Love makes the dervish whirl

[1]

By Farrukh Dhondy [2]

Rs 299

Different strokes for different folks. America’s 9/11 did different things to different Americans. George Bush responded to it with his “war on terror’, that he called a “just war”. But within days of the Al Qaeda’s attack, in Islam’s name, on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, USA Today also reported that the Quran was fast becoming the bestselling book in the country.

To some this was a sure sign that in Uncle Sam’s den Islam was now the fastest growing religion. Meanwhile, drawing attention to torn-out-of-context, isolated verses from the scripture, Islamophobes could now tell uncritical readers: Check it out for yourself, Allah is a “Violent God”.
Even before the Quran started flying off the bookshelves in the Mecca of materialism, the great American public had fallen in love with a 13th century Muslim mystic from Central Asia: Jalaluddin Mohammed Rumi. One of the world’s most revered mystic poets, Rumi is now America’s most popular bard. As one writer pointed out some years ago, with over 250,000 copies of The Essential Rumi in print, it is the most successful poetry book published in the US in recent decades.
Jump now to Farrukh Dhondy’s Rumi: A New Translation, a selection from the Sufi saint’s vast repertoire. Thanks to his familiarity with the world of qawwalis and the Whirling Dervishes perhaps (following his death, Rumi’s followers established the Mevlevi Order, also known as the Order of the Whirling Dervishes in Turkey), Rumi is no stranger to Dhondy. But as he says it himself, the mystic poet is not in the long list of his all-time favourites: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Yeats, Eliot, even “some of my contemporaries, too many to mention”. Why then should this non-Sufi, non-poet get drawn into this translation project, especially considering there are so many already dotting the literary landscape?
It’s a three-tiered answer. Dhondy, a poetry lover, is aghast at the pathetic quality of recent translations. He is also appalled by the fact that Rumi’s Western lovers — rock star Madonna, fashion queen
Donna Karan, filmmaker Oliver Stone included — have mistaken the mevlana (maulana) for yet another modern-day “Guru of Love and Lust”. In
translating Rumi, Dhondy’s aim is to do “poetic justice” to the verses coming from a great master, as also to establish that in Rumi’s universe — as in the entire Sufi tradition — the constant invocation of love and ecstasy are not quite the same as sexual lust and orgasm. Above all, in Dhondy’s
own words, his book is “intended as a contention that in our times the identification of Sufism as the enduring interpretation of Islam is a political duty”.
Call it salvaging Islam from the fanatics. In these troubled times — of intolerant Wahhabism, militant theology and global jihad — through Rumi, Dhondy seeks to remind Muslims and non-Muslims alike of the tolerant tradition in Islam — Sufism — that is as old as Islam itself.
It’s a tradition that from the very beginning has refused to recognise the familiar divides: us versus them, believer versus infidel, sinner versus pious:

My heart has opened up in every form:
It is a pasture for gazelles a cloister for Christian monks,
A temple for idols, the Kaaba of the pilgrim,
The tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran.
I practice the religion of Love:
In whatever direction its caravan advances,
The religion of Love shall be my religion and my Faith.
(Ibn al Arabi, more or less Rumi’s contemporary)

It’s a tradition where there is neither fear of Hell, nor lure of Paradise. It’s a tradition which seeks not forgiveness or redemption, but re-union with the One, a drop losing itself in the ocean through an all-consuming, self-annihilating Love of the Beloved: Ishwar, Allah, God. For the Sufi, a natural corollary of Love for God is love for His entire Creation without distinction of any kind whatsoever: Love Me, love my Creation.
It’s a different Islam out here, an Islam beyond Shariah laws, a world without fatwas. If namaaz, roza, Haj obligations are the perennial refrain of the ulema of Shariah Islam, the Sufi forever warns the believer of the worthlessness of vacuous piety and empty rituals:

O pilgrim who visit the Holy Land
I’ll show you heaven in a grain of sand
Why traverse the deserts, why confront the storm
If within you resides the formless form
Of the Beloved? If he’s in your heart
Your pilgrimage has ended where you start.

That’s Rumi, and so is this one:

There are no rules of worship
He will hear
The voice of every heart
That is sincere

If singing, music and dancing are haraam in Shariah law, for the Sufi, qawwalis sung to the accompaniment of enchanting music, the dance of the Whirling Dervishes are the pathways to the Divine. And whatever the narrow-minded mullah might say, Sufism for very many Muslims is the very heart of Islam. For those in the know, Rumi’s epic Mathnawi is considered the Quran in Persian.
The Sufi’s message of love is not as loud as the Al Qaeda’s bomb. But if heeded it can heal our wounded world. It’s a message as old as Islam, a message that still resonates in the hearts and minds of Muslims across the globe. It’s a message that the fanatics seek to silence forever.

Javed Anand is co-editor of Communalism Combat and general secretary, Muslims for Secular Democracy