Silent Eyes

A Palestinian Dervish.

Medicine for the Soul(ful)

Dervish With Meditation Stick

Rumi Offering His Belt To A Beggar

Late 16th century (vellum).

Brothers Beyond Time

Muhammad said, "Oh! how I miss my brothers!"
His companions asked, "O Messenger of God! Did you want us who are your brothers?"
"No, you are my friends," he said.
"Then your brothers are the prophets who have come before you and have now passed from the world?" they asked.
The Blessed Prophet said, "No, it is not those brothers of mine that I am missing, either. I am missing the graceful servants--the saints of God--who will come after me."

Translated from the Maqalat of Shams of Tabriz by Refik Algan and Camille Adams Helminski (Rumi's Sun, pp. 109-110).

Agnostic Ecstasy

A conversation with Coleman Barks.

The Mazeppist

Part Irish: Brooding, refractory, poetic, satirical.

Part Dervish: Aspiring pilgrim, Wayfarer, yearning for mythical mount Qaf.

Practicing Tolstoyan: Hard-won utopian convictions anchoring thought and action.

Mawlana In Full

Thanks to the efforts of the American poets Coleman Barks and Robert Bly, Jalal al-Din Rumi, a 13th century poet of Iranian origin, has become (and remained) the best-selling poet in the U.S. for the past couple of decades. In my view, Barks and Bly have performed a great service by introducing Rumi's genius to an educated American public, but more needs to be done. Lovers of Rumi should be confronted with the poet's religious identity and convictions. In his incomparable book, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000), the University of Chicago Persianist Frank Lewis does just that. Lewis writes:

It will simply not do to extract quotations out of context and present Rumi as a prophet of the presumptions of an unchurched and syncretic spirituality. While Rumi does indeed demonstrate a tolerant and inclusive understanding of religion, he also, we must remember, trained as a preacher, like his father before him, and as a scholar of Islamic law. Rumi did not come to his theology of tolerance and inclusive spirituality by turning away from traditional Islam or organized religion, but through an immersion in it; his spiritual yearning stemmed from a radical desire to follow the example of the Prophet Mohammad and actualize his potential as a perfect Muslim (Lewis, p. 10).

Rumi's poetic genius, his Persianate (Iranian) culture, and his Islam were all of a piece. Take away a single ingredient of this fine mixture and Rumi (known throughout the sphere of Persianate cultural influence--an area which stretches from the Balkans to Western China and includes Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Indian sub-continent--simply as Mawlana, "our master"), disappears into thin air. He should suffer no such injustice at the hands of his newest public. He deserves better than that.

And Moses Said to Pharaoh

"With us, one must needs be a waking sleeper, that in the state of wakefulness he may dream dreams." The Mathnawi of Mawlana Jalaladdin Rumi, Book III, line 1114, edited and translated by Reynold A. Nicholson.

A Pilgrim and a Stranger

In August of 1968, the Byrds (reformed by Roger McGuinn after the departure of David Crosby and under the spell of the late Gram Parsons) released the album Sweetheart of the Rodeo to polite but tepid reviews. Speaking personally, however, the album was a watershed. I was a child of nine when first introduced to the record by my older (college age) cousin in the summer of 1969, but I will never forget the impact of McGuinn and Chris Hillman's arrangement of the Appalachian traditional "A Pilgrim and a Stranger" (recorded as "I Am A Pilgrim"). I heard the song and recognized myself in it. Forty-four years later, the album as a whole (and that song in particular) continue to resonate with me.



Part Irish, part Dervish, and a practicing Tolstoyan, from an early age I have sensed myself as one who is just passing through this wearisome land. It matters not where I happen to find myself on the planet--presently in the wonderful carnival called Istanbul--I've got a home in/That yonder city, good Lord/And it's not/Not made by hand...

At Mevlana's Turbe in Konya

A civilization that builds shrines to poets is a civilization worthy of the name.

Meditation in Konya

Here in Konya, in the Rumi Hotel, just a block or so from Mevlana's shrine, my thoughts turn to the fundamental differences that distinguish pre-modern and modern assumptions about the nature and destiny of the human being (a preoccupation that afflicts everyone who spends time in the Turkish Republic).

Those differences are brought into stark relief by one of Mevlana's brilliant Khorasani precursors, Farid ud-Din Attar, in these lines from his famed Mantiq at-Tayr ("The Parliament of the Birds"):

Here every pilgrim takes a different way,
And different spirits different rules obey.
Each soul and body has its level here
And climbs or falls within its proper sphere--
There are so many roads, and each is fit
For that one pilgrim who must follow it.

[tr. Darbandi and Davis (1984), 179].

The "here" to which Attar refers is the "Valley of Insight into Mystery," a station along the way to the discovery of ultimate Reality, i.e., the Divine.

These lines bespeak the Islamic tradition's sanctification of the individual conscience: not the right but the responsibility of every individual to follow her or his own path to the (capital "T") Truth.

This distinction between rights and responsibilities is crucial to recognize, for pre-modern societies did not construct a notion of the human being upon a foundation of rights. The language of rights is post-Enlightenment and European. And from the standpoint of post-Enlightenment Europeans and their ideological progeny the world over (including here in the Turkish Republic), individuals are encouraged to assert their rights over against the rights of others. This modern modality often leads to adversarial institutions of legal process and the privileging of individualism at the expense of more communitarian considerations. Indeed, the argument is often made that, without a "rights-based" polity, individuality is inevitably submerged beneath the weight of tradition and group-think.

Such an argument ignores the degree to which group-think is ubiquitous in modern societies; it also ignores the fact, reflected in Attar's lines quoted above, that individuality receives ample expression in traditional cultures--even during historical periods that preceded the invention of rights-based political ideologies. In lieu of the language of rights, the traditional modality emphasizes the exercise of the individual conscience--indeed, it sanctifies the individual conscience--while, at the same time, regarding the individual as part of a larger community of individuals, all of whom are deemed to possess their own consciences to which they are ultimately responsible. However, proximately, any exercise of individual conscience that fails to take into consideration the prerogatives of the individual consciences of others is not an exercise of conscience worthy of the name.

The assertion of individual rights without regard to social responsibility is, perhaps, one of the most pernicious of modern social dysfunctions. When historians review the collapse of the modernist project, it is likely that they will find fault with the anti-communitarian myopia to which the post-Enlightenment economy of rights-based individuality led.

From the perspective of the Mazeppist, over the past 300 years, the language of rights has helped many individuals to negotiate--and even emerge victorious from--oppressive assertions of political power. But divorced from a sense of communal responsibility, rights-based systems themselves become sources of political oppression. If one wishes to be an historian, one must develop a keen sense of irony.