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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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.