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­converted to Islam. Why would he not? She was close to the centre of ­Rumi’s followers, she was intensely devoted to him, and her patronage ensured the building of the marvellous shrine in Konya that is still visited by millions of pilgrims and tourists every year. The fact that no one seems to have cared if she converted or not makes this a most intriguing secret. It seems, as it were, to be hiding in plain view. Despite the criticisms offered above, I remain impressed byRumi’s ­Secret. It is always important, I think, for reviewers to ask if they could have written a better book themselves. I could not have written a better book about Rumi. Now that I am writing a biography of the Georgian Lady, I am grateful to Brad Gooch for having encouraged me to think more carefully about the task by writing the book that he chose to write.  Sheila R. Canby, Deniz Beyazit, Martina Rugiadi, and A.C.S. Peacock (eds.), Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art 2016, 365 pages.

Reviewed by Roderick Grierson

Anyone who had not been fortunate enough to see the exhibition Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs while it was displayed at the Metro­politan Museum of Art in 2016 would be delighted that its legacy survives in the pages of its catalogue. I would be astonished if any reader of the Mawlana­ Rumi Review were not extremely grateful for the skill and expertize that it represents. The erudition of its contributors as well as the beauty of its design and the quality of its printing are very impressive in- deed. For those of us who are curious about the world in which Jalal al-Din Rumi lived and taught, a more attractive introduction in English would be difficult to imagine. Certainly, none has yet been published. The achievement is all the more impressive because Sheila Canby and her colleagues encountered real difficulties as they began to assemble ob- jects for their exhibition. None of this is mentioned in the catalogue, which is not only a brilliant work of scholarship but also a masterpiece of discre- tion. The problem arose because the Turkish government demanded the return of objects in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum and was less than satisfied with the response. It therefore seems to have refused requests for loans to the exhibition. It should be added, however, that this is the offi- cial Turkish view of events. The museum denies having made any requests

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that could have been refused. The result, in any case, was the same. Unfor- tunately, this was not the first occasion on which the Turkish government did not lend to major exhibitions in New York or London. No loans were sent in 2012 either to Byzantium and Islam at the Metropolitan Museum or to The Hajj at the British Museum. The exhibition and therefore the catalogue contain no objects from Turkey, and indeed no objects from either Iran or Russia. In such circum- stances, it would be invidious to describe the emphasis placed on unprece­ dented loans from Turkmenistan as a brave attempt to disguise a bitter ­disappointment. In any case, the objects from Turkmenistan are undoubt- edly very interesting. Furthermore, it should not be imagined that Turkey or Iran are entirely­ absent from the catalogue. It contains photographs of important examples of architecture that would obviously never have travelled abroad, as well as large or delicate objects that might not have been lent to a foreign museum whatever the agenda of the government of the day. Although the catalogue makes no mention of it, an ambitious Seljuk exhibition entitled Selçuklular was organized in Istanbul by the Türk ve ­İslam Eserleri Müzesi only a few months earlier and was accompanied by a catalogue of 461 pages edited by Sevgi Kutluay, the curator and coordinator of the project. The exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum was, in a sense, organized in its shadow. Simply put, despite the undoubted expertise of the curators at the Metropolitan Museum, it might have been more prudent to organize such an exhibition elsewhere, if it were going to be organized at all in the present political climate. As a major exhibition of Qurʾanic manu­ scripts could evidently travel from Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi to the Sackler Museum in 2016, it would seem that the problems encountered by the Metropolitan Museum might have been avoided by another American institution. The problem caused by the absence of Turkish loans should not be underestimated, both for the exhibition itself and for the catalogue. Some categories of object are simply missing, one of the more conspicuous being the absence of any Seljuk carpet comparable to the famous ‘Konya Car- pets’ in the Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi that were acquired in the early years of the twentieth century. Of course, it would have been possible to request similar loans from museums outside Turkey, such as the Davids Samling in Copenhagen. However, although the Davids Samling did send objects to the exhibition, the catalogue contains no photographs and no descriptions of Seljuk carpets. At least for anyone familiar with the history of Turkish textiles, and with the impressive collection exhibited in the Türk

