Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi.

• Author: HOMERIN, TH. EMIL
• Position: Review

Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi. By FATEMEH KESHAVARZ. Columbia: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS, 1998. Pp. x + 194. $29.95.

English translations of Jalal-al-Din Rumi's (d. 1273) mystical Persian poems are now best-sellers in the United Stales. Versions of Rumi by Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, and others have had a broad appeal to both new-age and contemporary literary sensibilities, and Rumi's message of religious tolerance and universal love counters the terrorist images of Islam so prevalent today. While Rumi's Sufi teachings have long been the focus of scholarly study, much less attention has been given to the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of his work, and so this study of Rumi's ghazals, or love lyrics, by Fatemeh Keshavarz breaks new and fertile ground. At the outset, Keshavarz aims to correct two persistent misreadings of Rumi as, first, a reluctant poet, disapproving of his craft (he authored over 35,000 verses!), and second, that the mystical contents of his poems may be easily abstracted from their poetic forms. Rumi was certainly critical of courtly poets and their aesthetic and moral compromises in search of patronage. Yet Keshavarz argues eloquently that Rumi's frequent criticisms of verse are not attacks on the art of poetry, but "confessions of frustration": "Like any poet of vision, he was aware of the shortness of poetry's effective life if it failed to extend itself beyond its immediate context" (p. 17). Turning to matters of content and form, Keshavarz begins by asserting that Rumi's "poems are themselves the mystical experience and meaning" (p. 19), an erroneous assertion harkening to the work of Steven T. Katz and his "constructivist" readings of mystical literature. However, Keshavarz quickly retreats to a more nuanced position, declaring these poems to be "textualizations of an experience," where words, syntax, and sonic qualities interact to generate meaning as "an existential phenomenon" (pp. 20ff.).

Here--following Heidegger--and throughout this work, Keshavarz demonstrates her wide knowledge of Western literary theory and criticism, which she brings to Rumi's ghazals to explore issues of paradox and "illogical tropes." Rumi uses both to disrupt the habits of reading and thought in order to induce a shift in perception toward a mystical view of the world. So, too, with silence, as Keshavarz shows how Rumi often invokes silence to listen to a living universe which echoes with the divine...