of Turkey (highly recommended).
As we were travelling towards Cappadocia our tour guide started talking
to us about Mevlana. Mevlana was very
well loved in Turkey and perhaps we would like to go to a ceremony still
carried out by his followers. We had never heard of Mevlana.
The guide kept mentioning the
possibility of attending this ceremony and eventually said Whirling
Dervishes. Then the penny dropped and I
said do you mean Rumi? Rumi has many names;
in Turkey he is known commonly as Mevlana, which means master. In the West we
call him Rumi, which refers to the sultanate of Rum, which was the ruling
entity in that part of Turkey at the time Rumi lived there. (Rum is Roman)
Some of us did go to the
ceremony. Strict rules applied to the
attendees. No talking, no clapping and
of course no cameras. It started with a
long musical introduction, then the master came out, and finally the dervishes
arrived one by one. The purpose of the
master is to stop the dervishes whirling off the track. They began to whirl, always left to right,
and moved into their meditative trance.
It was quite mesmerising and went on for over an hour. The music eventually changed and brought them
out of their trance and that was it.
Some of the Dervishes then came back and did a few whirls so that the
camera-deprived could get one shot for their memory bank.
It was Sunday when we visited
the Rumi Museum in Konya. It was for
many centuries a Madrassa. Islamic
leaders had offered it to Rumi’s father, Baha ad Din Waled who was also a famous
teacher, and called the Sultan of Scholars.
Rumi inherited it from him, and then his son after Rumi’s death in 1273.
When Ataturk came to power in
Turkey after the First World War, the Madrassas were closed down. Dervish
ceremonies were prohibited. Eventually,
in the 1950’s, a whirling ceremony was allowed to be performed, at Konya, once
a year. As Rumi is so significant in
Turkish Islamic spirituality, this Madrassa became his museum and a place of pilgrimage.
Adherents of every religion visit it. The mosque contains his mausoleum along with
those of his father and other leading scholars.
There is a display of the dervish ceremony and a few artefacts that
actually belonged to Rumi. As he was an ascetic, his possessions were not
plentiful. Today Ataturk’s laws have
been watered down and Dervish ceremonies are more easily celebrated……….although
not popular with right wing elements in Islam.
The most amazing thing to me
was the mix of people who were there that day.
It was very crowded. There were
tourists like myself, nuns in the garbs of many congregations, ordinary Turks,
some of the women in hijabs, a few Buddhists, and quite a few Saudis, with
women in their black burkas. An amazing mix of people, all here because
of their common interest in this man, who lived and died in the thirteenth
century.
Time to find out a bit more
about him.
Rumi
Mevlana Jalauddin Rumi to
note some of his names was born in Balkh, which was then in Persia and is now
part of Afghanistan, on the 30th of September 1207. He died in his
long time home of Konya, in Turkey in December 1273. Rumi is known as a Persian
poet, a Jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian and great Sufi Mystic.
He is the founder of a form
of the ascetic dervish movement in Sufism. (There are a number of different
forms of Dervish Sufism) Rumi is the
founder of the group of Dervishes famous for their whirling trances. It is properly
known as The Order of Mevlevi. Their
prayer services are called Sama. They
consist of music, which creates a rhythm, a master to keep dervishes centred
and a number of whirling devotees (always to the left) who enter into deep
trances, which can go on for hours. Rumi started this form of mystic devotion
by circling around a pole in order to clear his mind and connect with the
spiritual.
Rumi believed in the use of
music, poetry and dance as a path for reaching God. He said that music focuses the whole being on
the Divine. In the whirling dance the
practitioner turns towards the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego and
arrives at the perfect.
Rumi came from a family
tradition of liberal Islamic preachers of the Hanafi rite. They were Sunni
Muslims. It was an automatic assumption
that Rumi, this only son to survive childhood, would follow in the family
vocation. By 1220 the family had fled their home in Balkh due to the Mongol
invasions. They wandered across the
region for a number of years. To Mecca,
Baghdad, Damascus, and Karaman where they lived for seven years, before settling
in Konya in 1228, after an invitation to his father to set up a Madrassa.
Prior to arriving in Konya,
at the age of 18, Rumi met the Sufi, Attar, in the Iranian city of
Nishapur. Attar was a very renowned Sufi
who was generally held in awe in the Islamic world. Rumi was greatly attracted
to Attar and became a constant follower.
He was searching for deeper religious understanding and had investigated
a number of other belief systems, including Christianity. Attar recognised Rumi as potentially a great
leader. When he saw Rumi walking behind
his father, Attar described the father as The Sea---- followed by the
Ocean. Further encounters with Sufi’s in
Bagdad ensured that by the time he reached Konya, Rumi was a committed Sufi.
Konya had been a Roman
settlement. (Rum) At that time it was a thriving, cosmopolitan city with Jews,
Christians and Muslims living in harmony. It proved a fine place for a young Sufi to
create a following. When his father
died, Rumi succeeded him at the Madrassa.
He was just 25.
Rumi is sometimes acclaimed
as the Shakespeare of Mysticism. His
poetry and mystical insights were respected and loved across religious
traditions in his lifetime, as they still are today, eight centuries after his
death.
He has left us his seminal
work the Mathnavi, considered one of the greatest poems in the Persian
language. This is a poem of six volumes,
which took the last 12 years of his life.
It contains 27000 lines each consisting of a couplet with an internal
rhyme. It covers many topics, including
right living, wisdom, justice the wonder of the natural world and love. Images
of the natural world and love in its various forms are major themes which he
comes back to constantly.
We have the works of Shams-e
Tabrizi, Rumi’s teacher, which contain 35000 Persian couplets and 2000 Quatrains.
It is written mostly in Persian but also in Turkish, Greek and Arabic. We also
have seventy-one lectures and talks, sermons, and letters, which were written
to friends and family. A huge legacy,
which is requires great skills in translation from its ancient languages to
modern idioms. Rumi’s renown is such, that a number of modern scholars have
devoted their lives to translating his works, e.g. the translator Coleman Barks.
An important part of Rumi’s
spiritual formation was his friendship with Shams-e Tabrizi.
They met in 1244, when Shams went to Konya and sought him out. They were
spiritual soul mates who engaged is mystical conversations which enriched each other’s
deepest understandings. Shams was with
Rumi for five years and then went away never to return. What happened to him is not known, but Rumi
grieved his parting for the rest of his life.
Shams is often mentioned in his poetry and there are many verses devoted
to him
Rumi married twice. He had two sons with his first wife and after
her death, a son and a daughter with his second wife.
When he died in December 1273
the Christians and Jews of Konya joined his funeral procession a tribute of his
great spirituality, which was above religious divisions.
Finally, because of my own
interest, I have to point out that Rumi was a contemporary of both Saint Francis
of Assisi and Meister Eckhart. What was
there about the 13th century that brought into the world such a
wealth of mystical insight?
No comments:
Post a Comment