"Into the Mystic"
America may be consumed by a war against Islamic fundamentalists, but perhaps the country's best-selling poet for several years now has been a Muslim mystic who died in 1273. Kell Kearns believes it's no coincidence.
"Rumi discovered [that] at the heart of everything is love. That's what he loved and that's what he wrote about," says Kearns, co-producer and -director of Rumi Returning, a documentary about 13th-century Sufi theologian and poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi and the phenomenon of his modern-day rediscovery. "For us it's clear. It's this real hunger right now for humanity to come together as one."
Kearns and collaborator Cynthia Lukas made the film, which gets its European premiere tonight at Kino Aero as part of the four-day Rumi Alive Festival in Prague, to coincide with UNESCO's International Year of Rumi, marking the 800th anniversary of the poet's birth in present-day Afghanistan. From interviews with Rumi experts, to performances by the ancient order of Whirling Dervishes founded by his followers, to scenes of the landscape in which he lived, Rumi Returning focuses on the themes that dominated the poet's writings: love, unity and tolerance.
In an interview in the film, Coleman Barks, the American poet and translator largely responsible for introducing Rumi to English-speaking audiences in the early 1990s, calls him "probably the only planetary poet we have".
"This is the first generation where we can really have a planetary poet," Kearns elaborates. "This is the only time in history where we really are all together as one people on the planet. We are literally in each other's backyards. We are a mouse click away from each other."
Rumi's faith is another important element of his appeal, the filmmaker says. In a post-9/11 world where Western audiences are mainly exposed to an extremist, violent form of Islam, a Muslim mystic who wrote "Our prophet's voice is the voice of love/ We are the children of love/ And our mother is love" holds an appeal for those seeking a different picture of the religion.
"It's important that Rumi's Islamic, that he's Muslim to the core," Kearns says. "He belies the whole notion that Islam is a religion of war and subjugation and that sort of thing. Because he really realised the very heights of what Islam is all about, which is peace, reconciliation and an understanding of the basic unity of all humankind."
Rumi Returning posits that spirit of tolerance as a legacy of Rumi's life in a region that was central to multiple faiths and civilisations. If we ourselves lived in such a heterogeneous society, among various cultures, identities and religions, the film suggests, many of our present-day problems would vanish.
"If there's one motto that the post-9/11 world needs to adopt, it should be a line from Rumi in which he says, 'I go to the synagogue, I go to the church, I go too the mosque, I see the same altar, I feel the same spirit,'" Akbar Ahmed, the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University and one of the world's leading authorities on modern Islam, declares at the end of the film. "The universal spirit without which I'm afraid in the 21st century – and I say this with great confidence – we as a world civilization are lost. We do not have a choice. We must re-discover the spirit of the universal mystics."
"We put that at the end of the film very deliberately," Kearns says. "For us that entirely sums up the entire message of Rumi right there."
That message is also in keeping with Kearns and Lukas' past film work. Their last documentary, In the Consciousness of the Christ: Reclaiming Jesus for a New Humanity, also turned on the belief that humankind's purpose is to achieve a loving union with the divine.
"All of our films have been trying to raise human consciousness, through these universal figures of one-ness," Kearns says. "Rumi is right at home with those people – with Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi and Buddha."
For the film's first European showing, he hopes to repeat the experience of its world premiere at the Universal Forum of Cultures in Monterrey, Mexico. "Only one screening was allowed, and the theatre held 1,000 people, and it was absolutely crammed, I mean absolutely overflowing," Kearns says.
"Afterwards there was this great discussion that went on for almost an hour among all these other cultures about Rumi. We're getting that response from everywhere. We hope to get that response in Prague." |
