Mystic · Medieval
Jalal al-Din Rumi
1207–1273 · Persian Sufism of love; the Mevlevi (whirling) order founded by his son
The most widely read Muslim poet in the West; Christians and Jews walked in his funeral at Konya, and Catholic contemplatives from Merton onward have read him beside the Song of Songs.
A jurist and preacher of Konya transformed at thirty-seven by his meeting with the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, Rumi poured the rest of his life into the lyric “Divan-i Shams” and the six-book “Masnavi,” a vast poem of stories, parables and Qur'anic commentary that Persian readers called “the Qur'an in Persian.” He taught that love (ishq), not reasoning, brings the soul to God, that the reed flute's lament is the soul's longing for the ground from which it was cut, and that the self must die (fana) to be reborn in the Beloved; he kept the Law as the lamp, the Sufi path as the road and the Truth as the goal. He held that free will is real, since the Qur'an is nothing but commands and prohibitions, that suffering purifies, and that the religions differ as lamps differ while the light is one. The ritual dance (sama) of his followers is prayer made bodily.
Why he matters: He is the gate through which many Westerners first meet a Muslim who speaks of God as a lover, and Thomas Merton, who corresponded with Sufis and read Rumi, found in him the nearest Muslim voice to the Christian mystics; the Catholic tradition of spiritual reading of the Qur'an by Massignon's heirs takes him as its best text. He is also a corrective to the picture of Islam as law without love.
Where to be careful
His language of union and his hint that the Beloved is in every form leans toward the immanentism condemned at Lateran IV and Vatican I, and his relativizing of the religions toward the indifferentism rejected in Mirari Vos and Dominus Iesus; Jesus for him is the healer and breath of God, not God incarnate. Common ground: the primacy of love, the dying of the self, the purifying office of suffering, and a God who seeks the soul before the soul seeks Him.
Reading
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Rumi: Past and Present, East and WestFranklin D. Lewis · The standard life and study, which separates the historical Rumi from the paraphrases sold under his name.
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Merton and Sufism: The Untold Storyed. Rob Baker and Gray Henry · Merton's letters and talks on the Sufis, the fullest record of a Catholic contemplative reading Rumi's tradition from inside his own.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each question the test asks.