I saw a bumper sticker once, with a line from Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. Rumi’s message cuts through and communicates. “His work comes out of dealing with the separation from Shams and from love and the source of creation, and out of facing death. “He’s a poet of joy and of love,” says Gooch. Now I recite rhymes and poems and songs.” Centuries after his death, Rumi’s work is recited, chanted, set to music and used as inspiration for novels, poems, music, films, YouTube videos and tweets (Gooch tweets his translations Why does Rumi’s work endure? “That was codified after his death into elegant meditative dance.” Or, as Rumi wrote, in Ghazal 2,351: “I used to recite prayers. “Rumi would whirl while he was meditating and while composing poetry, which he dictated,” said Gooch. He wrote in couplets a six-volume spiritual epic, The Masnavi.”ĭuring these years, Rumi incorporated poetry, music and dance into religious practice. He wrote 2,000 rubayat, four-line quatrains. He wrote 3,000 to Shams, the prophet Muhammad and God.
“Most of the poetry we have comes from age 37 to 67. After three years Shams disappeared – “possibly murdered by a jealous son of Rumi, possibly teaching Rumi an important lesson in separation.” Rumi coped by writing poetry. “The two of them have this electric friendship for three years – lover and beloved disciple and sheikh, it’s never clear.” Rumi became a mystic. “Rumi was 37, a traditional Muslim preacher and scholar, as his father and grandfather had been,” says Gooch. The transformative moment in Rumi’s life came in 1244, when he met a wandering mystic known as Shams of Tabriz. Today Rumi’s tomb draws reverent followers and heads of state each year for a whirling dervish ceremony on 17 December, the anniversary of his death. His final stop was Konya, in Turkey, where Rumi spent the last 50 years of his life. “The map of Rumi’s life covers 2,500 miles,” says Gooch, who has traveled from Rumi’s birthplace in Vakhsh, a small village in what is now Tajikistan, to Samarkand in Uzbekistan, to Iran and to Syria, where Rumi studied at Damascus and Aleppo in his twenties.
“He’s this compelling figure in all cultures,” says Brad Gooch, who is writing a biography of Rumi to follow his critically acclaimed books on Frank O’Hara and Flannery O’Connor. The ecstatic poems of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, a Persian poet and Sufi master born 807 years ago in 1207, have sold millions of copies in recent years, making him the most popular poet in the US.
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