Does a 13th century Islamic mystic hold a key to peace on earth?
This epic biography of the thirteenth century Muslim-Sufi poet, teacher, and spiritual master, Mevlâna Jalâluddin Rumi begins in 1221CE in the already ancient city of Balkh, Afghanistan. The boy Rumi, his father and family are fleeing the oncoming army of Genghis Khan.
Throughout the telling of Rumi’s life, his poetry of love and the sublime unity of all creation is voiced with evocative images which open its meanings, interlaced with music ranging from traditional Sufic to modern interpretations.
HD images of Islamic architectural masterpieces inspired by Sufism, tapestries and paintings from the world in which Rumi lived, dramatic tableaus of dervishes in traditional garb shot at historically accurate locations, and scenes depicting Rumi as a child, bring the Islamic world of the Middle Ages to life.
 One by one the documentary’s four commentators are introduced. Amidst the modern day ruins of Balkh preeminent Rumi translator and interpreter Coleman Barks notes that Rumi is “the only planetary poet we have.” From his apartment in Manhattan, Andrew Harvey, Rumi scholar and author of three books on the founder of the Mevlevi order of whirling dervishes, describes Rumi as the “Shakespeare of the soul.” From American University in Washington, DC, Dr. Akbar S. Ahmed, Chair of the Ibn Khaldun School of Islamic Studies, asks the audience to consider the significance of the fact that Rumi continues to be the best selling poet in the United States even after 9/11. One of the most important voices of our time regarding Islam and the West, Dr. Ahmed combines historical accuracy with a thorough knowledge of contemporary Islam and what may be learned from Islam’s tolerant paths of Sufism. Üzeyir Özyurt, director of the Dervish Brothers Center in Konya, Turkey, is interviewed across the street from Rumi’s home and tomb. Üzeyir, who travels the world teaching the traditions and spiritual practices of the Mevlevi order, tells the audience that Rumi
speaks to all religions, to all people. “Love, divine love, is so great it doesn’t have any dimension. For that is Akbar! Allähu Akbar!”
Khan’s army utterly destroyed Rumi’s birthplace in Balkh, known from ancient times as The Mother of Cities, a center of Buddhist as well as Islamic studies, home to both Zoroaster and, for three years, Alexander the Great. Reportedly, 29,000 students who remained to defend the city, were slaughtered.
Rumi and his family escaped. The documentary follows their decade-long migration through learning centers of Islam – Mecca, Medina, Baghdad, Damascus, Nishapur. It was the Golden Age of Sufism. Through their travels the program continues to display Rumi’s diverse cultural foundations. They met the great Andalusian Islamic master, Ibn Arabi, who described the young Rumi as an “ocean”. In Baghdad Rumi heard the words of the famous female Sufi, who had once lived in Basra: Rabia. The influence of her way of absolute surrender to the Divine in ecstatic love is apparent in Rumi. In Mecca he circled the sacred Kaaba along with thousands of other pilgrims. The symbol of humankind circling its sacred home in Allah, desiring union, would become a major theme of Rumi’s and find expression in the whirling dervishes. “I have no name for that which circles so perfectly,” he would say later.
Dr. Ahmed explains how the teachings of Sufism are “directly associated with the Prophet of Islam himself, going back to the 7th century.” Sufism, he says, spread from
village to village, from Spain to India, bringing The Prophet’s message of respect for all paths to God, and justice and compassion for the poor and oppressed. Dr. Harvey remembers a song sung during the annual December 17th international, intercultural gathering at Rumi’s tomb, which describes him as “the light in the eye of The Prophet.” “Our prophet’s way is the way of love,” a Rumi poem proclaims.
Rumi’s father, Bahauddin Valad, widely revered as a great Sufi Shaikh, was sought after by the rulers into whose realms they migrated, to stay and found a school of Islamic wisdom.
Finally, Bahauddin accepted the offer of a farsighted sultan named Alaeddin to open a school in Konya, a city of the province of Rum in the Selchuk empire of Anatolia,
present day Turkey. Rumi would live there for the remainder of his life, but would never lose his sense of cosmic homelessness.
At the age of 24, after Bahauddin’s death, Rumi assumed the mantle of Shaikh and taught at the Konya mádrassah. He became widely respected for his knowledge and
wisdom. Dr. Harvey believes that Rumi could have become “a grandee...a big fish in a small pond” had it not been for what happened next.
 Shams d’ Tabriz was a wandering, mendicant dervish in his sixties. To the wider world he was unknown, invisible. He had committed his life to the annihilation of “the false self” into the infinite, loving light of Allah. Coleman Barks concludes that “there was something dangerous about Shams,” comparing him to the Bodhi-Dharma in the Buddhist tradition.
Andrew Harvey repeats the legend that “(Shams) prayed passionately to God to be given one being who could stand the wildness and grandeur of the realization that God had given him, and to whom he could transmit this realization. Allah answers, ‘If I give you this man as your Beloved, what will you give me in exchange?’ Shams had the courage to say, ‘I will give you my life.’ Allah directed him to leave Iran for Konya, and wait there among the caravanseri of the sugar sellers for the moment when his beloved, who was named to him, Jalâluddin Rumi, crossed his path”.
There are two versions of the meeting of Shams and Rumi. In one Rumi fell off his horse at the power of the words that passed between them. In the other, Shams fell to the ground. Both realizing that the other was their long awaited conduit to the Divine, they disappeared together for forty days, fasting, performing the Zikr (prayer of remembrance), discussing the heights of spiritual union in which the nature of God
appeared perfectly in the other, and experiencing ecstasy in selflessness. Rumi later wrote, “The soul’s mirror is naught but the face of a friend...I saw that you are the universal mirror unto everlasting.”
