Content area
Full Text
Rumi remains the most popular poet in America today. To many who claim to be "spiritual but not religious," his poems represent direct spiritual connection with a higher power, but a religious worldview underpins every poem he ever wrote.
Today, the ugly sides of religions are more prominent than ever, as they are never far from the headlines. Bigotry, violence, ethnic cleansing, enslavement, barbaric torture-all in the name of the major surviving religions in the world-whether Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, have made it an embarrassment for many to identify with any particular faith. In fact, this is a major attraction for the relatively new designation of "spiritual but not religious" (henceforth SBNR), which is increasingly prominent in North America (pewforum.org).
It is clear from the headlines in North American news programs that the faith that is most commonly associated here with the ugly sides of religion is Islam; one does not need to refer to polls for this. It makes it all the more remarkable that the individual most commonly regarded as a historical representative of the SBNR tendency is arguably the Sufi poet Rumi (d. 1273), who was raised to be a theologian of that religion. His poems in translations by the poet Coleman Barks have been the best-selling poetry (of any kind) in North America for at least two decades. The most popular of them is probably the following:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
(Barks, The Essential Rumi, 36)
The above translation of the first line of a quatrain by Rumi is now the most frequently quoted verse in America and a favorite for weddings. It is representative of the image of Rumi in the popular imagination of American readers as a mystic beyond the realm of religious dogma. This is in such stark contrast to the stereotypical image of Islamic religiosity that it has led to the following assumptions in reaction: (1) that Rumi was not truly of Muslim origin; (2) that Rumi rejected his Islamic origins for another Eastern religion; and (3) that the translations of this kind are wildly inaccurate.
In fact, none of the above are true. While many will point out that Coleman Barks cannot...