By Cynthia Lukas, Co-Producer

We begin our film biography of the 13th century spiritual genius Mevalâna Jalâluddin Rumi with his words that presage the fascinating story of his life and great love that transcended chaos, conflict, and even death.

          “The minute I heard my first love story
          I started looking for you, not knowing
          how blind that was.

          Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
          They’re in each other all along.”

Using the Sufi metaphor of the love story as the paradigm for our love story with our Source and Creator, whom he called his “Beloved,” Rumi has recently become endeared to the West as he has been in the Muslim East for centuries.  There children memorize couplets of his poetry as a game, and adults revere him as “The Sultan of Lovers.”As the premier translator of Rumi into English, Coleman Barks says at the outset of “RUMI RETURNING": “He is probably the only planetary poet we have.”

With UNESCO’s designation of 2007 as the “International Year of Rumi,” the time has come for the unique, unitive vision he offers our planet to be explored in all of its expansive, ecstatic truth and beauty.  That is what Director Kell Kearns and I offer you in “RUMI RETURNING”.  We have married the amazing images Kearns filmed on our recent trips to Turkey with Rumi’s permanently astonishing words, moving Sufi music (the reed flute played by Turkish masters), and ethereal Iranian song (Azam Ali, Niyaz).

          "Listen to the reed
          and the tale it tells.
          How it sings of separation.
          'Ever since they cut me from the reed bed,
          my wail has caused men and women to weep.
          Whoever has been separated from his source
          longs to return to that state of union.'"

These were the first lines that Rumi wrote for what became his six-book masterpiece, the Mathnawi. These and thousands of odes were written in middle age in a state of grief after he had lost his great teacher and heart companion, Shams of Tabriz (Iran). In "RUMI RETURNING," we show how Rumi's life is a triumph over separation and longing, illusion and limitation. We show how it is a metaphor for our own. His journey to wisdom and compassion and joy becomes our own. Although he was born 800 years ago this September 30, Rumi's story is divinely relevant to us today.

In “RUMI RETURNING,” Rumi expert Andrew Harvey, makes this connection between Rumi’s chaotic, violent times and ours:  “That instability of the world drove him in the deepest level to try and find what is permanent, what will last, what is eternal.  And I think that this may be one of the greatest reasons for the intensity of his search, just as it is one of the greatest reasons for the intensity of the mystical search that we see all over the world at the moment.”

At a time when the disparity between members of humanity appears a gulf too vast to span, we offer “RUMI RETURNING” with the intention of building a bridge of understanding between the East and West toward mutual respect, compassion, and justice.  At a time when conflict, destruction, and depletion seem to scream out to us from every outlet of our media as if to keep us down, we offer soaring beauty and inspiration.  With its never-before seen, high-definition images of Rumi’s world in Turkey and its never-before heard insightful story of his life, “RUMI RETURNING” is a way of celebrating our amazing diversity and at the same time our blessed similarity.  In our telling, we highlight his complete rootedness in Islam with the flowering of his tolerance for other faiths.  He shows us these two do not preclude each other but masterfully coexist.

          “Our prophet’s way is the way of love.
          We are children of love.
          And our mother is love…

          Come, join us.  We are lovers of God;
          join us so we open for you the doors of the garden of love…”

Unlike other films about Rumi, we emphasize the context from which this Muslim mystic came:  the rich history and traditions that bore him.  With special permission from the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, our camera was able to capture locales and landmarks that were familiar to him in his daily life, as well as antiquities and artwork rarely glimpsed in the West but important to Islam or serving as spiritual and cultural foundation for Rumi’s place in time.  Our camera lovingly scans magnificent mosques such as the Selimiye Mosque (Edirne, Turkey), considered one of the finest in Islam, as well as stunning statues like the world famous Artemis (Ephesus Museum) and legendary locations (Troy, Ephesus, Sille) symbolic of great cultures that predated Rumi.

Commentator Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, places Rumi in both his historical and theological context.  

“When Rumi arrives, he’s not coming out of nowhere; he’s not coming on a blank slate.”  In one fascinating sequence, Dr. Ahmed tells us about Rumi being caught “in the eye of the storm” of his times, between the Crusaders on one side and the Mongols on the other, but rising above to provide the world with solace and compassion.  In another, he describes one of Rumi’s precursors:  the female Sufi saint, Rabia, the first to call God her “Beloved”.

Unlike other films about Rumi, we present in high definition the mesmerizing dance of the Whirling Dervishes he inspired by his own rapturous turning.  We witness this prayerful dance known as “the Semâ” in all of its glory and mystery.  We begin to grasp its transcendent meaning.

          “I have no name for that which circles so perfectly. . .”

“RUMI RETURNING” reveals “high definition” truths of his Sufic path, in the past veiled by secrecy and profundity, and rarely heard in this part of our world.  The foremost mystical scholar of our moment, Andrew Harvey, explains “rare and subtle points” about Sufism, which is notoriously difficult to define.  He stresses the importance of Islam’s Prophet to Sufism and compares it with other belief streams, especially Christianity, with which many Westerners can best identify.

