A Millennium of Turkish Literature: A Concise History

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11 Selçuk Sufism Turkish communities, through many centuries, experienced the duality of the gazi (warrior, conquering hero) and Sufi (mystic) spirits. Whereas the raiders and the soldiers of Islam kept waging war to expand the frontiers of the faith, the Sufis—men of peace, humanism, and love—preached the virtues of tranquility in the heart and all over the world. The mystic philosopher whose thoughts and spiritual guidance were to dominate Anatolia from the thirteenth century onward and to inspire many nations in modern times was Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi (1207–73). With his poetic celebrations of love and the arts and life itself, he heralded in the thirteenth century a new glittering age of humanistic mysticism. His ideas—which stressed the deathlessness of the loving soul, the joys of passion, the inherent worth of the human being, the aesthetic and ecstatic imperative of faith, the need to go beyond the confines of scholasticism and to transcend schisms, and, above all, the godliness of man—not only gave renewed vigor to Islamic mysticism, but also represented for the Islamic religion in general a counterpart of the Renaissance, which was to emerge in Europe a century after Rumi’s death. Recognition of Rumi’s enduring moral force in the Islamic world and his intellectual impact elsewhere has prompted many prominent figures to praise him. The British Orientalist Reynold A. Nicholson, an indefatigable translator of Rumi’s verse, paid tribute to him as “the greatest mystical poet of any age.” For his Westöstlicher Divan, Goethe drew inspiration from some of Rumi’s poems translated into German. One of the immortals of Persian classical poetry, Jami (d. 1492), said of him: “He is not a prophet, but he has written a holy book,” referring to the Mesnevi (Persian original: Mathnawi), which has also been called “The Koran of Mysticism” and “The Inner Truth 12  A Millennium of Turkish Literature of the Koran.” Gandhi used to quote his couplet “To unite—that is why we came / To divide—that is not our aim.” UNESCO’s first director-general, Julian Huxley, lauded Rumi’s spirit of international brotherhood. In 1958, Pope John XXIII wrote a special message: “In the name of the Catholic world, I bow with respect before the memory of Mevlana.” On the philosophic value of his poetry, Hegel saw him as one of the great poets and thinkers in world history. At the close of his Encyclopaedia, in approaching God as Absolute Mind, Hegel cites the “excellent” Celaleddin Rumi at length, saying that “if we want to see the consciousness of the One . . . in its finest purity and sublimity,” we cannot do better than to read that mystic’s verses. The unity with the One, in love, set forth there is, Hegel concludes, “an exaltation above the finite and vulgar, a transfiguration of the natural and the spiritual, in which the externalism and transitoriness of immediate nature, and of empirical secular spirit, is discarded and absorbed.” Celaleddin was born in Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan) in 1207, the son of a renowned scholar and mystic, Bahaüddin Veled. When Celaleddin was about twelve years old, his family was forced to flee Balkh probably either because of an impending Mongol onslaught or the result of an intellectual-political disagreement between Bahaüddin and the sultan. The family wandered through Persia and the Arab lands for ten years without finding a city receptive to Bahaüddin’s independent spirit and unorthodox ideas. Finally, the city of Konya welcomed them. Celaleddin was twenty-two years old when they arrived in Konya, which had been a Selçuk city for nearly 150 years. The capital of the Turkish Selçuk Empire, it was a center of high culture and enjoyed a climate of tolerance and freedom. Although predominantly Turkish and Muslim, Rumi’s new home had a cosmopolitan population with Christian, Jewish, Greek, and Armenian communities. Islamic sects and non-Muslim communities coexisted and flourished. He lived there until his death on December 17, 1273, at the age of sixty-six. The city afforded him the atmosphere and the opportunity to evolve and express his new ideas, which included cultural values from the diverse religions and sects active in the Selçuk capital. He achieved distinction as a young theologian and Sufi. It was in Konya that Rumi’s philosophy engendered the Mevlevi movement or sect (which has come to be known in the West as “The Whirling Dervishes”). In 1244, a dramatic encounter changed...