2.
Like most medieval saints in both the east and west, the life of the historical Rumi lies clouded in a fog of later hagiography. Some facts do however stand out. He was born in Balkh, capital of Khorasan, in what is now Afghanistan, on September 30 1207, and migrated with his family to Anatolia shortly before his home city was destroyed by the Mongols in 1221. After training as a Muslim preacher and jurist, he taught sharia law, of the Hanafi school, in a madrasa in Konya where he died on December 17 1273, and where his shrine, the Yesil Turbe, or Green Tomb, still stands.
At 37, Rumi's life was transformed when he met an enigmatic wandering dervish called Shams Tabrizi, who brought about a major spiritual epiphany in the respectable and bookish jurist. The two quickly became inseparable (though judging by Rumi's writings, it is most unlikely there was any sexual relationship as some have claimed). When Tabrizi mysteriously disappeared, Rumi's grief was expressed in one of the greatest outpourings of longing and separation ever produced in any language: a great waterfall of Persian verse - some 3,500 odes, 2,000 quatrains, and a massive mystical epic, The Masnavi, 26,000 couplets long, a rambling collection of tales, teaching stories and spiritual anecdotes built around the theme of "the Nightingale who was separated from the Rose". It is, in the eyes of many, the deepest, most complex and most mellifluous collection of mystical poetry ever written in any language, and from any religious tradition. It certainly stands as the supreme expression of mystical Islam.
Rumi advocated an individual and interior spirituality, and it is the love, rather than the fear, of God that lies at the heart of his message. He attempts to merge the spirit of the human with the ideal of a god of love, whom Rumi locates within the human heart. Rumi's first biographer, Aflaki, tells of a man who came to Rumi asking how he could reach the other world, as only there would he be at peace. "What do you know about where He is?" asked Rumi. "Everything in this or that world is within you."
Because God can best be reached through the gateway of the heart, Rumi believed you did not necessarily need ritual to get to him, and that the Divine is as accessible to Christians and Jews as to Muslims: "Love's creed is separate from all religions," he wrote. "The creed and denomination of lovers is God." All traditions are tolerated, because in the opinion of Rumi anyone is capable of expressing their love for God, and that transcends both religious associations and your place in the social order: "My religion," he wrote, "is to live through love."
Yet for all this, Rumi himself always remained an orthodox and practising Sunni Muslim. As Lewis rightly notes, "Rumi did not come to his theology of tolerance and inclusive spirituality by turning away from traditional Islam, but through immersion in it." He was not a "guru calmly dispensing words of wisdom capable of resolving, panacea-like, all our ontological ailments", as he is presented in the translations of Coleman Barks, so much as "a poet of overpowering longing, trying to grope through his shattering sense of loss". Likewise the poet and fellow of All Souls Andrew Harvey, who has produced some fine recreations of Rumi's verse, emphasises Rumi's "rigorous, even ferocious austerity". It is a far cry, he believes, from the New Age construct, "Rosebud Rumi, a Californian hippy-like figure of vague ecstatic sweetness and diffused warm-hearted brotherhood, a kind of medieval Jerry Garcia of the Sacred Heart".
One way Rumi did, however, most certainly diverge from some of the more austere ulema of his time was in that he believed passionately in the use of music, poetry and dancing as a path for reaching God, as a way of, as he put it, opening the gates of paradise. For Rumi, music helped devotees to focus their whole being on the divine, and to do this so intensely that the soul was both destroyed and resurrected. It was from these ideas that the whirling of Rumi's Mevlevi Sufi brotherhood - known in the west as the Whirling Dervishes - developed into a ritual form. The intention was to help devotees focus on the God within: as one Mevlevi Whirler we interviewed put it, there is a "palpable stillness you discover at the centre of the whirling ... everyone disappears and you feel as if you're in the eye of a hurricane".
Beautiful as it is, this use of poetry and music in ritual is one of the many aspects of Sufi practice that has attracted the wrath of modern Islamists. For although there is nothing in the Qur'an that specifically bans music, Islamic tradition has always associated music with courts, dancing girls and immorality, and there is a long tradition of clerical opposition to music. Today, Islamic puritans, like those of 17th-century England, firmly regard all music as unacceptable, and work to ban it wherever they come to power.
While filming in Pakistan we interviewed Maulana Mohammad Abdul Malik, a senior cleric with the Islamist political party, Jamaat-i-Islami, which has just banned the public playing of music within the Frontier province. For him the matter was quite simple. "Music is against Islam," he said. "These musical instruments - the tabla, sarangi, dhol - lead men astray and are sinful. They are forbidden, and these musicians are wrongdoers." This attitude is on the ascendant across the Islamic world and the pacifist Sufis have frequently faced violence from their Islamist opponents: several Sufi shrines and brotherhoods, for example, have recently been bombed in Iraq.
In Turkey, however, the Sufis have suffered far more from the secular Republicans than from the country's relatively quiescent Islamists. Before the first world war there were almost 100,000 disciples of the Mevlevi order throughout the Ottoman empire. But in 1925, as part of his desire to create a modern, western-orientated, secular state, Atatürk banned all the different Sufi orders and closed their tekkes. Pious foundations were suspended and their endowments expropriated; Sufi hospices were closed and their contents seized; all religious titles were abolished and dervish clothes outlawed. Turkish intellectuals were encouraged to study the western classics, while Rumi's writings, along with those of all his Sufi peers, were treated as an intellectual irrelevance. In 1937, Atatürk went even further, prohibiting by law any form of traditional music, especially the playing of the ney, the Sufis' reed flute.
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