Even if not Christian, spiritual seekers will find the comparisons between Islam and Christianity a highlight, as we did while immersing ourselves in Islam to create “RUMI RETURNING” just after mining the essential inner truths of Jesus in our most recent full-length documentary, “THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE CHRIST:  RECLAIMING JESUS FOR A NEW HUMANITY.”  (Read more.)  Although there are distinctive differences, the similarities between“people of the book” (as Muslims refer to Christians, Jews, and Muslims) are both surprising and inspiring.   We also were intrigued by comparisons between Sufism and Buddhism, Hinduism, and even Zoroasterism.

Sometimes we forget how all of these great faiths have coexisted peacefully at different times and places in history, how ways of thinking can influence and enrich each other without endangering.  This quatrain of Rumi’s, for example, is found carved in stone over the door of a Christian church in Shiraz (Iran):

          “Where Jesus lives, the great-hearted gather.
          We are a door that’s never locked.

          If you are suffering any kind of pain,
          Stay near this door.  Open it.”

In “RUMI RETURNING” we offer viewers a rare treat:  an intimate interview with a Sufi dervish born and living in Konya, just steps from where Rumi lived most of his life. This is the Mevlâna Museum and shrine to which thousands flood each year on December 17, celebrated as Rumi’s “wedding night”.  Üzeyir Özyurt (pronounced Ooh-zeh-eer Urz-yoort), Director of the Dervish Brothers Center, provides a fresh, joyful look at what it means to be a Sufi today and live the Sufi way on Rumi’s old “stomping grounds”.

          “The sufi opens his hands to the universe
          and gives away each instant, free.
          Like someone who begs on the street
          for money to survive,
          a dervish begs to give you his life.”

At this very moment Western ignorance and fear of Islam and the Middle East endangers our very existence.  Yet, as if to reverse this, Rumi, born into what is now Afghanistan and speaking and writing primarily in Persian, has become the top-selling poet in the United States.  Translated into an accessible, resonant English idiom by poet Coleman Barks, Kabir Helminski, Andrew Harvey, and others, Rumi’s luminous  poetry continues to grow in popularity in America, even since 9-11.  Having sold an unprecedented half a million copies in a country where there is no spiritual tradition of poetry as in the East and where poetry doesn’t usually sell, Rumi is to contemporary poetry what the Beatles were to music—but more:  a phenomenon whose universal message of love and peace resonates with the deep Western desire for sacred connection and its dire need to understand Islam and the Middle East.

Thus, we offer “RUMI RETURNING” as a way to educate the West about Islam and Islam’s heart:  Sufism.  But the movie is more:  we intend it to validate the intense Eastern yearning for respect and to inspire Muslims to embrace the beautiful Sufi way that is their heritage.  Fusing these two goals, we will hold screenings that feature inter-faith dialogues afterward.  We believe such events can help to bring our splintered world together.

          “What is to be done, Oh, Muslims
          For I do not recognize myself.
          I am neither Christian, nor
          Jew . . .nor Muslim.
          I am not of the east, nor of
          the west . . .”

As Dr. Ahmed tells us:  “If there’s one motto that the post-9-11 world needs to adopt, I would say it should be a line from Rumi, in which he says, ‘I go to the synagogue, I go to the church, I go to the mosque, and I see the same altar, and I feel the same spirit.’  It is the embodiment of the universal spirit without which I’m afraid in the 21st century—and I can say this with great confidence—we as a world civilization, are lost.”

Ahmed knows what he is talking about:  after arriving in the United States just two weeks prior to 9/11, he has made it his mission to assist in bringing our ever-diverse world together by educating the West about the three different models of Islam he describes as mystical (Sufi), orthodox, and modernist.  He’s been traveling the Muslim world surveying Muslims to aid our understanding of divergent views within Islam about Islam during this time of rampant globalization.   He chronicles his findings in his new book Journey Into Islam:  The Crisis of Globalization.  His conclusion is that the Sufi model, “which embodies pluralism and acceptance of others, is perhaps the only one that can lead Muslims out of the ethnic, religious, and political conflicts that globalization has thrust on them and that they continue to ignore at their peril.”

Thus, Rumi’s chosen path becomes the key to world peace!  His mystical way, whose secrets were transmitted to him from Shams’ heart and with which Rumi’s heart extends to us, is the way of love.

          “A secret turning in us
          makes the universe turn.”

In one of the many ways the Universe “turned” for us while we were co-creating "RUMI RETURNING,” we were synchronistically led to Dr. Ahmed, so that we could share his important voice with you.

Rumi himself predicted that his and Shams' love would someday "rain down" to turn the earth green. There is not one ounce of coincidence in the fact that Rumi is as popular as he is today. His love is "raining down" just as he said it would! His universal mysticism is "returning" to us now when we need it the most! We are happy to bring "RUMI RETURNING"  to our world when we need him the most!

Cynthia Lukas and Kell Kearns are Partners in Heaven on Earth Creations.   They are Co-Producers and Writers of “RUMI RETURNING".  Kearns is Director and Photographer.  Lukas is narrator.  See their website (www.heavenearth.net) for more about them and their other creations.

**The Rumi poems quoted in this article were translated by the following: Coleman Barks (#1, 4, 5, 6, 8); Kabir Helminski (#2); Sefik Can (#3); Reynold A. Nicholson (#7).