Summary
- The scholar Ibrahim Gamard has performed a signal service to readers of Rumi in identifying several verses widely attributed to the master that are, in fact, forgeries, not Rumi’s words at all, but the compositions of others, some well-meaning, some simply careless, and some engaged in a project of deliberate spiritual rebranding.
- The verse, it emerges, was originally composed not by Rumi but by the nineteenth-century German scholar Friedrich Rückert, a lover of Persian poetry who found that faithful translation and the formal demands of the ghazal could not be reconciled.
- To strip Rumi of his Islamic ground is not to liberate him; it is to diminish him.
By Salman Alam Khan
‘I am a slave of the Quran for as long as I live.
I am dust at the door of Muhammad (PBUH), The Chosen One.
If anyone interprets my words in any other way,
I deplore that person and I deplore his words’
– Maulana Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī
Rumi is a master claimed by many yet known by few. There is a peculiar paradox at the heart of
Rumi’s fame in the Western world: the more celebrated he becomes, the further he seems to drift
from himself.
Maulana Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, known to his devoted followers as Mawlānā, ‘our
master’, was born in Vakhsh, in present-day Tajikistan, (It is also claimed that he was born in
Balkh, present day Afghanistan) into a family of considerable spiritual and scholarly distinction.
His father, Bahā ud-Dīn Walad, was himself a luminary of Islamic learning. From Balkh, the
young Maulana journeyed first to Karaman and eventually settled in Konya, in what is now
Turkey. Four nations, Afghanistan, Iran, Tajikistan and Turkey, each lay claim to him with
understandable pride. But Maulana, in the truest sense, belongs to none of them. His message
was never provincial; it was as vast and borderless as the sky he so often invoked.
Yet there is a deeper ownership, one that demands not pride but fidelity. To know Maulana is to
know that his poetry was never an ornament hung loosely upon the wall of ‘universal
spirituality.’ It was rooted, with extraordinary depth, in the soil of Islam: in the luminous
corridors of the Quran, in the adoration of the Prophet (peace be upon him), in the rigorous
beauty of the Sharia. He himself declared it plainly, in the verse that opens this essay. For
Maulana, love and law were never in opposition; they were, as the reed and its longing,
inseparable.
There is a kind of violence, subtle and well-intentioned, that is done to a poet when the
scaffolding of his belief is quietly dismantled by those who admire only the edifice. This is
precisely what has happened to Rumi in the English-speaking world. Translated and re-imagined
primarily through the work of Western writers, some gifted poets in their own right but few with
any grounding in Islamic scholarship or classical Persian, Rumi has been refashioned into
something altogether more palatable to secular modernity: a poet of boundless, creedless love; a
mystic who transcended religion altogether; a voice whispering that all paths are equal and none
is necessary.
Coleman Barks, whose ‘interpretive versions’ of Rumi have sold millions of copies and made the
thirteenth-century Persian master the best-selling poet in the United States, has done much to
bring Rumi’s imagery to a vast readership. But Barks read no Persian. His versions were drawn
from older literal translations, and in the alchemical passage from scholarship to verse,
something essential was lost, or rather, deliberately set aside. The Islamic framework that gives
Rumi’s poetry its very grammar was treated as incidental, even inconvenient.
“In the West, Rumi is the bestselling poet, and yet he is perhaps the most thoroughly
misunderstood.”
We live, moreover, in an age that moves by impulse. Ideas circulate online with neither sourcing
nor accountability. A verse attributed to Rumi, however spuriously, accumulates the authority of
repetition. It is shared, re-shared, printed on greeting cards and spoken at weddings, until the
fiction hardens into received wisdom. In such an environment, the pursuit of authenticity is not
pedantry; it is a moral obligation.
The scholar Ibrahim Gamard has performed a signal service to readers of Rumi in identifying
several verses widely attributed to the master that are, in fact, forgeries, not Rumi’s words at all,
but the compositions of others, some well-meaning, some simply careless, and some engaged in
a project of deliberate spiritual rebranding.
The first and perhaps most ubiquitous of these false verses appears in Barks’ The Essential
Rumi, and has been quoted from lecture podiums to UNESCO headquarters: ‘Not Christian, or
Jew or Muslim, nor Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system.’ These
lines have become the cornerstone of a certain reading of Rumi, a Rumi who stands serenely
above all creeds, belonging to none. The difficulty is that they are simply not his. They do not
appear in any of the earliest Persian manuscripts of Rumi’s Dīvān, nor in the authoritative critical
edition compiled by the scholar Furūzanfar. When the eminent scholar A. J. Arberry re-translated
Rumi’s selected poems, he declined to include this poem. Nicholson himself, from whose earlier
literal version Barks worked, was candid about the problem: the original text, he admitted, did
not appear in any of the manuscripts available to him. He proceeded nonetheless, on the strength
of personal conviction rather than textual evidence, a choice that has had consequences far
beyond what he might have imagined.
