Celebrating Rumi’s 800th Birthday
Today is an important day in many parts of the world:
Whenever people say that Islam is hostile to opposing views and violent in its nature, I always wonder whether those people actually ever took the time to read the Koran, to talk about it, to read other Islamic literature, to take a long and hard look at the history of this second largest religion of the world, and whether they’ve ever heard of someone we in the West have come to know as Rumi.
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi was born almost 800 years ago in what’s known today as Afghanistan. After the Mongols conquered large parts of the Muslim empire, Rumi – together with his family – fled. After several years of living in Baghdad, the family moved to the city of Konya, in today’s Turkey (Anatolia). It is there where Rumi wrote his poetry and where he became one of the greatest and most peaceloving thinkers and poets Islam ever brought forth.
Instead of writing big books detailing a logical, well thought out philosophy, Rumi wrote poems, and combined his love for religion and search for oneness with God with “music, dance and lyric poems.†The idea was to disconnect from the world as such, to go completely into God, to truly become one with God. After his death, Rumi’s followers created an order called the Mevlevi. The Mevlevi were also knows as “The Whirling Dervishes.â€
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One Response to “Celebrating Rumi’s 800th Birthday”
Very good post
It counteracts the wave of books and blogs in the ‘Islam is xxx’ vein.
Islam is how Muslims practice it in a particular time and place.
Every religion has inner contradictions. Budhism, the religion of peace, runs martial arts schools. while some monks withdraw from everyday life and others die in political protests.
It makes some debates about religions extemely difficult. When Muslims counter extremists by saying that Islam is the religion of peace, the truth is that Islam is the relligion of peace only when ists adherents understand it as such and practice it as such.
When Christians say that Christianity is the religion of love, the truth is that it’s a religion of love only when its adherents understand and practise it as such.