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Written by Rozina Ali, the article is called \u201cThe Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi<\/a>,\u201d and it says something that Iranians I know have been saying for a very long time\u2014something that I learned from them, in fact. It just hasn\u2019t ever been said, at least not to my knowledge, in a mainstream publication with the kind of intellectual, cultural, and\u00a0literary<\/em>weight of\u00a0The New Yorker.<\/em>\u00a0Basically, the idea is this: if you\u2019re reading Rumi in English, which almost certainly means you are reading the versions produced by Coleman Barks, then the Rumi you know has been denuded of his 13th century Persian culture and transformed from a traditionally observant, well-respected Muslim scholar and cleric into a generic, easily digestible, and at times platitudinous New Age mystic. To be fair, neither Ali nor the people she interviewed for her article say it quite as strongly as I just did, so I will admit that some of the bite in my description comes from my own dislike for Barks\u2019 verse. The larger point, however, still stands: If you\u2019re reading Rumi in English, and you\u2019re reading the versions produced by Coleman Barks, or Daniel Ladinsky, or (for goodness\u2019 sake) Deepak Chopra, then the Rumi you know is not the devout Muslim Rumi in fact was. Further, and perhaps more to the point, the Islam in which Rumi\u2019s wisdom is ineluctably and inescapably rooted has been completely hidden from your view. This erasure, Ali argues, especially now, has some very serious implications.<\/p>\nAli begins her article by talking about the famous people\u2014Coldplay\u2019s Chris Martin, Madonna, Tilda Swinton\u2014who claim their lives have been transformed by Rumi\u2019s work. Multiply their number by the many tens, if not hundreds of thousands for whom Rumi has come to represent an, if not\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0essence of spiritual enlightenment\u2014a mystic whose teachings welcome all people, of whichever persuasion, onto the path towards God, or whatever it is they call the ultimate Truth they are trying to reach\u2014and you end up with an inordinately large number of people who do not understand that the openness they so value in Rumi was made possible for him by, would not have existed for him without, Islam. More to the point, and adding insult to injury, given the demonization of Islam that is so pervasive in our society right now, people could be forgiven for thinking that the teachings of this English-language Rumi are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Islam, rather than being a significant thread within them.<\/p>\n The demonization of Islam, it\u2019s important to recognize, did not begin in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11; nor is it merely an unfortunate but unsurprising response to the barbarous excesses of ISIS or other similar groups. For her article, Ali interviewed Omid Safi, professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Duke University, who points out that Western readers began to separate the mystical poetry of Islam from Islam itself during the Victorian period. \u201cTranslators and theologians of the time,\u201d Ali is paraphrasing Safi here, \u201ccould not reconcile their ideas about a \u2018desert religion,\u2019 wth its unusual moral and legal codes, and the work of poets like Rumi and Hafez.\u201d The only explanation these Western \u201cexperts\u201d could come up with was that the poets, and these are Safi\u2019s words, were \u201cmystical not because of Islam but in spite of it\u201d\u2014which is essentially what Coleman Barks has to say about Rumi. \u201cReligion,\u201d Ali quotes Barks as saying, \u201cis such a point of contention for the world. I got my truth and you got your truth\u2014this is just absurd. We\u2019re all in this together and I\u2019m trying to open my heart, and Rumi\u2019s poetry helps with that.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Barks, in other words, Rumi\u2019s truths, his wisdom, his openness, do not emerge from Islam, are not the product of the life Rumi lived through Islam. Rather, they exist, or\u2014in the hands of someone like Barks\u2014can be made to exist, in a realm outside of religion. This extraction, for me at least, is where what I think of as \u201cplatitudinous Rumi\u201d comes from. Ali gives a good example of this when she quotes one of Barks\u2019 most famous couplets:<\/p>\n Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. As an idea, \u201cideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing\u201d is so vague as to be meaningless, so all-inclusive as to be useless as a guide to anything. One might argue that this is precisely the point, that anyone can find themselves anywhere in that phrase, but so what? To follow the metaphor to its logical conclusion, if anyone can find themselves anywhere among \u201cideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing,\u201d who\u2019s to say that the field beyond them is the same for each of us? Barks\u2019 Rumi may assert that there is one field where we all can meet, if we get there, but if, as Barks\u2019 says, we each have our own truth, why wouldn\u2019t we each also have our own field?