The popularity in the US of Rumi, a 13th-century Turkish poet, is a tragic irony, as the order of Sufi dervishes he founded is banned at home, writes William Dalrymple
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It seems almost unbelievable in the world of 9/11, Bin Laden and the Clash of Civilisations, but the bestselling poet in the US in the 1990s was not any of the giants of American letters - Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens or Sylvia Plath; nor was it Shakespeare or Homer or Dante or any European poet. Instead, remarkably, it was a classically trained Muslim cleric who taught sharia law in a madrasa in what is now Turkey.
Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi lived in Central Anatolia in the early 13th century, and he died around the time of Dante's eighth birthday. How Rumi came to outsell any other poet in America in the late 1990s, at least according to the LA Times, is an unlikely story - but not quite as unlikely as the way Rumi has been mysteriously morphed from a medieval scholar of Islamic law, or fiqh, into an American New Age guru.
A selection from the "arousing" Rumi translations by the poet Coleman Barks has been set to music with his verses mouthed by such spiritual luminaries as Madonna, Goldie Hawn and Demi Moore (the cover blurb of this CD describes it as all about "Passion. Music. Romance. Transcending the boundaries of ecstasy it creates a musical tribute to the Act of Love.") Sarah Jessica Parker is reported to do her aerobics to rock'n'roll settings of Rumi, and he is also available in a self-help audiobook version aimed at stressed New York commuters. Rumi has even been hailed as one of the torchbearers (according to one book on the subject) "of homoeroticism and spirituality".
Very little of this, of course, seems to have much connection to the original, historical Rumi, or the voluminous pages of profoundly mystical Persian religious verse he wrote. According to his most authoritative modern biographer, the Persian scholar Franklin D Lewis, "while Rumi seems slightly out of place in the company of Ginsberg, and seriously misunderstood as a poet of sexual love, it simply defies credulity to find Rumi in the realm of haute couture. But models draped in Donna Karan's new black, charcoal and platinum fall fashions actually flounced down the runway to health guru Deepak Chopra's recent musical versions of Rumi."
There is an additional layer of paradox and absurdity here: although Rumi lived and wrote in central Turkey, he is almost unread in his homeland and there is no accessible modern edition of his work in contemporary Turkish. According to Talat Halman, the leading Turkish Rumi scholar, whom I went to see in Istanbul, "Rumi is certainly not the bestselling poet in Turkey - far from it. For one thing, his poems have not been translated as extensively as they should have been, and the translations that exist are not poetic enough. People here simply don't have the patience to read a huge book like [Rumi's masterpiece] The Masnavi."
But it is not just that Rumi's poetry is unread. The order of Sufi dervishes that Rumi was father to, the Mevlevis, have been officially banned since the time of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and their beautiful lodges or tekkes lie locked and left to decay or seized by the state, in order - a tragic irony - to westernise Turkey, and bring it closer to Europe and the US. Although discreet expressions of Sufism are now openly tolerated, and pictures of Whirling Dervishes are prominently used in Turkish government tourist brochures, the open practice of the Sufi mysticism that Rumi represented can still technically result in a seven-month prison sentence. While in Turkey making a Channel 4 documentary on Sufi music this summer we found it almost impossible to get any genuine Turkish Sufi group to allow us to film them, so nervous were they of the reaction of the authorities.
It all adds up to an archetypal - if unusually poignant - case of east-west misunderstanding: a west earnestly looking eastwards for an ancient spiritual wisdom, which it receives through the filter of sexed-up translations that most Persian scholars regard as seriously flawed, and which recreate a Rumi wholly divorced from his Islamic context; while in the east, a Republican Turkish government anxious to integrate Turkey with Europe bans Rumi's Sufi brotherhood as part of its attempt to embrace a west it perceives as rational, industrial, intolerant of superstition and somehow post-mystical.
In the middle of this confusion of civilisations, Sufism or Islamic mysticism, the most accessible, tolerant and pluralistic incarnation of Islam, and a uniquely valuable bridge between east and west at this moment of crisis, finds itself suppressed by the Islamic world's two most pro-western governments: the fundamentalist Saudi Wahhabis, who see it as a heretical threat to their own harsh, literal and intolerant interpretation of the Qur'an; and secular Turkey, which regards it as a token of their embarrassing, corrupt and superstitious Ottoman past.
It is, as Halman says, a major missed opportunity. He believes that Rumi's brand of Sufism represents "the free spirit of Islam ... the liberal spirit that I think needs to be recognised at a time when Islam has come to be considered almost synonymous with terrorism. The Sufi spirit softens the message of the Qur'an by emphasising the sense of love, and the passionate relationship between the believer and the beloved, God of course being the ultimate beloved. So in the eyes of Rumi and the Sufis, God becomes not the angry god of punishment, nor the god of revenge, but the god of love."
At this moment, more than ever, that message desperately needs to be heard.
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