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 06:16:40PM via free access book reviews 167 ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi, their omission is a real disappointment. The task of imagin­ing the circumstances of life in Konya and especially life at the Seljuk court has been made decidedly more difficult. This is by no means an exaggeration. ‘They will be missing important pieces,’ Kjeld von Folsach, the director of the Davids Samling, remarked before the exhibition opened. ‘It’s a very painful problem.’ Nevertheless, intransigent foreign governments seem not to have been the only reason for omissions. Perhaps more discouraging, and not only for readers of the Mawlana Rumi Review, was a failure to engage seriously with the legacy of Sufism. In this respect, the present exhibition is a notable contrast with the exhibition at the Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi, whose 227 objects included famous manuscripts, not only of the Mathnawi of Jalal al-Din Rumi but also of the Fusus al-hikam and the Futuhat al-Makkiyya of Ibn al-ʿArabi. Given the popularity of Rumi in particular and of Sufism in general, it seems odd that objects were not included that would have allowed the sub- ject to be discussed in more detail. Reviews of the exhibition made a point of mentioning Sufism in the Seljuk sultanate of Rum, referring in the conven- tional way to its tolerance and its other admirable qualities. In a superb­ intro­ ductory essay, Andrew Peacock does refer to both Rumi and Ibn al-ʿArabi. Nevertheless, exhibition catalogues are largely organized around the selection of objects, and the objects were simply not selected. While Andrew Peacock is immensely learned, one general essay does not provide much opportunity for his knowledge of Sufism in Anatolia to be displayed. I hope that these remarks do not appear to be a narrow criticism of the catalogue for its failure to pander to special interests. In fact, its neglect of the topic suggests an approach that would have been conventional enough in earlier decades, when historians assumed that Sufism in Seljuk, Beylik, or Ottoman centuries could be safely ignored as marginal, and ignored all the more easily because comparatively little was known about it. I recall the grande dame of Turkish art historians, Nurhan Atasoy, telling me that Sufis were never mentioned when she was taught art history in Istanbul. Her ­realization of their significance and the extent of their legacy came as a complete surprise. For other branches of Ottoman history as well, Sufism was the elephant in the room, so to speak. Surely the time has come for a project of this size to provide a more detailed account of the role that ­Sufism played in the cultural history of Anatolia.

On page vi of his ‘Director’s Foreword’, Thomas Campbell describesCosmos and Court as ‘the first major exhibition to focus on the full breadth of Seljuq

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art produced in Iran, Anatolia, northern Iraq, and northern Syria’. A few pages later, Sheila Canby states in her preface that the exhibition will ‘focus on the artistic innovations of the Seljuqs and how their art differed in the eastern and western parts of their realm.’ It will not simply ‘chart the stylis- tic progression in different media’ but will examine ‘Seljuq imagery and its relation to the lives of the ruling sultans and their local subjects – Persians, Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, and others.’ In other words, as the title of the exhibition suggests, it is not concerned simply with the Seljuks but with the much wider question of the ‘Age’ of the Seljuks. With this aim in mind, the exhibition and the catalogue were divided into six sections, each with an introductory essay by Sheila Canby: ‘Sultans of the East and West’, ‘The Courtly Cycle’, ‘Science, Medicine, and Technol- ogy’, ‘Astrology, Magic, and the World of Beasts’, ‘Religion and the Literary Life’, and ‘The Funerary Arts’. Some of the essays are more successful than others. The first and second essays I thought especially helpful because they address in clear and precise terms the activities of Seljuk rulers and their courts, describing the ways in which they drew upon the legacies of earlier societies to proclaim their own political and religious aspirations across a range of media from coinage to architectural decoration. I was particu- larly impressed by the second essay, which portrays an elite culture that incorpor­ated Iranian and Turkish traditions of chivalry, settled as well as nomadic patterns of life, and calendars of ritual and public observance that included the requirements of Islam but were not confined to them or always bound by them. These subjects are of interest not only to political historians or indeed to art historians. As Andrew Peacock has remarked elsewhere, the Maktubat of Rumi indicate very clearly how reliant he and his followers were on the patronage of the court. In other words, its institutions should not be omitted from any attempt to understand even a topic such as Sufism, which has often been depicted as rejecting or denouncing the wealth and power of the present age. Although it may seem too obvious to require stating, the Seljuks ruled large numbers of people whose relationship with the ruling dynasty and its various families and representatives was remote, or at least tangential, and who would certainly not have seen themselves as Seljuk or even as mem- bers of a Seljuk society. This statement would apply to Turkish nomads as much as it would apply to Greeks or Armenians who lived in a city such as Konya. When one moves away from this focus on the dynasty itself, the conceptual structure of the exhibition becomes more difficult to grasp, at least if one is attempting to understand its applicability to the sultanate of

