by Ed Husain
The Seljuk sultans of Anatolia welcomed Rumi’s father, Baha’uddin Walad, as a professor at a sharia seminary. Rumi himself studied in the great cities of learning of the time, Damascus and Aleppo, and by 1244, as his father’s son and as a scholar in his own right, he commanded an academic following in Konya and had a reputation for being upright and erudite. But all that was set to change.
A wandering dervish from Persia, Shams of Tabriz, had arrived in town. Rumi’s fame and stature were such that he had little time for lowly dervishes – for Rumi, it was his books, lectures and students that mattered, not conversing with vagabonds, however inwardly alive to God they might be. Shams of Tabriz had other ideas.
Rumi was sitting one day near a fountain in Konya, talking to his students, with a precious, rare copy of the Ma‘arif, a mystical tract written by his father, open on the fountain ledge. Shams walked up to Rumi, interrupted the gathering, and pushed the Ma‘arif and other books into the water. ‘What are you doing?’ Rumi asked, aghast that one of the few extant copies of his father’s masterpiece should be ruined in this way. ‘O Rumi, you won’t understand unless you start to live what you have been reading about,’ Shams replied. ‘But if you want, I can retrieve the books, and you will find them to be dry.’ And so he did: Shams pulled the books out of the water, dry and with no trace of moisture about them.
Rumi had read about miracles, but never before witnessed one. He recalled his father’s teaching – ‘Listen to those who yearn achingly for God’ – and realised that such a person was standing before him. An ambassador of the divine presence had reached Rumi, and Rumi knew it, felt it. Thirteen years after his father’s passing, and three years before Rumi’s fortieth birthday, the sober professor was about to shed his old self and emerge anew – but it would not be easy, or without scandal.
Soon after that, Shams of Tabriz approached Rumi in the bazaar in Konya and posed the question: Who was greater, the Prophet Mohamed for teaching ‘Subhan Allah’ (‘Glory be to God’) or a venerated early Muslim saint, Bayazid Bistami (d. 874), who declared: ‘Subhani’ (‘Glory be to me’)? Bistami had experienced divine unity with God and believed he had merged with the Divine, so that his glory was the glory of God. Shams’s blasphemous question left Rumi speechless.
It was an uncomfortable moment for Rumi’s students, to see their esteemed theology professor silenced by a travelling dervish. But with Shams’s help Rumi soon learned the answer to the question: the celebrated Bistami had had only a taste of the Divine, and melted in its ambience, whereas Mohamed returned from the Divine presence again and again to teach humans how to get closer to their Source. Rumi now yearned for this knowledge of the Source.
The two key influences on Rumi’s life, his Afghan father Baha’uddin and now the Persian Shams of Tabriz, gave Rumi wings. Both were from the East, had memorised the Quran in its entirety, taught people religious and mystical knowledge, and uttered profanities. Most importantly, both bequeathed their spiritual secrets to Rumi.
Rumi started spending more and more time alone with Shams. He could not stop asking him about the higher secrets of Sufism, the flaws of the path, the trials of progress in God’s love, maintaining equilibrium while swimming in deep oceans of spiritual awareness, and the ways in which the human ego could be crushed.
Shams never spoke of Rumi as a disciple, and Rumi was not allowed to refer to Shams as his teacher. It was a meeting of equals, or at least that was how Shams insisted on presenting their relationship. When speaking to Rumi’s students and sons, Shams was full of praise for the professor. Shams saw Rumi as a perfect human, the best possible reservoir for the secrets Shams had gathered as a Sufi traveller about the loving, why-less and how-less, approach to God. Shams had travelled vast distances to teach his insights to a mind and soul as deep as Rumi’s.
Shams spoke less positively, however – in fact he was downright rude – about other people in Konya, apart from Rumi’s students and family. He had only scorn and contempt for their spiritual laziness, and his sharp tongue and blunt rebukes did not endear him to them.
