But on another count, Rumi could hardly be more at odds with the Islamic fundamentalists. While fundamentalists preach a strict observance of the Quran's every injunction, Sufis, like all mystics, find God in experience rather than in scripture. Ecstatic communion is what Rumi was after, and that kind of experience was not going to happen at the mosque or reading the Quran. Rumi didn't want to throw his books in the fountain, until he learned that the message in them would have to come from within himself.
Despite all this, it's not so unreasonable to think that, as you read these words, there is on the radio somewhere in Kabul or Mazar-i-Sharif, a voice reciting the poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi, Afghanistan's local prodigy. And if that person, or one of us, went looking for a poem to describe the agony of war, we might come up with this one.
I've broken through to longing
Now, filled with a grief I have
Felt before, but never like this.
The center leads to love.
Soul opens the creation core.
Hold on to your particular pain.
That too can take you to God.
According to Rumi, not only does our "particular pain" take us to God, it is God. And in Barks' translations, there's nothing in the world, its worst and best, that isn't holy. Barks explains, "And if that's true then every kindness and every healing, as well as every disease and cruelty and every terrible sudden screaming is all God. It's all divine."
This is one way to look at tragedies on the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks. Another way is to simply wish they hadn't happened and maybe consider dumping a God who would have allowed it. The question of why any God would allow tragedy on this scale fills entire shelves at the library, but I asked Barks anyway, at which point he took another bite of his sandwich and said, "Maybe Rumi is just trying to describe his ignorance. He feels that it's a sacred universe, and yet he feel that there's terrible things happening and he can't deny that they're part of it."
Art is a place we often go looking for advice when we've run out of other options. And what's there, inevitably, isn't an answer but a reflection of the suffering we already feel. On this point, Rumi, reduced by grief to simple, unmiraculous reflection, does a pretty good job.
The tomb
Looks like a prison, but it's really
Release into union. The human seed goes
Down into the ground like a bucket into
The well where Joseph is. It grows and
Comes up full of some unimagined beauty.
Your mouth closes here and immediately
Opens with a shout of joy there.
"It's a mysterious thing what the soul is," Barks says. "No one knows what the soul is. But I think it's the thing that makes symbols, makes stories, it's that overflow part of the human psyche that generates 'War and Peace.' There was no need for 'Twelfth Night,' or 'As You Like It,' it just flowed out of Shakespeare. Same way with Rumi's poetry; it was all spontaneous. It was part of the work that he was doing with the learning community, he spoke it. Didn't write it down. He spoke it and then a scribe took it down. And then Rumi would look at the pages and make alterations. But mainly you can say it is jazz, made up at the demands of the moment. It's as spontaneous as a day. And keeps on happening. So certain characteristics of the soul might be that it's generous in its ability to generate things, it's joyous, innately playful and grieving; it's very connected to grief."
About the writer
Amy Standen is a writer in Oakland, Calif.
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