The Sufi Lyric Tradition and Its Modern Heirs
Rumi is the best-selling poet in America. His translators have made him famous; his tradition has something more demanding to say.
Every year, millions of people encounter Rumi through translations that emphasise his universalism and his ecstasy, and that omit or minimise the Islamic context in which his poetry was written. The Rumi of Western popular culture is a wisdom poet for the spiritual-but-not-religious; the Rumi of the Mevlevi order, whose followers performed the whirling ceremony he inspired, is a Sufi master whose every metaphor points toward Islamic practice and Quranic teaching.
The gap between these two Rumis is not merely an academic curiosity. It speaks to a larger question about how Islamic cultural tradition is received in the non-Muslim world — and about what is gained and what is lost when universalism is purchased at the price of particularity.
