Our Master Jallaludin Rumi

Naqshbanki #26 you write ``Allah says in the hadith``. As muslims, we believe that Allah speaks in the Quran. Not in the hadith. This focus on the hadith rather than the Quran has served to dilute the simple, peaceful message of the Quran, and replace it with a ``religion`` that you may call Islam but has nothing to do with the Quran and everything to do with superstition and jehaliat (savagery and backwardness).
you write ``Whoseover shows enmity to my wali``: the Quran condemns in the strongest of terms those who claim to have some special link to God. And for good reason, knowing the ease with which a unthinking, insecure, men start worshipping other men.
You write ``It was related by al-Bukhari.`` Al-Bukhari is not a prophet and what he relates has no standing. I have read some of what he writes, and found his writings to be so disgusting and downright stupid.

talha #25 Sufis may have learnt great things even from dogs, as you say. You seem to imply that ordinary men cannot do the same. If I am right in thinking this is what you mean, then I think you need to have more respect for the mind God gave you, and to use it, and to not simply rely on ``borrowed wisdom`` (or ``foreign aid``) from sufis. If I am wrong in thinking that this is what you mean, then by definition every man is a sufi.
By all means learn from sufis, but dont think that they are infallible or in possession of any more knowledge than you have at your fingertips (indeed, a few centuries ago the frontiers of knowledge were very limited anyway).

I did not mean that Rumi was Divine as in God! Astaghfirullah! BUT the saints of Allah are so much in love with God that they are a manifestation of his Attributes--not in a physical sense of of course as that is kufr.

They act as vehicles through which God acts. Like Allah says in the hadith qudsi, ``‘Whosoever shows enmity to my wali, I shall be at war with him. My servant draws not near to Me with anything more loved by Me than the religious duties I have enjoined upon him, and My servant continues to draw near to Me with supererogatory works so that I shall love him. When I love him I am his hearing with which he hears, his seeing with which he sees, his hand with which he strikes and his foot with which he walks. Were he to ask [something] of Me, I would surely give it to him, and were he to ask Me for refuge, I would surely grant him it. I do not hesitate about anything as much as I hesitate about [seizing] the soul of My faithful servant: he hates death and I hate hurting him.’``
It was related by al-Bukhari.
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tahmed32 #24 Certainly we need to learn from all that happens around us and comes to us. ``A mystic sees in everything a divine message,`` There have been tales of Sufis who learnt great things from animals, such as dogs.
Not all of us can learn on our own, that is why we need a guide who can guide us and correct us before we fall, who has already travelled the Path. Thats the role Rumi played during his life.After all not many people can distinguish between their ego`s desires and inspirations.

Zeejah #23 Having settled the discussion on Rumi`s divinity, we can indeed admire and learn from his writings. One verse that sticks in my head is something like this:
``Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent as a guide from beyond``
Like all great works, many of Rumi`s verses need to be not just recited, but chewed and mulled upon and discussed and hopefully digested. Thus: to take the above verse. To me this means that each individual we come across - in real life, and nowadays on the internet and on chowk - is ``a guide from beyond``. What a wonderful way to think of other people on earth!!
In my earlier post to Naqshbandi, I had said how I was inspired not just by great writers like Rumi, but also by everyday folk. I was inspired by aged pathan gentleman, with nothing but the clothes on his back, a shovel, AND his dignity, as I mentioned in that post. Indeed he was a ``guide from beyond``, a reminder that even when one has nothing else in life, one still has one`s dignity which no one can take away. And I could discuss each one of the other people I mentioned in that post and how I was inspired by them. And add many more people to the list. And keep on adding...and adding... to that list of ``guides from beyond`` until I come to the bottom of the barrel and find Jay stuck there :-)

Yes, Rumi was a man...but what a man! ...reading his words make one transcendental,
how much more Love must have been in the soul of the man who wrote those words!
Sufism/mysticism is the spirit of all religions, and all religions lead us to God fulfilling Man`s eternal quest.

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#17 by tahmed32 on January 22, 2003 8:28am PT

At times you make compelling arguments I must admit..

