Where To Begin With Mevlana?

Coleman Barks's The Essential Rumi (new expanded edition, 2004) is a great place to start. Having studied for many years with the late Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Barks displays uncommon insight into Mevlana. He also works with the Persianist John Moyne to try to do justice to the original. What one does not get from Barks, however, is any sense of Mevlana's own ordering of his poetic corpus. Reynold Nicholson's multi-volume translation and commentary of the Mesnavi preserves the order of that great poem and also makes it obvious that Rumi threads his lines with Qur'an and ahadith (less obvious in Barks's renderings). But Nicholson suffered from the anxieties about Islam that afflicted so many Orientalists (he could not permit himself to fall in love with the Mesnavi--known traditionally as "the Qur'an in Persian"--and it shows in his renderings and comments). Why so many academics feel that they are obligated to reinscribe sectarian and cultural boundaries--to be "gatekeepers for the West" (or wherever)--is truly mystifying to me. There can be no academic freedom (what my mentor in Qur'anic studies Nasr Abu Zayd called the "scholar's license") where academics themselves fail or refuse to exercise it.



Only those who, like Norman O. Brown, break the bonds of ethnocentrism arrive at the Heideggerian "clearing"; those who do so abide there, as he did, with "the unravished bride of quietness." (Love's Body).