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Rum. For this and indeed for other reasons, the term ‘Seljuk Anatolia’ has begun to seem increasingly problematic. Although the preface claims that these six sections reflect three themes – the preoccupations of the Seljuks, their successor states, and the people over whom they ruled – it can become difficult to understand what sort of claim is being made about the last of these three groups in particular, whether they were Muslim or Christian. The introductions to science, medicine, and technology in the third essay and then to astrology, magic, and the world of beasts in the fourth essay seem to me to be less helpful. The distinction that the author imposes between science and superstition – assigning astronomy to the former and astrology to the latter, for example – appears simplistic as well as anachron­ istic. The former essay makes no attempt to consider the religious obliga- tions that provided much of the impetus for astronomical research, and the latter spends a large part of its two pages describing eclipses and other events that are assumed to have terrified the inhabitants of Seljuk territory to such an extent that they began in their ignorance to believe complete nonsense. There seems to have been little effort to engage seriously with the cosmology of the time. Although the introduction to religion and the literary life refers to ­Sufism in one paragraph, it goes no further. It mentions Rumi, along with al-Ghazali and Suhrawardi, but it does not mention Ibn al-ʿArabi, and it does not mention either Yunus Emre or for that matter Haji Bektash Veli. In other words, the greatest exponents of Sufism in Arabic and Turkish were teaching in Anatolia under the Seljuk sultans but receive little acknow­ ledgement. And unless I am mistaken, none of the objects in this section has any obvious connection with Sufism or helps to explain its place in the Seljuk sultanate. However, even if I find the thematic structure of the exhibition and the catalogue difficult to follow at some points, anyone familiar with Turkish publications in particular will immediately see an advantage in its approach that more general criticisms should not be allowed to obscure. The exhibi- tion eschews a narrow line of legitimacy in which succession is believed to have passed from the Sultanate of Rum to the Ottoman Empire and then to the Turkish Republic. As the approach of Court and Cosmos is more in- clusive, it fits far less easily into a nationalistic agenda. The catalogue there- fore allows those of us whose interests might reasonably be described as all too narrowly Turkish to gaze at a wider horizon. I am grateful for the opportun­ity and regard it as a real encouragement to further research. I might add that we are still at a relatively early stage in considering ques- tions of this sort and are obviously hampered by traditions of ­historiography

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that insist upon ethnicity or language or religion as marking the boundaries of the discipline. Few specialists in one area are also specialists in another. Innovative exhibitions such as Byzantium and Islam, which the Metropoli­ tan Museum organized in 2012, are therefore comparatively rare. While some Christian items have been included in Court and Cosmos and de- scribed in its catalogue – and one would hardly object to their presence – it might have been less problematic to define the exhibition in much ­narrower terms or much wider terms. In this sense, the ‘Age’ of the Seljuks may be misleading. Even if the exhibition is not entirely about the Seljuks, it is really not about anyone else. Nevertheless, it includes examples of work such as in the inlaid brass vessels in Nos. 168 a–c, which were produced to the highest standard by Christian artists working for Muslim patrons who were evidently not alarmed by overtly Christian imagery. This is very interesting in the context of the hybrid culture that was created under Seljuk sultans and that one sees in the pages of contemporary accounts. Clearly the lines of demarcation between Islam and Christianity were conceived in very different terms than they are now in most parts of the world. Whether or not the attitudes of earlier centuries constituted tolerance in the way that some of us might like to suggest, it is undoubtedly true that they should not be forgotten. Given its superb scholarship, and the absence of other essays of similar length at the beginning of the catalogue, Andrew Peacock’s introduction might have been expected to define or clarify the thematic approach of the exhibition. It is no criticism of it to suggest that it does not. Instead, he provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to Seljuk history and its legacy that would be impressive in any context. He achieves this by organiz- ing the subject into six sections, the third of which is divided into a further three subsections: ‘The Origin and Rise of the Seljuqs’, ‘The Great Seljuq Empire, 1040–1157’, ‘The Seljuq Successor States, 12th and 13th Centuries (The Seljuqs of Anatolia, The Artuqids, The Zangids)’, ‘Religion in the Age of the Seljuqs’, ‘Society, Language, and Culture in the Age of the Seljuqs and Their Successors’, and ‘The Seljuq Legacy’. Readers of the Mawlana Rumi Review may be especially interested in his description of the Seljuks of Anatolia and his account of religion in the age of the Seljuks, both of which are admirably succinct and provide helpful notes about publications in several disciplines that are now advancing at a far greater speed than they were even a few years ago. The account that he offers on page 28 of the importance of Sufism is reliable despite its brevity, and his depiction of Jalal al-Din Rumi is certainly accurate. Ibn al-ʿArabi is also mentioned in a single sentence and Haji Bektash Veli receives no