Sufism is not islam - Tariqat has been proved from quraan but it usually gets confused it with sufism / qawali etc

Naqshbandi #16 The ``reality of the Divine`` you refer to should, per our muslim belief, be restricted only to the Supreme Being. You protest that I do not extend this concept of divinity to a man, and you seek to have me understand why you venerate this man (Rumi). I am afraid I cannot oblige. In fact I cannot place Rumi on a higher pedestal than any other man - the cycle rickshaw drivers of Bangal whom I saw working hard to get dinner for their families, the aged pathan gentleman I saw in Islamabad sitting under the hot sun with a shovel waiting to be asked to do some odd job by some stranger, the college professor in the US who put his heart and soul in the subject that he taught, the old woman leading her emancipated AIDs patient son to a hospital in Uganda that I saw,

THE JUST BALANCE

It is my understanding that human being as an entity has duality in its composition. That is how God made us. On one side of the split we are ethereal or spiritual and on the other hand we have a temporal self, which serves as a vehicle to carry our ethereal self. According to our belief system (and almost any other) the former component, our ethereal self is permanent whereas our temporal self is only transitory and temporary. The Sufi tradition, no matter which order, recognizes this split and concentrate and teaches to develop the ethereal part of ourselves.

Sufi traditions propagate the idea that this ethereal part of us is the primordial state of being, and it is the state of being when it was closest to the Creator. According to the beliefs and ethics of Naqshbandi order this may be summarized as ``All humanity carries deep within its innermost being the flavor and memory of this primordial nearness. This creates a tremendous longing: men and women long to return to the state in which they were before they were. ``

So this is the Sufi quest – to seek the nearness to the Creator – the primordial state when we existed only in ethereal self. I think idea is correct because when we look at the spiritual aspect of other religions the basic idea revolves around the same concept. Even the non-revealed agnostic religions as Buddhism propagates to follow the same path to discover ``the ethereal self`` as that of revealed religions. And that path according to Naqshbandi code of ethics is Dhiker (Ziker) or Jaap (in Hindi). The Naqshbandi order suggests ``This latent memory is revived through the practice of dhikr: the remembrance of the Beloved…..the dhikr is practiced in silence. The silent dhikr produces in the heart an intense and imperishable impression (naqsh = ``impression, print``; band = ``to bind, to fasten``).
.

But in my opinion that was never the message of Islam. Islam is a religion of balance and Muslims are the Ummat-ul-Wast - according to the words of Qura`n – the nation of moderation and balance. Islam places an equal emphasis on our temporal self as well, and that is the way our Holy Prophet (pbuh) showed us by his actions. If we look at the life of the Prophet we see that he marries women, have children, raises his children, earns his daily bread, fights wars, establishes order and law in the society and creates a constitutional government also. On the other hand he prays, he fasts, and tells us how to re-connect our ethereal self to the Creator. This is the life of perfect balance. He neither himself sacrificed his ethereal self over temporal self nor he taught us to do so. It is true that according to his words this world is like a field where we sow what we are going to reap in hereafter but he also made a distinction between Rights of God (Haqooq – Ullah) and the Rights of Men (Haqooq – ul – Ibad) among themselves. Our task is to strike a just balance between the two. And God himself has told us that His rights cannot be delivered unless man first delivers the rights of other men. This is only possible when we create a world that is just and only then we can sow here the right seeds to reap the sweet fruit in the next life.

Sufism is counter to that balance and tilts it totally towards uplifting our ethereal self and only that. But we as Muslim nation are given the task that no nation had been given before. There is no Prophet after Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) and the further revelation has stopped until after the End of the Days. According to Qura`n the message for humanity has completed (Inna Akmalta kum deenakum) and we as Muslim nation are tasked with what Prophets were tasked before, that is to propagate this message to coming generations of all humanity. And it is not possible if we only indulge ourselves in our ethereal self only.

