Islam’s Own Persian Antidote to ISIL/DĀʿISH: Re-presenting the Masnavi of Rumi as basic reading for Muslims in the twenty-first century

Facing pages of the beginning of the Masnavi,  the famous passage of the Neynāmeh ‘Song of the Reed’ in the complete manuscript known as G, dated AD 1278/AH 677. The manuscript is kept in the Mevlana Museum in Konya, Turkey .

The event is FREE & open to all but BOOKING BY WEDNESDAY 23 November 2016 IS ESSENTIAL.  

Please reserve a place by emailing  bips@britac.ac.uk. The lecture will be given by Professor Alan Williams (British Academy Wolfson Research Professor and Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Manchester).   Professor Williams is the BIPS Programme Director for research into Medieval Iran.

For seven centuries the poetry of Mowlānā Jalāloddin Balkhi Rumi was basic reading for Muslims all over the Islamic world and a central part of their literary and oral canon. His Divān and Masnavi were translated first into Turkish, then Arabic, as well as other Iranian and South Asian languages, especially Urdu, and Central and South East Asian Muslim languages, ‘even unto China’, as the hadith says. In the 20th century, ‘Rumi’ became ever more popular (and popularized) in the West since the 1970s. Ironically, among Muslims, on the other hand, familiarity with his work had already begun to decline, for a number of reasons. This decline can partly be explained by the new anglophone ‘written’ literacy of modernity which no longer committed classical poetry to memory. The demise of the love of the great Sufi poets, and Rumi especially, was also occasioned by the post-colonial spread of Wahhābist-Salafist teachings long hostile to Sufi Islam in the ‘Islamic Heartlands’ of the Hejaz and Maghreb, and further abroad in Pakistan and South-East Asia.  In this lecture I argue that the re-presentation of the great text of the Masnavi in faithful, accessible forms, including the Persian languaget offers an antidote to the exclusivist and ‘law-enforced’ Islam of fundamentalism and all forms of extremism. Whether or not the Masnavi  was ever intended to be, as the poet Jami reputedly dubbed it, ‘the Quran in the Persian tongue’, it is indeed the greatest ʿerfāni tafsir of the Quran. Far from dissolving Islam into mere medieval mysticism and detaching it further from the modern world, the Masnavi brings an understanding of love, knowledge, tolerance and mutuality that can bridge the three Abrahamic faiths. Rumi’s psychological wisdom is not confined to Muslims or to the 7th /13th century, as witnessed by his above-mentioned popularity in the West. However it is primarily a text for Muslims, to help them understand the depths of Islam, not merely the surfaces. This is an ‘antidote’ that is not concocted out of Sufi antinomianism, but which springs from the sage poetic vision of the ʿerfāni wisdom tradition that Mowlana Rumi inherited from his Khorasani ancestors. The hundreds of quotations and meditations on Quranic passages and prophets of the Abrahamic tradition, combined with stories from Rumi’s knowledge of folk and literary traditions from far west and far east of his own of Seljuq Rum, make this a text of global stature that Muslims can be proud to own as both fully Islamic and fully human.