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 06:16:40PM via free access book reviews 171 mention at all. Otherwise, one finds a sentence on page 18 about the rebel- lion of Baba Ishaq, who is described merely as ‘a self-proclaimed holy man’. Unless one were already familiar with the diversity of Sufism in Anatolia at the time, it might be difficult to connect these statements or make much sense of them. In later centuries, Turkish heterodoxy or metadoxy would be of great importance within and even beyond the Ottoman Empire. It would also be formative. Much of the Sufism practised in the Ottoman Empire emerged during the Sultanate of Rum, and much of it was rather different from the orthodoxy that was often proclaimed by Ottoman or by more recent Turk- ish historians. But if some of the details of Anatolian history have been omitted, it is nevertheless immensely helpful to have the sultanate placed in the context of the larger Seljuk world. Furthermore, the photographs of landscapes that accompany the essay are informative as well as beautiful, and they are supplemented by modern and nineteenth-century archival photographs of famous Seljuk monuments such as the Alâeddin Camii in Konya, the Sultan Han near Aksaray, the Çifte Minareli Medrese at Sivas, and the Mevlana Türbesi in Konya. The result is undeniably impressive.

In addition to the essay by Andrew Peacock, the catalogue contains a num- ber of brilliant entries that explain the significance of individual objects or groups of objects in fascinating detail. The entry that impressed me most, even if the objects themselves are not the most beautiful in the exhibition, has been written by Deniz Beyazit about Nos. 20 a–g, seven fragments of architectural decoration from the Alâeddin Keykubat Köşkü, which stands on Alâeddin Tepesi in Konya. It was built by Kılıç Arslan II, who died in 1192, and renovated by Ala al-Din Kay Qubad I, who died in 1237. From these fragments, and from photographs taken in 1905, Deniz Beyazit has summoned a vanished world and offered it to the reader: a palace meant to recreate within a city the bucolic pleasures of a nomadic encampment, and within this earthly life the greater joys of paradise that await the faithful in the life to come. Her discussion raises questions about the nomadic nature of the ­Seljuk court and about the tensions that existed between the ruling dynas- ty and the tribal warriors on whom its military and therefore its political power depended, questions that Andrew Peacock has discussed with re- markable insight in previous publications. It also serves as a demonstration of the hybrid cultures produced by Seljuk patronage, in which Persianate ­artistic traditions inherited from Iran and Central Asia mixed with the ­legacies of Byzantium, the Christian Orient, and Classical Antiquity. Even

