Excerpt
from
Mevlana Jalal’uddin Rumi:
His Life and Poetry
by Mark W. Muesse
In
the land where he spent the greater portion of his life,
the country we today call Turkey, the mystic poet Rumi
is scarcely known by that name. The Turks call him Mevlana,
or “our master.” “Rumi” is more
of a nickname than a surname, and it simply means the “Roman” or
more accurately, the “Byzantine,” since this
part of the world was once the Byzantine Empire, the successor
of the East Roman Empire.
But
this “Rumi” was not a Roman, or a Byzantine,
or even a Turk. He was born in the area of Balkh in present-day
Afghanistan, then known as Khorasan, a place bustling with
Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians. Jalal’uddin
Rumi was born into this religiously diverse place on 30
September 1207, making him the contemporary of two other
great mystics, Francis of Assisi (c. 1182-1226) and Meister
Eckhart (c. 1260-1328). Rumi
seems in his early life to have been every bit a conventional
Muslim. During
this period, in the 1230s and 1240s,
he led a normal life for a religious scholar, teaching,
praying, and helping the poor. But in October 1244,
when he was 37 years old, Rumi had an encounter that
would forever change his life. There are several conflicting
accounts of this event. One story maintains that on
his way home from the madrasa, Rumi met a wandering
dervish (Sufi) who asked him a question that impacted
him like a Zen koan. There are even different versions
of this question, and today we are not certain of its
actual content. But it stirred Rumi profoundly.
In
another account, Rumi was teaching by a fountain in a square
in Konya. The wandering stranger pushed through crowd and
tossed into the fountain the books from which Rumi was
teaching. When Rumi demanded to know who this stranger
was and why he did this, the stranger replied: “You
must now live what you have been reading about.” The
stranger then turned to the books at the bottom of the
fountain and said “We can retrieve them. They’ll
be as dry as they were.” He picked one up from the
bottom of the fountain, and it was dry. Rumi said “leave
them.”
Full
text
(Woodstock, Vermont: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2004.) 36-37. |