Meanwhile, Rumi was starting to make obscure statements in public such as: ‘I was raw, I was cooked, I was burned’, and other mystical utterances that made sense only to those who knew something of the journey to God. Perhaps rebuking those obsessed with the sharia, he wrote: ‘Out there, beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.’ And, alluding to the human search for the divine: ‘What you seek is seeking you.’ What did it all mean? The public were baffled, and horrified.
Shams and Rumi now became inseparable, spending months locked away in meditation, study and the exchanging of divine secrets. Rumi’s neglect of his professorial duties aroused anger and jealousy among his colleagues and students. Who was this dervish who dared to take away their teacher? Worse was Shams’s rudeness – not that he cared for popular approval. The light that Shams had carried from the East had found a home. His dreams had sent him to Konya to find Rumi, and their scandalous association was set to change Muslim spirituality – Sufism – for ever.
Rumi had now been set alight within, and could no longer go back to dry book-knowledge and the mere rituals of religion. Under pressure, he returned to the seminary, but he would be seen there holding on to a pillar and slowly walking round it, again and again, murmuring love poetry, yearning for the Divine. His students looked on, and blamed the foreigner Shams for so corrupting their teacher. Shams urged Rumi to violate every code, every sacrosanct behaviour, so that in their eyes he became nothing, and predictably was cursed for it – but in Divine eyes Rumi would become everything, committed only to the love of God, seeking acceptance only in heaven. He killed his ego’s desire to please others and be liked and respected, and he did everything society forbade: he sang, he danced, he was free.
This delirious, ecstatic style of Sufism is still alive today. The Turkish author Elif Shafak’s bestselling book The Forty Rules of Love taps into people’s enduring love for Shams and Rumi. The Qawwali singers of Sufi devotional music in Pakistan and India are YouTube sensations in the Indian subcontinent. Bollywood movies are peppered with Sufi shrines and poetry, and the Sufi values of valour and spirituality, reflecting the extent to which most Hindus in India do not see Sufism as alien to their own identity or ideas. Many Sikhs, Hindus and other Indians have a sense of mystical affiliation with the Muslim saints of Delhi and Bombay, and visit their tombs.
And Rumi’s poetry is a top seller in America, because he speaks to that inner yearning of the human soul that within Islam only the Sufis understand:
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.
This Sufi message of hope and renewal has survived many centuries already, and will no doubt endure many more. But Rumi’s was only one example of Sufi practice. The modern West too easily associates Sufism with his Mevlevi order’s whirling dervishes, while ignoring the much broader and deeper dynamics of Muslim mysticism. The Sufis have had a far more wide-ranging impact on Islam, and today most of the world’s Muslims are either Sufis or at least deeply influenced by Sufism.
It was Sufis from the Hadhramaut valley in Yemen, for example – six traders of the Alawi order – who spread Islam throughout Indonesia. The largest Muslim nation in the world today follows Sufi ways, venerating the Prophet with million-strong congregations joining in the mawlid, commemorating the Prophet’s birth and life, and the collective dhikr, or gathering to glorify God.
In India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh it was the great Sufis of Ajmer Sharif and Delhi who brought millions to Islam with their meditation and miracles, outdoing the Hindu yogis. Later, the Mughal emperors were deeply influenced by this Sufism and renovated and revived the great shrines of the Sufis.
In Iraq, the
Sufi Abdul Qadir al-Jilani (d. 1166) and his students founded the Qadiri order that is widespread across the Muslim world today. He was born in the Jilan province of Persia, and his mother sent him to Baghdad to study Islam. Sufis tell the story that she gave young Abdul Qadir food for the journey and sewed a large amount of cash into the lining of his shirt. His outer robe concealed his hidden wealth. On the way to Baghdad, the caravan was attacked by bandits. Their leader asked the boy if he had anything of value, or knew if anyone else in the convoy did. The young man opened his shirt and handed over the hidden cash. ‘You have what you want of this world,’ he told the thieves. ‘Now give us safe passage to the wealth of knowledge in Baghdad that will give us the bounties of the next world.’ Moved by Abdul Qadir’s sincerity and single-mindedness, the robbers joined him and went with him to Baghdad. There they became the first students of the Sufi Qadiri order, which is now prevalent in the Middle East, India and Pakistan.
