International Mevlana Symposiuın Papers ,. Birleşmiş Minetler 2007 Eğitim, Bilim ve Kültür MevlAnA CelAleddin ROmi Kurumu 800. ~um Yıl Oönümü United Nations Educaöonal, Scientific and aoo:ı Anniversary of Cu/tura! Organlzatlon the Birth of Rumi Symposium organization commitlee Prof. Dr. Mahmut Erol Kılıç (President) Celil Güngör Volume 3 Ekrem Işın Nuri Şimşekler Motto Project Publication Tugrul İnançer Istanbul, June 20 ı O ISBN 978-605-61104-0-5 Editors Mahmut Erol Kılıç Celil Güngör Mustafa Çiçekler Katkıda bulunanlar Bülent Katkak Muttalip Görgülü Berrin Öztürk Nazan Özer Ayla İlker Mustafa İsmet Saraç Asude Alkaylı Turgut Nadir Aksu Gülay Öztürk Kipmen YusufKat Furkan Katkak Berat Yıldız Yücel Daglı Book design Ersu Pekin Graphic application Kemal Kara Publishing Motto Project, 2007 Mtt İletişim ve Reklam Hizmetleri Şehit Muhtar Cad. Tan Apt. No: 13 1 13 Taksim 1 İstanbul Tel: (212) 250 12 02 Fax: (212) 250 12 64 www.mottoproject.com 8-12 Mayıs 2007 Bu kitap, tarihinde Kültür ve yayirı[email protected] Turizm Bakanlıgı himayesinde ve Başbakanlık Tamtma Fonu'nun katkılanyla İstanbul ve Konya'da Printing Mas Matbaacılık A.Ş. düzerılenen Uluslararası Mevhiııfı Sempozyumu bildirilerini içermektedir. Hamidiye Mahallesi, Soguksu Caddesi, No. 3 Kagıtlıane - İstanbul The autlıors are responsible for tlıe content of tlıe essays .. Tei. 0212 294 10 00 "W e are the inheritors of the lig ht of Muhammad": Rumi, ada b, and Muhammadan intimacy ümid Safi 1 lran 1 WlLL begin by two stories about relations between Mawlana and his do se companions, each revealing one facet of his un derstanding of the Prophet. One day Shaykh Shas al-Din Multi (Malati?) had come to see Mawlana. Mawlana was sitting alone in the Jamaa'at-khaneh (assembly hall) of the madrasa. I bowed my head in respect and sat far from him. Mawlana said: "nazdik biya", come closer! I moved a bit further. Time and again he said: "nazdik biya", come closer, until my knee was close his blessed knee. From awe and respect, I was shivering on this inside. T He then said: sit so that your knee touches mine." Then he told me so many tales ab out virtues of Sayyed Borhan al-Din and the wondrous deeds of Mawlana Shams al-Din of Tabriz, may God sanctify their innermost heart, that I almost lost consciousness. Then Mawlana said: Dur Sultan, i.e. Prophet Muhammad (S), has stated: Mercy rains down with the mention of righteous souls of the Muslim com­ 1' munity. But wherever I (i.e. the Prophet) am remembered, there God rains down. 1 So here we have a story within a story, the tale of Mevlevis remembering Mawlana remembering the Prophet. The second story is similar to the above, of remembering the Prophet, but with an important twist. In this story, Parveneh [the well-known Amir and Patron of Konya] came to Mawlana one day: 1 Aflaki, Manaqeb al-'arefin, 125-6. 1478 He begged Mawlana to offer him some counsel and advice. Mawlana put his head down for a while, and remained deep in thought. He then lifted his head and said: "O Amir Mo'in al-Din, I hear that you have leamed the Qur'an." ı Parveneh said: yes. \ I heard that you have studied the hadith collection, Jami' al-Usuf with Shaykh Sadr al-Din [Qunawi?]. He said: yes. When you have heard the words of God and the Prophet, and study "what is required", and yet do not take heed from those advice, and don't act based on what is required from those verses of the Qur'an and hadith of the Prophet, what are you going to listen to from anything I might have to say? Parvaneh got up in tears, and wandered away. After that po int, he devoted himself to action, the spreading of justice ('adl-gostari), and ilisan (realization of goodness and beauty).3 What is remarkable about stories like this is that simultaneously Mawlana places his own advice in the tradition of the Qur'an and the. hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, even though he chastises his follower for not having heeded the call of the Qur'an to begin with. And yet, there is the realistic recognition that there are those whose hearts may not respond initially to the call of the Qur'an and the hadith, who may be opened up to the sweetness of Rumi's message. Taday, there are millions of people araund the world, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who find themselves in the same position as Parvaneh, somehow estranged from the beauty of the Qur'an and the usıvatun lıasana 4 (loveliest 2 This probably refers to Jami' al-usul fi ahadith ai-Rasul, by ai-Mubarak ibn Muhammad ibn ai-Athir (d. 1209). 3 Afla ki, Manaqeb al-'arefin, 1 :165. 