Suddenly, after 15 months and 20 days of spiritual revelry, Shams disappeared. Jealousy on the part of Rumi’s followers is the simple explanation. But, Sufis were often persecuted for their beliefs by traditionalists who believed they blasphemously equated themselves with Allah, bringing down upon themselves what Dr. Ahmed describes as “the full wrath and majesty of the orthodox establishment.” Shams may have fled Konya under threat.
Distraught at Shams’ departure, Rumi sent his son, Valad, to find him. In Damascus, Valad convinced the fakir to return. Rumi rushed out of the gates of Konya to embrace him.
Dr. Harvey maintains that “Shams had to withdraw for Rumi to be cooked in what in Sufism is called 'separation’, the hunger to be united at an ever greater depth with The Beloved. When Shams returns, they plunge again into the deepest mystical passion, into the deepest mystical rapture, and the last and most profound secrets of unity were transmitted from Shams’ heart to Rumi’s.”
One night, as they are together, there is a knock on the door. Saying, “It is finished,” Shams goes to answer it, disappears and is never seen again. It is generally believed that Shams was murdered by Rumi’s disciples. But, the mystery remains. “Flying Shams!” Üzeyir Özyurt exclaims at the Dervish Center in Konya. “We don’t know how he came to Konya and we don’t know how he disappeared. Shams is a secret, the secret of love. But, Rumi was ready for these things! He learned the secret from Shams d’ Tabriz.”
 At first, Andrew Harvey says, Rumi went mad at the loss. He then came to an awakening that Shams lived on within him and that the joyous communion with The Beloved never ends. Rumi exploded creatively at this moment. All that the world has come to know as the poetry of Rumi and the whirling dervishes of what would become the Mevlevi order began. Rumi started to “turn” in ecstasy, and spontaneously pour forth poetry that was then written down by one of his students. In one poem he described the three stages of his relationship with Shams. “First I was raw, then I was cooked, then I was ash.”
“RUMI RETURNING” then displays the full beauty of the music and “turning” of the Sêma – the dance of the whirling dervishes. From the tall, conical hats that represent their tombstones, to the white inner dresses that represent their shrouds, the Sêma is filled with symbols of the yearning for union with the Sacred, and the ecstatic annihilation of the ego self which precedes union. Üzeyir explains the Sêma’s overarching meaning: “All the world is turning. The particles inside you is turning; your blood, your heart is turning. The turning energy, it’s the energy of love, the energy of God.”
Rumi was forty. Over the next 27 years he poured out a six-volume mystical epic, 3,500 odes, 2,000 quatrains, a book of table talk and a large volume of letters. His
example of tolerance and love made him renowned throughout the Islamic world and beyond in his lifetime.
Konya possessed a heritage of diverse cultures living in peace. It had once been known as Iconium because of the many, varied temples and icons that stood side by side. An ancient Christian church reverently held what was purported to be the tomb of the Greek philosopher Plato. The Book of Acts relates that Saint Paul stayed for “a long time” there, preaching in the synagogues. A Christian colony had existed in the nearby
village of Sille since the second century CE. Rumi would often ride there to visit with the Christian monks.
Dr. Harvey tells the story of a young monk who traveled from Constantinople, the capital of Christian Byzantium, to learn from the famous spiritual master of Anatolia. Rumi was in his sixties. He had amassed a reported 10,000 students. The monk prostrated himself before Rumi. Rumi returned the honor and prostrated himself before the priest. Aghast, the young man fell to the ground again. This went on 32 times, until the monk beseeched Rumi to stop bowing. Rumi replied, “If I did not show you my nothingness, what would I be useful for?”
He had fled the Mongol invasion as a child. Now that army was poised at the outskirts of Konya. Rumi’s life had come full circle. Again, he faced the destruction of his home, and, this time, the potential deaths of thousands of his students and friends.
The Mongol general announced that he would negotiate with only one person: Jalalûddín Rumi. Following their talks the city was spared.
Dr. Harvey says, “How a great spiritual figure dies is often their last teaching. Rumi died in a particularly exquisite, holy and sublime way. In the autumn of 1273, he fell mysteriously ill. The illness progressed, and everyone was miserable, except him. One of his great friends came to his bedside and started to cry. Rumi looked at him with
a smile in his eye and picking up his nightshirt said, ‘When there is only this shirt between me and my Beloved, why would you not want the light to be united with the Light?’ When he left his body, on December 17, 1273, in the latish afternoon between 4 and 5, it is said that the entire sky filled with a blood-colored light, the color of the Sacred Heart of the Universe.”
Konya’s streets were filled with mourners. Rumi’s pall-bearers consisted of Muslims, Christians and Jews . Üzeyir Özyurt tells of one of Rumi’s last requests for the occasion of his death: “It’s my wedding night! With my lover I will be. For that, make holiday. Make dance. Make festival.” And so it is to this day, except now the thousands from different faiths who come to Konya each December come from across the planet.
Dr. Akbar Ahmed concludes the commentaries with an essential theme: “If there’s one motto which the post 9-11 world needs to adopt, I would say it should be a line from Rumi. 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.’ This 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. We do not have a choice. We must rediscover the spirit of the universal mystics.”
“RUMI RETURNING” ends with one of Rumi’s most famous poems which highlights his life for the triumph it was...here quoted in part:
“What is to be done, O Moslems? for I do not recognize myself.
I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Gabr, nor Moslem.
I am not of the East, nor of the West...for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.
I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one...
I am intoxicated with Love's cup,
The two worlds have passed out of my ken;
I will trample on both worlds, I will dance in triumph for ever!”
THE END
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