In Africa, the spread of Islam was greatly assisted by wandering Sufi dervishes who won fame by performing miracles. As in India, the Sufis in Africa did not disrupt local customs and traditions unless they contradicted Islam. Their understanding of the sharia was that everything was permitted unless specifically forbidden. Dance, music, dress, architecture, languages and landscape were left alone – their only purpose was to impart spirituality and a connection to the Divine among the masses. The Sufis sought to influence the Batin, the inner being, knowing that once that was touched, faith would manifest itself in the Zahir, the outward.
Beyond Indonesia, India, Iraq and Africa there was also Osman Ghazi, the Sufi founder of the Ottoman Empire. In the year 1300 he was leading an army of his Turkic warriors in Anatolia, accompanied by a Sufi dervish. Osman, from whose name we get ‘Ottoman’, would not lead an army into battle without his Sufi spiritual masters present. On one such military expedition, he dreamed that the moon came out of his Sufi guide’s mouth and passed into Osman’s own chest. Then a great tree sprang forth from the warrior’s breast, its branches spreading over the whole world. Seven centuries later, Sufism remains the lifeblood of popular Muslim practice in Turkey and the Turkosphere across the Balkans and central Asia.
Unfortunately, in every area of human activity there is scope for rivalry, power politics and intrigue, and of course Sufism is no exception: at times it has harboured a degree of corruption and seen its good name exploited. The popularity of Sufism in Egypt, Nigeria and Pakistan has meant it getting embroiled in the vices of those fragile countries. There are Sufis who keep their distance from power in all three countries, but there are also powerful men who are members of Sufi orders.
In Egypt, the pious and popular (former) grand mufti Sheikh Ali Gomaa openly supported the military and government after they deposed President Mohamed Morsi in 2012, and provided religious justification for the killing of hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members. In Pakistan, Sufi pirs, or teachers, and their students have sometimes been frauds. Their vast network of property ownership and political influence in garnering votes has besmirched the name of dervishes who are supposed to distance themselves from the dunya, the temporal world. And in Nigeria, the trust demanded by Sufi instructors has often been abused, when parents have handed sons over to live with their Sufi teacher, only for the master to send the children out to beg all day, claiming he is ‘teaching them to combat the ego’. These Mujiri children (a derivative of the Arabic word muhajir or ‘migrant’) are now attached to several militias across northern Nigeria.
By and large, in developing Muslim countries like these, where Sufis have become corrupted, or Sufi scholars have been co-opted by the state and lost their independence, the middle classes have turned elsewhere for guidance: to the emerging Islamists and Salafists, among others. In their rejection of Sufism, Islamists and Salafists have created a version of Islam that is functional and robotic about acting in accordance with scripture, but is devoid of beauty. In this respect they have killed the soul of Islam, Sufism, with its veneration of the Prophet, its appreciation of beauty in poetry, art and architecture, and its commitment to coexistence with other faiths.
Iran was once home to this vibrant Sufism. The Islamist government in Tehran today, together with its allies in Hezbollah in Lebanon and the governments of Iraq and Syria, promotes a version of the faith that is a world away from the joyous freedom of the Sufis. Yet one of the pioneers of Sufism was the celebrated Persian scholar and poet Omar Khayyam.
Rare is the literary bookshelf in the West that does not have a copy of the famed Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a collection of quatrains celebrating love, divinity, wine, and living life to the full. Khayyam was a devout twelfth-century Sufi Muslim scholar, poet and astronomer who loved drinking wine – forbidden in Islam – but was also intoxicated with love of the Divine. Edward FitzGerald’s inspired nineteenth-century English translations of Khayyam’s wild, euphoric poetry, published only two years after the trauma of the Indian revolt against British rule in 1857, helped to recast England’s perception of the Muslim East.
Across America, FitzGerald’s translations of Khayyam’s masterpiece led to dining and drinking clubs being named after this great Muslim scholar. It should be noted, however, that the Khayyam that FitzGerald unearthed, and with whom he dazzled the nineteenth-century literary elite, was not the whole Khayyam. FitzGerald’s selective translations were driven by detestation of his own zealous, preacher brother – which led FitzGerald to remove Khayyam’s religious side, and present the English-speaking world with only a truncated Khayyam.