NOTE: Please ignore the note I just sent accidentally before completing.
Naqshbandi #16 The ``reality of the Divine`` you refer to should, per our muslim belief, be restricted only to the Supreme Being. You protest that I do not extend this concept of divinity to a man, and you seek to have me understand why you venerate this man (Rumi). I am afraid I cannot oblige. In fact I cannot place Rumi on a higher pedestal than any other man - the cycle rickshaw drivers of Bangal whom I saw working hard to get dinner for their families, the aged pathan gentleman I saw in Islamabad sitting under the hot sun with a shovel waiting to be asked to do some odd job by some stranger, the college professor in the US who put his heart and soul in the subject that he taught, the old African woman leading her emancipated AIDs patient son to a hospital in Uganda that I saw, the Mexican farmer who proudly showed me his newly planted vegetable fields. All these people, and many more, have inspired me as much as Rumi or any other great writer. So do I declare all of them to be divine? Or do I follow my understanding of Islam which is that all men (muslims and nonmuslims) are equal and we should neither look up to any man nor look down upon any man.
I agree fully with Umar Murtaza #114 when he writes that instead of declaring people to be saints, we should simply consider them to be extraordinary human beings. In fact I would go a step further and say that these people - including Mother Teresa, including Rumi - are ordinary human beings who have done extraordinary things.
Ghalib Zaman #13 Agreed about love for the prophet. But this love can be no greater than we would have for any other human being, muslim or nonmuslim. And granted that this love sometimes wears thin at times on chowk and in real life, but that is our own shortcoming as emotional human beings that we realize in due course (sometimes years after our association with a person has ended.

#12: TAhmed
The heart has its own reasons.

Every sufi was a staunch subscriber to shariat, tariquat, rituals and above all excuded a glowing love for the prophet (pbuh). Rumi was Iqbal`s murshid as well.

Most of us are too uneducated to even pronounce such names.

PS:
The current pop-ing of Rumi by the riff-raff like madonna & junoon have suddenly given some ideas to certain bare-alls and pot-rolls to sidle & mosey up their butts among the sacred & the sacrosanct to look respectable.
Such behaviour is certainly profane and almost blasphemous.

Awesome little article, Talha.

Asif,
Many thanks for the link!!!


Tahmed,

Sir, I agree with you 120%. I wish we could simply learn from these people as opposed to following them. The first step, in my opinion, is to take these people off the pedestal of sainthood and leave them at being extraordinary humans. On a slightly different note, this is the reason why I think people like Mother Teresa should not be sainted because then they become unreachable. As `saints` and children of God, their mistakes are overlooked (hanging around with dictators) and the actual qualities that are becoming increasingly relevent to societies as a whole, especially societies like those belonging to the Muslims, that of sacrifice and hard work, will be shelved into an unreachable shelf.

Umer M.

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tahmed--i must protest your refusal to look beyond the ordinary and to refuse to accept the reality of the Divine! If you were ever to meet a wali in person I am sure you will understand why we venerate him (Rumi) and others like him!

He himself says:
The man of God is drunken without wine,
The man of God is full without meat.
The man of God is distraught and bewildered,
The man of God has no food or sleep.
The man of God is a king ``neath dervish-cloak,
The man of God is a treasure in a ruin.
The man of God is not of air and earth,
The man of God is not of fire and water.
The man of God is a boundless sea,
The man of God rains pearls without a cloud.
The man of God has hundred moons and skies,
The man of God has hundred suns.
The man of God is made wise by the Truth,
The man of God is not learned from book.
The man of God is beyond infidelity and religion,
To the man of God right and wrong are alike.
The man of God has ridden away from Not-being,
The man of God is gloriously attended.
The man of God is concealed, Shamsi Din;
The man of God do you seek and find!
--Rumi, Divan i Shams Tabrizi, trans. by Nicholson

And he says:
What can I say about the stations of those who have attained union except that they are infinite, while the stations of the travelers have a limit? The limit of the travelers is union. But what could be the limit of those in union? -- that is, that union which cannot be marred by separation. No ripe grape ever again becomes green, and no mature fruit ever again becomes raw.
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings
of Rumi)

And Our Master Rumi says:

Try not to understand the work of the pure saints by comparing them with yourself ... By such comparisons all the world`s inhabitants have gone astray... They hold themselves up as equal to the prophets, imagining that the saints are just like themselves. They say, ``Look: We are human and they are human, both of us must eat and sleep.`` Out of blindness they do not know that between them is an infinite difference... This person eats food and gives out filth; the other also eats, but his food is transformed entirely into the Light of God. This one eats and gives birth to avarice and envy; the other eats and gives birth only to love for the One.
(The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, p. 144)