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if ­arguments between Turkish and Iranian scholars are no longer as strident as they were some decades ago, it is still tempting to quarrel over national ownership of a poet who wrote in Persian but lived in Turkey. It is therefore salutary to be reminded of the complex nature of the society in which Rumi lived and taught. The entry is only one of several by Deniz Beyazit that I thought exem­ plary. In No. 160, she describes a pair of late thirteenth-century wooden ­doors or shutters from Konya, perhaps from the Beyhekim Camii, which are now in the Museum of Islamic Art at Doha. They are decorated with geo­metric patterns filled with arabesques, as well as an inscription in ­Arabic that extends across both panels. The mosque was named after a physician named Beyhekim, who was said to have treated Rumi himself. Two other sets of wooden doors or shutters were found at the site, one of which is now in the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin and the other in the Mevlana Müzesi in Konya. As Deniz Beyazit discusses the availablity of wood and its use on a monumental scale in Anatolia, in contrast to eastern Seljuk lands, her entry includes photographs of the wooden pillars in the interior of Ulu Cami at Afyon as well as a rahla now in the Mevlana Müzesi at Konya. She suggests that the inscription on the doors that were included in the exhibi­ tion refer to the wisdom that a man such as Beyhekim would have posses- sed: ‘The wise one is he who has learned a lesson from experience / And the ignorant one is he who does not think of the consequences.’ Although she suggests that such a proverb might have been taken from the Hadith or from Rumi, she provides no further information about the source and simply refers the reader to a Christie’s sale catalogue from 2003. The words are those of ʿAli ibn Abi Talib. One of the most intriguing descriptions in the catalogue appears in an essay that accompanies a series of coins labelled as Nos. 14 a–l. Among these, No. 14 b is a silver dirham minted at Konya during the reign of Kay Khusraw II, between 1237 and 1246. While the obverse is stamped with the inscription ‘The Greatest Sultan / Ghiyath al-Dunya wa-l-Din / Kay Khus- raw Kay Qubad’, the reverse depicts the sun and a lion along with the in- scription ‘Al-Imam al-Mustansir with the help of God, the Commander of the Faithful / This dirham was struck in Konya’. A date is supplied on the reverse margin: ‘in the year 638’. The two images of sun and lion have pro- duced considerable discussion, especially in light of comments made by the great Syrian Orthodox polymath and maphrian Abu al-Faraj, who died in 1286 and is usually known in Europe by the Latin form of his Syriac name, Bar Hebraeus. Deniz Beyazit provides an English translation of the relevant passage:

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He married the daughter of the king of Georgia and was pas- sionately in love with her. He was so madly in love with her that he wanted an image of her on the dirhams, but was advised to depict the image of a lion above which was a sun in order to refer to his taliʾ (ascendant star, nativity), and by this means the goal was achieved.

She tells us that Ottoman and more recent scholars have suggested that the sun and the lion were, in effect, the sultan’s coat of arms. It has also been argued that they refer to his personal ascendant, Leo in the house of the sun, and perhaps to a passion for hunting and a fascination with lions as guardians. Although she says little about the princess Tamar, the daughter of the Georgian king, the important point about her was really that she was the daughter of the Georgian queen Rusudan and the granddaughter of the Georgian queen Tamar the Great, after whom she was named. Her­father was an obscure Seljuk prince who converted to Christianity in order to marry her mother, and the terms of her own marriage to Kay Khusraw II allowed her to preserve her faith. The sultan was not her only husband. After his death, she married the Mongol governor, Muʾin al-Din Sulayman Parvana. She also became one of the most prominent disciples of Jalal al- Din Rumi and appears frequently in the pages of Aflaki’sManaqib al-ʿarifin as Gorji Khatun, the ‘Georgian Lady’. After Rumi’s death, her patronage en- abled the construction of the famous Green Dome above his sarco­phagus, one of the most important monuments to survive from the Seljuk ­period and the destination of millions of pilgrims or tourists every year. It is more visited than any site in Turkey except Topkapı Sarayı, the palace of the Otto­man sultans in Istanbul. The entry for No. 130 is also fascinating. It is a manuscript containing five texts in Persian, one of them the Daqaʾiq al-haʾqiq (Degrees of Truths) by al-Nasiri, written at Aksaray and dated 670/1272. An inscription dedi­ cates the manuscript to Ghiyath al-Din Kay Khusraw III, the last of the Rum Seljuks, who ruled Aksaray and Kayseri until he was executed by the Mongols in 1284. He had been placed on the throne by the Parvana, the Mongol governor and husband of the Georgian Lady, and he was the last Seljuk sultan to be buried in the Alâeddin Camii at Konya. The book was presented to Kay Khusraw when he was still a child so that he could learn the arts of prediction. Its illustrated sections are mostly concerned with astrology, angelology, talismans, and magic. Although the style of the painting indicates Byzantine influence, the iconography suggests a range