Be that as it may, FitzGerald gave Khayyam’s work a new lease of life and returned him from England, via America, back to his native Persia with added fame, stature, and now also recognition in the West. Iranians visited their medieval ancestor anew, and named streets and schools after him. His verses still play on the lips of young Iranians; the theocrats aren’t happy about it, but they would not dare to outlaw the hugely popular Khayyam. So why, 900 years after his death, is he so important in the Muslim world, America and Britain?
Abul Fath Omar ibn Ibrahim Khayyam (1048–1129) was born in the district of Shadyakh in the old city of Nishapur in Khurasan, the eastern province of today’s Iran. Omar’s father Ibrahim was a khayyam, a tentmaker. Poor and without connections, how could an illiterate tentmaker educate his son? Like many piously raised Muslim boys then and since, young Omar had already memorised much of the Quran, so his father presented him to the imam at the local mosque. There he learned Arabic grammar and Quranic exegesis, and acquired basic religious knowledge.
Once firmly grounded in religion and Arabic, Khayyam moved on to another master, with whom he learned mathematics, astronomy and cosmology. The tentmaker’s son possessed intellectual abilities that surprised his teachers, and he was accepted among the ‘best of the best’, being mentored by the teachers of princes and the nobility. Yet Khayyam never lost sight of his humble roots.
The Muslims of the time were fascinated by astronomy. Their reading of the Quran, with its reflective verses on the stars and galaxies, made them want to learn about the secrets of the universe. Study of the stars yielded a means of navigation for travelling merchants, and precise calculations of daybreak, dawn, noon, sunset and so on helped to regulate prayer times. From Ibn Hazm in Andalusia to Omar Khayyam in Persia, there was no shortage of Muslim contributors to the science of astronomy, but Khayyam’s contribution was outstanding.
By tradition, higher learning was acquired through travel, study and ijazah (licence) from other masters. Khayyam travelled to Isfahan, where his fame as a leading astronomer and mathematician had reached the court of the Seljuk kings. In 1076 the king Malik Shah commissioned Khayyam, with several assistants, to work on a new imperial calendar. For three years he worked meticulously to produce the Taqwim Jalali, the most detailed calendar ever produced. It etched the name of Omar Khayyam on the Iranian national psyche, and remains Iran’s time-honoured official calendar.
Soon afterwards, Khayyam went on the Hajj,
where he was received by other scholars as an allamah, or scholar extraordinaire. Everyone had heard of his writings and scientific treatises, even if they had not actually read them. In Mecca, like other Muslim pilgrims, he would have worn two white shrouds to remind him of death, and fulfilled the rituals of the Hajj, from circumambulating the Ka’bah seven times to walking between two hills in commemoration of the sacrifices of Hagar for her son Ishmael. The spiritual experience stayed with Khayyam for life, and his encounters on his travels with scholars, merchants, clerics and judges helped form the rebel he was to become with the passing of time.
In the royal courts Omar Khayyam was an outsider – he was not born of the nobility. And his observations were acute. Little wonder, then, that the poetry that was to pour from his pen has become the succour of the underdogs, the anti-establishment Sufis, and lovers of pleasure through the ages.
Khayyam’s Rubaiyat – ‘Quatrains’ – is a collection of 1,200 verses. FitzGerald’s genius was to edit the lines and present their most pertinent themes in an impassioned English rendition that aroused a sense of urgency and passion for life, joy and freedom from the clerical reprimands both of Khayyam’s time and of our own. Khayyam wrote freely, openly, about the taverns, wine and cups of Nishapur in the twelfth century, bringing to life for us a period in history. The drinking of wine is for Khayyam waking from the slumber of our lives. His opening lines in the Rubaiyat are:
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of the Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky,
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,
‘Awake, my little ones, and fill the Cup
‘Before Life’s Liquor in its cup be dry.’