4 Qur'an 33:21. Om id Safi "We are tlıe inlıeritors of tlıe liglzt of Mulıammad": Rumi, ada b, and Mulzammadan intimacy example) of the Prophet, who stili do find themselves responding to the embod­ ied love and compassian of Hazrat Ma w lana. It could well be that for these and many others, the teachings of Rumi properly understood and contextualized rep­ resent a great opportunity to retum to the deepest and loftiest parts of the Islamic tradition. And the results of heeding the message of the Qur'an and hadith through the prism of Rumi are the same ethlcal imperatives that the Parveneh was led to, the ever-familiar linked commandments of 'adi and ihsan, as in imza 'l-lalıa ya 'm uru bi 'l-adl ıva '1-ilısan, indeed Go d commands you to social jus­ tice and the pursuit of goodness and beauty. One of the comman refrains of modem Islamic thought over the last 150 years has been the necessity of "retuming" to the Qur'an and Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad. Often this is expressed as part of an attempt to retum to the variety of Islam practiced by the al-salaf al-salih, the Pious Forefathers.5 Without dismissing the creative possibility that such a paradigm has for coun­ tering colonialism and purging same of the undesirable elements that have become woven in to the fabric of the Islamic tradition, I propose that the chal­ lenge facing Islamic thought taday is not so neatly simple as a simple returo to the Qur'an and the Sunna. The issue is alsa whose reading of the Qur'an one is returning to, and whose understanding of the Prophet Muhammad. In addition, it is alsa undeniably the case that between us and the revelation of the Qur'an stands 1400 years of the Islamic tradition, avastand glorious peri­ od in which God's self-revelation to humanity has continued through the inspiration of countless saints and scholars. Indeed the bulk of the Islamic spiritual, philosophical, ethical, theological, artistic, and legal tradition has been articulated this histarical period after that of the "al-salaf al-salih".6 We dismiss this legacy at the grave risk of dismissing God's continuous involve­ ment with humanity. 5 This is often traced to the classical "high phase" of lslamic modernism, of fıg­ ures such as Jamal al-Din Afghani, Muhammad Abd uh, and Rashid al-Din Ri da. Salafı thought eventually took an anti-modernist bent in the mid 20th century, a move which ta kes us far from the present discussion. 6 That is eve n allowing for the fact that the various early Salafıs disagreed about the length of the period of al-salaf al-salih, some restricting it to the immediate two generations after the time of the Prophet, others expanding it to the fırst four hundred years of lslamic civilization! See Albert Hourani, Liberal Thought in AnArab Age. 1480 The variety of Islam that we see in Turkey, Iran, South Asia, and countless other regions is through the vitality and creativity of this later Islamic tradition. The Muslim sage, poet, and mystic Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, whose 800th biriliday we are celebrating here, is doubtless one of the beacons of this later tra- , dition. Rather than simply parroting the mantra of "retuming to the Qur'an and \ sunna", I propose that we ask instead lıoıv asagelike Rumi came to understand the Prophet. Of his own relationship to the Prophet (S), Rumi states: "W e are in every way the inheritors of the Light of Muhammad." (maa jami' al-ıvojulı ıvaretlı-e nur-e Muhammad-im).7 A hundred years ago, and fıfty years ago, it was commonplace for Orientalists to look for extra-Islamic roots for Sufısm. Whether they tried to connect tasawwuf to Neopolatonism, Christian desert piety, Iranian nation­ alistic rebellion, Indian mysticism, ete., their goal was similar: to somehow fınd an allegedly "Indo-European" root for this lovely manifestation of spir­ ituality and mysticism in Islam. 8 In response, w e w ere fortunate to have a who le generation of scholarship from masters like Seyyed Hossein Nasr and others to argue for the Islamic nature of tasawwuf. So let us hop e that to day we can avoid the endless argument over whether tawassuf is Islamic or uni­ versal, as if Islam cannot contain universal truths. Instead of arguing whether Mawlana is spiritually connected to the very being of the Prophet, I hope to spend this paper demonstrating lıoıv he-and his followers in the Mevlevi order-came to establish Mawlana as a supreme inheritor of the Muhammadan Light (Nur-e Mulıammadi). I will do so. primarily through close reading and analysis of Rumi's main biography, Shams al-Din Aflaki's Manaqeb al-'arefın, written down a few generations after Rumi through extensive oral and written sources.9 My point in this paper is two-fold.