Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

Jalaludin and the beggar became inseparable. These two bonded passionately but on a purely spiritual level, bonded so utterly that Rumi began to sign his poetry with his master’s name: his lyrics from this period have been collected as The Works of Shams-i Tabrez. Before Rumi met Shams, he was a respected writer whose work might have been read for a hundred years. After he met Shams, he became one of the greatest mystic poets in the history of literature. After a number of years, Shams mysteriously disappeared, and Rumi went on to compose a single thousand-page poem called Mathnawi Ma’nawi (The Spiritual Manuscript). In the famous opening passage, Rumi poses a question: why is the melody of the flute so piercingly sad? Then he answers his own question: because the flute started out as a reed, growing by the river bank, rooted in soil. When it was made into a flute, it was severed from its roots. The sorrow keening in its song is the reed’s wistful memory of its lost connection to the source. In the next thirty thousand couplets, Rumi delivers hundreds of stories in a language thrumming with eroticized religiosity, illustrating how we human flutes can recover our connection to the source. Rumi remains influential, even in the English-speaking world, where translations of his work outsell those of every other poet.