Rumi

What is Sufism?

Sufism is the mystical side of Islam, and Rumi is its most read voice. Where law asks what a person should do, Sufism asks what happens to a person on the way to God. It works through practice more than argument. Dhikr is remembrance, the divine names repeated until the mind steadies. Sama is listening, poetry and music used to open a state that talking cannot reach. And it runs on relationship. A seeker needs a guide, and what passes between them goes heart to heart, not book to head. The goal has names too. Fana, the burning away of the separate self, and baqa, what carries on living once it is gone.

Who was Shams of Tabriz?

Shams of Tabriz was a wandering dervish who met Rumi in Konya in late 1244 and ended the life Rumi had built. Rumi was about thirty-seven, established, respected, thirteen years into teaching. After Shams he was a poet who whirled. They spent months in each other's company, and it cost Rumi his household, his students and his work for a while. Then in 1247 Shams disappeared. Later scholarship claims he was murdered, and that remains disputed. Rumi's grief afterwards is documented at length. His largest collection of poems carries the other man's name, the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, as if the poems were never his own.

• Spiritual guidance (irshad) is essential in Sufi tradition. Transformation needs a mirror that reflects your true nature.
• Sohbet, spiritual companionship, transmits knowledge heart-to-heart beyond what books alone can give.
• Rumi's encounter with Shams in 1244 turned a scholar into an ecstatic poet and mystic.

Listen to the story “Meeting Your Teacher”

What is the Masnavi about?

The Masnavi-yi Ma'navi is Rumi's long work, six books of couplets written roughly between 1258 and 1273. It is not a treatise. It is stories, hundreds of them, that break off into commentary and then start another story. Merchants, parrots, lovers, thieves. Each one is doing the same job, taking something you can picture and using it to point at something you cannot. It opens with a reed flute complaining that it was cut from the reed bed, and that image sets the whole book. The separation is real. So is the pull back. Read a few lines at a time, not chapters.

What did Rumi teach?

Rumi taught about divine love, the heart and union with God. Ishq is his word for love, and he does not mean affection. He means the pull that draws everything back toward its source. The heart, qalb, is not only where you feel in his psychology. It is where you know, and it reaches what argument cannot. And the self has to give way. Fana is the burning off of the separate self. Baqa is what goes on living afterwards. He put all of it into poetry rather than argument, in the Masnavi-yi Ma'navi, six books of spiritual couplets, and in the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi.

What is ishq?

Ishq is divine love, and in Sufi teaching it is not a warm feeling. The tradition sorts love into levels, from affection up to ishq, which consumes. Rumi puts it at the center of everything. It is the force pulling all of creation back toward where it came from, the way a moth obeys a flame. That is why his poems are not calm. The Masnavi opens with a reed flute crying about being cut from the reed bed, and the crying is the point. The longing you feel is not a fault to fix. It is the thing itself, pulling.