Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rumi.

• Author: Renard, John

Publications on Rumi have been numerous enough that a casual glimpse at recent bibliography on Islamic mysticism might lead one to conclude that he was the only truly noteworthy mystic Islam ever produced. Proliferation of scholarly and popular studies on Rumi, however, suggests not an indefensible focus on him, but merely insufficient attention to other great figures in the still-youthful field of Islamic studies. Measured against research on figures of comparable stature in other religious traditions, such as Thomas Aquinas or Sankara, John of the Cross or Dogen, the study of Rumi still has some catching up to do. Poetry and Mysticism in Islam takes several confident steps in that direction with studies in cultural context, literary criticism, and intellectual history.

Two studies situate Rumi in cultural contexts, one narrowly and one more broadly. Annemarie Schimmel, whose reception of the Levi della Vida award this volume celebrates, suggests several avenues that might help establish the life-settings and a general chronological sequence in which the lyric poems of the Divan-i Shams were composed. She proposes collecting and arranging poems on the basis of pen-name (takhallus) references, using the shift from Shams ad-Din to Salah ad-Din as a period indicator. A correlative indicator might be Rumi's composition of poems in Arabic, for although some mention Shams, none appears to have been addressed to Salah ad-Din. More indirect is the suggestion that one might follow a trail of subtler clues as to the poet's psychological states for help in reconstructing his spiritual history. Schimmel does not pursue her suggestions further here, leaving them as allusions (isharat) of the sort the poet uses so deftly.

Moving to the Masnavi, Margaret Mills explores how Rumi introduces engaging twists into his use of various folk genres, as a way of illuminating performative aspects of Rumi's didactic epic. Here is a rich, refreshing reading informed by fieldwork in the realm of living poetry and of poetry enlivened by its interchange with cultural settings distant in time and space from that of the poem's inaugural recitation. Sometimes demandingly technical and detail-dense, Mills' very substantial study rewards the effort.

In the first of three literary critiques, Amin Banani argues that Rumi's professed disdain for linear rationality fuels the fire of his ghazals, allowing him to perfect the form to a greater degree than other poets celebrated for...