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of sources from Greek to Indian. Mercury, for example, is depicted with four arms, a highly unusual image for an Islamic text, which may have been drawn from a Hindu astrological treatise. Whatever its origin, it raises in- triguing questions of what was considered a suitably orthodox education for a young Seljuk prince. If an opportunity to describe an object in terms of the history of ­Sufism in Anatolia has not been taken on some occasions, an attempt to claim a more direct link than is really warranted may have been made by Martina Rugiadi in the catalogue entry and notes for No. 93. The object is a stonepaste ewer with a transparent turquoise glaze and was evidently made in the late eleventh or twelfth century in Iran. It is decorated with a series of figures performing a choral dance, which she says is not uncommon on such vessels. At least fourteen other examples are known, all with stand- ing figures who hold hands in a double chain while their legs are variously arranged to convey the different steps of the dance. She not only adduces sema as a kind of choral dance, even though a connection between sema and the movements depicted might seem rather distant, she also suggests that the costumes worn by the dancers might be Turkish rather than Iran­ ian, and the scene might therefore represent a form of Turkish folk dancing. Although this too might be connected with some types of sema, such as that practised by the Bektashi, it is difficult to see how the claim could be substantiated in any specific sense. In fact, it is difficult to see why the -pro posal has been made. As Rugiadi notes, the shoulder of the same ewer also depicts scenes from a hunt. It therefore seems far more likely that the danc- ing figures belong to the courtly diversions ofbazm and razm – the feasting and hunting in which festive dances were performed as an entertainment – rather than to any sort of sema. Nevertheless, even if Rugiadi chooses to discard some of the suggestions that she reports, the reader will almost certainly find them intriguing and be grateful that she has included them.

Sheila Canby and her colleagues have delivered a professional exhibition and catalogue, impressive and at times brilliant. They were dealt a poor hand by political agenda beyond their control and evidently played it with considerable skill. If one were tempted to suggest that they might have ­waited until political relations improved, there is every sign that relations will not improve in the foreseeable future and might well become worse. One hopes that the exhibition and its beautiful catalogue will encourage more research and publication in Seljuk history, and one hopes that an- other and more comprehensive exhibition might become possible in the future. With two important Seljuk exhibitions in 2015 and 2016, however,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 06:16:40PM via free access book reviews 175 we may need to wait for some years. In the meantime, perhaps the sugges- tion will become more generally accepted that the role of Sufism should be assigned greater prominence if one hopes to understand the age of the Seljuks. Despite the undoubted quality of its scholarship, the approach of Court and Cosmos may seem, at least to some readers, slightly antiquated. The organizers should nevertheless be congratulated. The catalogue is so attractive that almost anyone would be delighted to own a copy, and its contents will undoubtedly inspire and help to refine Seljuk scholarship for years to come. In his foreword, Thomas Campbell claimed that the Metro­ politan Museum had set out to organize a Seljuk exhibition of a breadth never before seen. In this, Sheila Canby and her colleagues have undoubt- edly succeeded. We are all in their debt.  Mostafa Vaziri. Rumi and Shams’ Silent Rebellion: Parallels with Vedanta, Buddhism, and Shaivism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2015. 244 pages + xvii.

Reviewed by Ovidio Salazar

Although a social scientist by training, Iranian-born author Mostafa Vaziri’s­ personal interest in Rumi’s philosophical and spiritual approach first led him to undertake the translation and publication of a selection of Mawlana Rumi’s poems in 1998. He followed this up ten years later with an introduc- tion to Rumi and Shams, in which he says he was ‘influenced by the usual depiction of Rumi found in secondary sources: as Sufi poet and Islamic mystic transformed by his master Shams’. But it was after this volume was published that Vaziri began to revise his entire approach to the traditional narrative of Rumi’s encounter with Shams, including what he holds to be the true significance of the impact it had on Rumi’s philosophy and what he terms their ‘silent rebellion’. After making several trips to India, where he first began to study ­Buddhism and then later the two non-dualist schools of Advaita Vedanta­ and Kashmiri Shaivism, Vaziri’s approach and understanding of Rumi under­went a transformation. His initial ideas on Rumi now seemed to him to be ‘limited and sentimentalized’ as he began to see Mawlana ‘through a different set of philosophical and anthropological lenses’. This tack has led to the author’s current effort to update the Rumi narrative with a new historiographical and philosophical approach, by ‘disentangling’ him from

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