Rumi at 800

September 30, 2007 marks the 800th birthday anniversary of arguably the world’s most beloved poet, Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273). If only the place of his birth were as certain as the date, for he is generally thought to have been born in eastern Afghanistan, but more likely in what is now Tajikistan. Notwithstanding this and the fact that his entire poetical career was lived in Konya, Turkey, he is Persian through and through, in the great tradition of the mystic poets that preceded him -- ‘Attar, Khayyam, Ferdowsi, Sana’i, et. al -- his contemporary Sa’adi, and those who followed, such as Hafiz.

His prodigious output, several times that of Shakespeare’s, is all the more remarkable in that he didn’t begin until mid-life. He had been following in the footsteps of his scholarly father until the arrival on the scene one day of a certain Shams from Tabriz, Persia, who challenged his whole approach to the spiritual life. Legends abound about how this took place, the most popular being that Shams burst upon Rumi reading to his students from his own father’s works, and knocked the book into the fountain behind him. More likely was the less melodramatic problem posed by Shams about the Prophet Muhammad and Bayazid. At any rate, the older Shams became a mentor/muse/axis mundi/sounding board and human incarnation of his spiritual beloved all rolled into one, a relationship unknown in the western world. Rumi was initiated into the mysteries of Sufism, with its attendant devotional poetry about yearning to be reunited with the Beloved, music, chanting, and ecstatic, trancelike movement. Rumi began composing verses, many of them while “whirling,” and rarely stopped until the end of his life.

His relationship with Shams was fraught with turbulence and aroused the jealousy of his students. Shams disappeared at least twice, casing him untold anguish. He was once found in Damascus and brought back, but the last time he evaporated for good – rumours of his murder are unsubstantiated, and this last disappearance remains a mystery. Rumi eventually came to terms with this, reportedly discovering that Shams was somehow with him and he carried on.
Nevertheless two others in succession fulfilled Shams’ role, Salah al-Din, and Hosam al-Din, and the poetry showed marked differences in these periods. For instance, during the Shams period, his major work was the Divan – ecstatic poems suffused with longing, beautiful imagery, and mystical insights. These continued, but under Hosam’s prodding, he produced a no less-beloved work, the Mathnawi, full of instructional moral tales drawn from the Qur’an and the lore of the Middle East and Central Asia.

After his passing, his students established the Mevlevi Order in his honour and remembrance, famously known as the Whirling Dervishes, which have in these days been taken over by the government of Turkey as a cultural feature and export.

The present popularity of Rumi in America is largely attributable to the work of Coleman Barks, who has published several best-selling volumes of translations. Purists squirm at these, since Barks has taken all manner of liberties in trying to free them from their original context and make them contemporary and universal; notwithstanding Barks has struck a nerve, and the public is devouring them. Rumi has also become an icon himself, as films, stage productions, and musical works are devoted to his life and work.

Bahá’u’lláh quotes Rumi often in His own Writings, most notably in The Seven Valleys, an early mystical work revealed in Baghdad, ensuring that Rumi’s legacy will continue as long as the Bahá’í Faith endures, unforeseen in the wildest imaginations of the 13th century.

In 2000 Franklin Lewis published the most comprehensive scholarly work yet on the poet, the 686-page Rumi – Past and Present, East and West, and for this was invited to Iran for special recognition, all the more remarkable as he is non-Persian and a Bahá’í for good measure.

Here are the opening lines of the Mathnawi:


HEARKEN to the reed-flute, how it complains,
Lamenting its banishment from its home:
"Ever since they tore me from my osier bed,
My plaintive notes have moved men and women to tears.
I burst my breast, striving to give vent to sighs,
And to express the pangs of my yearning for my home.
He who abides far away from his home
Is ever longing for the day ho shall return.
My wailing is heard in every throng,
In concert with them that rejoice and them that weep.
Each interprets my notes in harmony with his own feelings,
But not one fathoms the secrets of my heart.
My secrets are not alien from my plaintive notes,
Yet they are not manifest to the sensual eye and ear.
Body is not veiled from soul, neither soul from body,
Yet no man hath ever seen a soul."
This plaint of the flute is fire, not mere air.
Let him who lacks this fire be accounted dead!
'Tis the fire of love that inspires the flute,l
'Tis the ferment of love that possesses the wine.
The flute is the confidant of all unhappy lovers;
Yea, its strains lay bare my inmost secrets.
Who hath seen a poison and an antidote like the flute?
Who hath seen a sympathetic consoler like the flute?
The flute tells the tale of love's bloodstained path,
It recounts the story of Majnun's love toils.
None is privy to these feelings save one distracted,
As ear inclines to the whispers of the tongue.