A second spurious verse, ‘I go into the Muslim mosque and the Jewish synagogue and the
Christian church and I see one altar’, was quoted by Koïchiro Matsuura, then Director-
General of UNESCO, at the celebration of Rumi’s 800th anniversary in Geneva in 2007. It, too,
is absent from the earliest Persian manuscripts. The verse, it emerges, was originally composed
not by Rumi but by the nineteenth-century German scholar Friedrich Rückert, a lover of Persian
poetry who found that faithful translation and the formal demands of the ghazal could not be
reconciled. His solution was to fabricate content, to write Rumi-esque verses himself while
preserving the ghazal’s structure. He even signed these poems in the manner of Rumi’s ghazals,
using the name ‘Jelaleddin’, though Rumi himself characteristically diverged from convention by
naming Shams of Tabriz in his closing verses, rather than himself.
The third false verse is perhaps the most emotionally resonant, and thus the most widely
repeated: ‘Come, come, whoever you are, wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving; it doesn’t
matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a
thousand times, come yet again, come.’ These words have made their way into the Unitarian
Universalist hymnbook, where they appear as Hymn 188. They belong, in fact, to a quatrain
composed by Abu Sa’īd ibn Abi’l-Khayr, a Sufi master who died in 1048, two centuries before
Rumi was born. The misattribution arose from a piece of old calligraphy discovered at the
Mevlevi dervish lodge in Konya, which a librarian named Necati Bey, without any scholarly
investigation, declared to be Rumi’s work. The misidentification spread, as such things do.
One might argue, and many do, that these verses, whatever their origins, carry genuine beauty
and spiritual value. Why quibble over attribution when the poetry itself is so alive? It is a
seductive argument, and not entirely without merit. But it rests on a misunderstanding of what is
at stake.
To strip Rumi of his Islamic ground is not to liberate him; it is to diminish him. The Masnavi, his
monumental six-volume poem, is saturated with Quranic verse and prophetic tradition. It is not
incidentally Islamic; it is Islamic in its very marrow. To read the Masnavi carefully is to
encounter a man ablaze with the love of God, of the Prophet, and of the community of believers,
not a man hovering serenely above all such particularities. His mysticism was not the mysticism
of the marketplace, available to all on terms of their own choosing. It was the hard-won fruit of
years of practice, study, and submission within the Sufi path, a path that has always required, at
its foundation, the discipline of Sharia.
The phenomenon Gamard identifies, what might be called ‘Universal Sufism’, teaches that
anyone may be a Sufi, regardless of their religious commitments or lack thereof. It is an
appealing idea, especially in an age suspicious of institutional religion. But it is historically and
spiritually inaccurate. And when it is promoted through the false attribution of verses to Rumi, it
does a double disservice: it falsifies the historical record, and it misleads the sincere seeker who
comes to Rumi in search of a genuine path.
There is an old Sufi admonition: ‘He who has no teacher has Satan for a guide.’ The point is not
ecclesiastical; it is epistemological. The inner journey demands a reliable map. A seeker who sets
out guided by verses that were never written, attributed to a master who never taught what they
are made to say, may travel great distances and arrive nowhere, or worse, somewhere entirely
other than where they intended.
We owe Maulana better than this. Not out of a narrow scholarly fastidiousness, but out of
genuine love. The love he embodied, rooted in the Quran, nourished by the example of the
Prophet, disciplined by the rigours of the path, was not a comfortable or convenient love. It
demanded everything. To reduce it to a series of feel-good aphorisms suited to the temper of the
age is to mistake the reflection in a puddle for the sky it mirrors.
The next time you encounter a verse attributed to Rumi, online, in a self-help book, inscribed on
a café wall, pause before you share it. Ask who translated it, from what manuscript, according to
what scholarly authority. And if you are moved to explore Rumi in earnest, choose your guide
with care. Seek out translators who have drunk from the same well as the master: scholars of
Persian, students of Islamic tradition, those who understand that the wine of his poetry and the
cup of his faith cannot, without loss, be separated.
Maulana’s light has not dimmed across eight centuries. It does not need our embellishment. It
needs, only, our fidelity.
Salman Alam Khan is an author and lawyer. He writes on law, literature, and Islamic thought. He can
be reached at salmanalamkhan@gmail.com
