“Rumi was born into a religious family and followed the proscribed rules of daily prayer and fasting throughout his entire life,” Gooch writes. In “Rumi’s Secret,” Gooch helpfully chronicles the political events and religious education that influenced Rumi. Still, Rumi built a large following in cosmopolitan Konya, incorporating Sufis, Muslim literalists and theologians, Christians, and Jews, as well as the local Sunni Seljuk rulers. This unusual tapestry of influences set Rumi apart from many of his contemporaries, Keshavarz told me. Rumi would come to blend the intuitive love for God that he found in Sufism with the legal codes of Sunni Islam and the mystical thought he learned from Shams. In a new biography of Rumi, “ Rumi’s Secret,” Brad Gooch describes how Shams pushed Rumi to question his scriptural education, debating Koranic passages with him and emphasizing the idea of devotion as finding oneness with God. The nature of the intimate friendship between the two is much debated, but Shams, everyone agrees, had a lasting influence on Rumi’s religious practice and his poetry. It was there that he met an elder traveller, Shams-i-Tabriz, who became his mentor. Rumi continued his theological education in Syria, where he studied the more traditional legal codes of Sunni Islam, and later returned to Konya as a seminary teacher. His father was a preacher and religious scholar, and he introduced Rumi to Sufism. He later settled in Konya, in present-day Turkey, with his family. Rumi was born in the early thirteenth century, in what is now Afghanistan. “The Rumi that people love is very beautiful in English, and the price you pay is to cut the culture and religion,” Jawid Mojaddedi, a scholar of early Sufism at Rutgers, told me recently. Rumi himself described the “Masnavi” as “the roots of the roots of the roots of religion”-meaning Islam-“and the explainer of the Koran.” And yet little trace of the religion exists in the translations that sell so well in the United States. (The work, which some scholars consider unfinished, has been nicknamed the Persian Koran.) Fatemeh Keshavarz, a professor of Persian studies at the University of Maryland, told me that Rumi probably had the Koran memorized, given how often he drew from it in his poetry. Its fifty thousand lines are mostly in Persian, but they are riddled with Arabic excerpts from Muslim scripture the book frequently alludes to Koranic anecdotes that offer moral lessons. The words that Martin featured on his album come from Rumi’s “Masnavi,” a six-book epic poem that he wrote toward the end of his life. Curiously, however, although he was a lifelong scholar of the Koran and Islam, he is less frequently described as a Muslim. He is typically referred to as a mystic, a saint, a Sufi, an enlightened man. Rumi is often described as the best-selling poet in the United States. I am a carpenter of my own soul.” Barks’s translations, in particular, are shared widely on the Internet they are also the ones that line American bookstore shelves and are recited at weddings. Or, “Every moment I shape my destiny with a chisel.
“If you are irritated by every rub, how will you ever get polished,” one of them goes. Aphorisms attributed to Rumi circulate daily on social media, offering motivation. Rumi has helped the spiritual journeys of other celebrities-Madonna, Tilda Swinton-some of whom similarly incorporated his work into theirs.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY THE WALTERS ART MUSEUM He is less frequently described as a Muslim. A seventeenth-century illustration for Rumi’s epic poem “Masnavi.” Rumi is often called a mystic, a saint, an enlightened man.
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