All the King's Falcons: Rumi on Prophets and Revelation.

• Author: Lewisohn, Leonard

"How should one organize the material found in nearly 60,000 verses of his [Rumi's] work?" wondered Annemarie Schimmel in the foreword to The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi (London 1978), xiii. By way of response, she proposed that the scholar adopt a "purely descriptive approach." In All the King's Falcons, a revision and abridgment of his 1978 doctoral dissertation at Harvard University written under her supervision, John Renard apparently chose to follow his mentor's approach; by citing numerous cross-references to Rumi's key works - namely, Divan-i Shams-i Tabriz, Fihi ma fihi, and Mathnawi (even the Maktubat are taken into account) - he endeavors to circumscribe the complexity of Rumi's ideas about the Semitic prophets and revelation. The result, based on exhaustive and meticulous research, is a very valuable summary of Rumi's views on theology, philosophy, and prophetology situated within the cultural context of the Islamicate tradition.

In his first chapter, Renard investigates the development of the concept of revelation and the use of stories about the prophets in the Koran, situating Rumi in the history of Islamic prophetology while broaching five different methodological approaches - historical, philosophical, theological, theosophical, and mystical - with Rumi presented as the "foremost representative of the mystical approach to prophetic revelation." Although the chapter is a very good introduction to, rather than an exhaustive analysis of, these five approaches, the fundamental problem of the uncomfortable relation between falsafa and irfan/tasawwuf in Rumi's work still remains unresolved. Renard's sharp distinction between two types of approaches to prophetology, the "theosophical" (defined as "a highly personal, subjectivist religious philosophy amalgamated with mysticism") and the "mystical" (mainly distinguished from the latter by the centrality of poetic imagination and lack of intellectualization of poetic imagery), although useful, is perhaps more of an analytical contrivance than a fact of literary history. In his discussion of "philosophical prophetology," Renard's comment that in Rumi's view "the Prophet stands above all considerations of reason, is in contact with the divine mind itself, and actually becomes the 'universal intellect'" - is not quite accurate. In one place in the Mathnawi (e.g., 3:3258-60), Rumi, in fact, explicitly compares the Prophet Muhammad's "reason" (aql) to his "spirit...