Civil Obedience

At a recent talk given at Transitions Bookstore in Chicago, Robert Stockman (pictured here with his family) coined the term Civil Obedience, a model of social change the Bahá’ís have used, and which he wistfully reflected the world in general may not yet be ready for. Bahá’ís are the supporters and well-wishers of every just government and are obedient to their own, and since only the Universal House of Justice has the authority to deem any government unjust and has never exercised this prerogative in the 44 years of its existence, the believers cannot agitate against civil authorities and can only use means within the laws of their lands to seek justice.

He cited a number of examples. In the Iranian city of Yazd, 150 families received a letter from the police, ordering the heads of the household to appear at the station on the morning of a given date. This kind of summons could only mean impending arrests, so the Bahá’ís held a meeting and at the appointed hour 150 women appeared in front of the police, as Bahá’ís maintain complete gender equality. Flummoxed, they let the women go.

In apartheid South Africa blacks were only allowed to enter the rear doors of homes, so the Bahá’ís placed heavy furniture blocking the front doors so everyone would have to enter through the back. When mixed-race meetings in public buildings were banned, members of Bahá’í committees were picked up in cars and the meetings were held while riding about the city, perfectly legal. When mixed-race Assemblies were outlawed, all the white members resigned, and the community was run by all-black Assemblies, a situation perfectly acceptable to the Bahá’ís, but not exactly what the government had in mind.

The Iranian Bahá’í community is rife with many examples. An ongoing dilemma is the systematic deprivation of Bahá’í students to a university education, a cat-and-mouse game in which, although books, computers, and records of a private Bahá’í university have been confiscated by the government, 500 students have obtained degrees and have been accepted into graduate studies in foreign countries. This year 800 students are enrolled, and all are studying English, as their online studies are administered by a computer network in Canada.

Bahá’ís continue to seek justice – never retribution or revenge – by diplomatic and legal means. They support UN Resolutions on human rights violations and encourage the local elected officials in their own countries to ask their national governments to support these resolutions as well by presenting them with unbiased, documented facts. And the students in Iran have garnered the support of campus and online organizations, Bahá’í and non- Bahá’í alike, so they might receive the education whose results will redound to the glory of their own nation.

Hatcher's Proof

There are certain existential questions that have never interested me. One of these is the proof of God’s existence. I have maintained for some time that you cannot prove nor disprove His existence through rational argument; rather it is a matter of either faith, or even better, a Reality once you have come face to face with either through experience, insight, or revelation that has removed all doubt forever. The challenge with this lack of doubt is to communicate it to unbelievers and convince them you are rational or sane. Yes, they might envy you your certitude or have their atheistic armour pierced by observation of your fine human qualities by virtue of your “irrational” views, but to convince them of the veracity of your view is an uphill battle.

There are traditional proofs of God, but they are existential and not scientific in the modern sense, and inadequate as arguments to a skeptical heart and mind. The Bahá’í Scriptures maintain that this has always been and will always be the way of the Almighty, for He places a high value on His creatures who will seek and find Him, which would simply be too easy if He were apparent for all to see without any hard-won spiritual insight.

Undaunted by attitudes such as mine, the late William Hatcher published several books on the subject, collating the best knowledge we have from the fields of mathematics, philosophy, physics, metaphysics, epistemology, and even linguistics to formulate his scientific proof of the existence of God, a proof which he calls Minimalism. Building on the classical Greek philosophers through Avicenna, Descartes, Gödel, and more modern thinkers, his approach seeks to debunk the excesses of reductionism and subjectivism, the fallacies of materialism and post-modernism, uproot the attitudes of atheism, agnosticism, cynicism, and skepticism, and tries to establish the invigorating breezes of rational thought over illogical dogmatism. [This has to be the worse sentence I’ve written since fourth grade.]