<\/p>\n Look at Rumi\u2019s original language, even in translation, and you can see very clearly what Barks leaves out and how that omission impoverishes the verse. As Ali indicates in her article, Rumi says nothing about \u201crightdoing\u201d and \u201cwrongdoing.\u201d Instead he talks about\u00a0iman<\/em>\u00a0(religion) and\u00a0kufr<\/em>\u00a0(infidelity), a very different and far more complex (and, to me at least, more interesting) opposition than right and wrong, one that would require a good deal of disciplined religious learning, as well as deeply experienced religious\/spiritual feeling, fully to understand and grow beyond. This doesn\u2019t mean, of course, that you have to be a Muslim, or a religious person of any sort, to study, appreciate, learn from, grow from, or be completely transformed by Rumi\u2019s work. Rather, it is to suggest that taking Rumi\u2019s work seriously, whether for personal reasons or because you\u2019re going to presume to make translations of it, means being responsible and accountable enough to take seriously both who Rumi actually was and the historical and cultural context within which he lived.<\/p>\n For me, one of the more telling ironies in Ali\u2019s article comes when she asks Coleman Barks why, after removing Islamic references from his versions of Rumi, and despite his feelings about how the absurdity of religion gets in the way of Rumi\u2019s message, he nonetheless chose to keep Christian and biblical references, such as those to Jesus and Joseph. In response, Barks tells her that he \u201ccan\u2019t recall\u201d if he made a deliberate choice not to mention Islam in his translations. Yet that deliberate choice is precisely what he made. He said so himself in his introduction to\u00a0The Essential Rumi:<\/em>\u00a0\u201cI obviously am not trying to place Rumi in his thirteenth century locus. That is fine work, and I am grateful for those who do it. My more grandiose project is to free his text into its essence.\u201d Since placing Rumi in that \u201c13th century locus\u201d would by definition have required Barks to include the Islam that was part of Rumi\u2019s daily life, choosing to ignore the historical Rumi was precisely \u201ca deliberate choice to remove Islamic references.\u201d<\/p>\n Omid Safi characterizes quite nicely the irony of both this decision and the forgetfulness Barks claims. \u201cI see,\u201d Ali quotes Safi as saying, \u201ca type of \u2018spiritual colonialism\u2019 at work here: bypassing, erasing, and occupying a spiritual landscape that has been lived and breathed and internalized by Muslims from Bosnia and Istanbul to Konya and Iran to Central and South Asia.\u201d Safi is absolutely spot on. Still, I\u2019m not suggesting that people who like Barks\u2019 versions of Rumi, who have been transformed by them, should now reject them. What I do think is that they, that we, have a responsibility not to indulge and perpetuate the spiritual colonialism Safi describes. As I suggested above and as Ali argues in her article, it\u2019s not just literary culture that\u2019s at stake here, but also how we as a society understand and value Islam and the many Muslims who live among us. One way of taking this responsibility is to go beyond Barks and seek out translations\u2014not only of Rumi, but Rumi is who we\u2019re talking about now\u2014that commit themselves to the original work and to a historically accurate understanding of the person who wrote it and the times in which he lived. Here are a couple of suggestions:<\/p>\n Finally, I would again urge you to read Rozina Ali\u2019s\u00a0article<\/a>.<\/p>\n Cross-posted<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Written by Rozina Ali, the article is called \u201cThe Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi,\u201d and it says something that Iranians I know have been saying for a very long time\u2014something that I learned from them, in fact. … Continue reading
\nI will meet you there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n