After a careful building up of parameters and methodology, in his last work: Minimalism: A Bridge Between Classical Philosophy and the Bahá’í Revelation, Hatcher has arrived at four metaphysical principles (as I understand them): first that Reality, the totality of existence, is composite; secondly, that every phenomenon is either caused by something else, or self-caused, but never both; thirdly, the cause of a phenomenon will also be the cause of its parts; and fourthly that a part of a phenomenon cannot be a part of its cause. From these principles he proposes a theorem that there can be only one universal cause and goes about proving it by arguments derived from the four principles.

Confused? If so, it’s not Hatcher’s fault, by mine, for he sets out these arguments with exemplary lucidity and relish. It should provide a colossal challenge for those who are predisposed to dismiss any introduction of a spiritual dimension into scientific inquiry as hokum, as it did in college milieu wherever he presented it. Check it out.

God Bless America

Now that I have lived in the United States for one full year, I have to pose a question I could keep at arm’s length when I was in Canada, but which is now in my face: Since when did God become American?

Over the millennia, many a culture has conceived a God in its own image, and it has even been said that if a triangle had a god, it would have three sides. Many races and nations have had their particular claim on God, fashioning their special status or justifying aggression. But America seems to have taken this to a whole new level, not only claiming that God is on our side, but that God is an avid supporter and defender of the American Way, the American Dream, the American Way of Life, as though the Almighty is a glorified cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys, one with an I-phone, wears the latest designer clothes, and eats at fast food restaurants. In effect, it has put American patriotism and values above God, and assumes that God enthusiastically approves of every move made by the greatest nation the world has ever seen. Surely I am not the only one who sees danger in such hubris. Am I wrong about this?

I queried a Bahá’í scholar on this vexing scenario. He posited that God was woven into American culture right from the beginning, and it has grown from there. That is certainly true, but since this notion is unique in the world, there must be forces that maintain and propagate this position. On the one hand, early American documents and manifestos mention God (though, interestingly enough, not Jesus Christ) frequently, and even the cash we handle daily affirms that God is a bedrock of American life. In our current climate, it has even been claimed that anyone who is an atheist has a questionable right to American citizenship. Shortly before his death, the playwright Arthur Miller spoke of the patriotic overlay on religion, and that there is even a small but vocal segment of society that is “aching for an Ayatollah.” On the other hand, the separation of church and state was guaranteed from the outset, and Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Buchanan, and Lincoln were not church-goers and spoke out against religion both in public and even private life.

We mostly hear these attitudes in conjunction with Christianity, usually of the more fundamentalist stripe, and associated with Conservatism. But some of the followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Transcendental Meditation fame have made claims that America can become invincible through the collective energies of 2500 yogic flyers, and receive an annual $12 million grant from a private foundation to carry forward research in this area. Indian spiritual thought has embraced belief from the highest mysticism and philosophy to the wildest imaginations of cults and madmen, but I sincerely doubt that any holy personage or group ever conceived that yoga, meditation, or any other spiritual practice would lead to the invincibility of India as a nation or political entity. It seems to be a particular American genius.

It is easy sport to criticize the weaknesses and foibles of any group, and the strong and unique are easy prey. For all its visible shortcomings, any fair person would acknowledge that the United States of America is a major player in the world, that its culture has touched down in every other nation in the world, and that in its short history it has brought incalculable benefits to the human race. The Bahá’í Faith affirms its special status. Bahá’u’lláh addressed these words to the leaders of the American Republics, during the tenure of Ulysses Grant:

Bind ye the broken with the hands of justice, and crush the oppressor who flourisheth with the rod of the commandments of your Lord, the Ordainer, the All-Wise.

In 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá revealed this “Prayer for America”:

O Thou kind Lord! This gathering is turning to Thee. These hearts are radiant with Thy love. These minds and spirits are exhilarated by the message of Thy glad-tidings. O God! Let this American democracy become glorious in spiritual degrees even as it has aspired to material degrees, and render this just government victorious. Confirm this revered nation to upraise the standard of the oneness of humanity, to promulgate the Most Great Peace, to become thereby most glorious and praiseworthy among all the nations of the world. O God! This American nation is worthy of Thy favors and is deserving of Thy mercy. Make it precious and near to Thee through Thy bounty and bestowal.

And the Guardian of the Faith chose America to establish the Administrative Order, which would spread over the earth and usher in the Golden Age of the World Order of Bahá’u’lláh. So its station and destiny, along with the responsibilities therein enshrined, are high indeed.

But if I just might add with my lone small voice, please make the nation under God, to make its future secure with divine guidance and truly spiritual forces and virtues.