Rumi

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

God is the Beloved: someone who calls, loves and awaits the soul's return

A personal GodStated explicitly

Jalal al-Din Rumi writes within Sufi Islam and his God is the God of the Qur'an, one and creator, but he lives Him above all as the Beloved. The Masnavi opens with the lament of the reed flute torn from the reed bed, an image of the soul separated from its origin and longing to return; the whole work is a commentary on that separation and that longing. In the Divan of Shams of Tabriz, love for the master Shams merges with love for God, who is addressed in the second person, reproached for absence and celebrated in presence. This God loves first, draws, wounds and consoles: not a principle to be contemplated but someone with whom one converses. At the same time, Rumi insists that in union the lover vanishes and only the Beloved remains, which brings him close to the experience of unity.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

The soul comes from God and returns to Him after dying to its ego

A created, immortal soulStated explicitly

For Rumi, the human being is a soul that came from God and is exiled in the world, like the reed torn from the reed bed with which the Masnavi opens. Following Sufi psychology, he distinguishes the lower ego (nafs), seat of desire, vanity and cunning, which he compares to wild beasts and to the donkey that must be tamed, from the spirit (ruh), which recognises its origin. In Book III of the Masnavi he describes the soul's ascent: it died as mineral and became plant, died as plant and became animal, died as animal and became human, and will yet die as human to rise beyond the angels. The true self is found by dying to the ego; in that extinction (fana) the soul does not vanish but returns to the Beloved from whom it came.

Why do we suffer?

Every lament is that of the reed torn from its reed bed

Separation from GodStated explicitly

Rumi opens the Masnavi with a reed flute that laments: since it was torn from the reed bed, men and women have wept at its cry, and it seeks a breast torn by separation to tell the pain of longing. That is his diagnosis: human suffering is, at bottom, the homesickness of the soul separated from its origin, seeking in the world's objects what it will only find on returning. But pain is not only lack. In his verses the wound is also the opening through which grace enters; suffering breaks the ego's pride and awakens the longing that leads back. Rumi therefore celebrates burning, sorrow and searching as signs of spiritual life, and distrusts the comfort that lulls. Love turns what is bitter into sweetness.

What happens after death?

Death is the wedding night: the soul's return to its Beloved

Eternal life and resurrectionStated explicitly

Rumi thinks about death within Islam — resurrection, judgement, return to God — but lives it as an encounter. The Mevlevi tradition calls his death Şeb-i Arûs, «wedding night», because in his poems dying means rejoining the Beloved from whom the soul was separated, like the reed flute torn from the reed bed. In Book III of the Masnavi he describes an ascent: he died as a mineral and became a plant, died as a plant and became an animal, died as an animal and became a man; why fear, when nothing was ever lost by dying? — and he concludes that he will also leave the human condition to return to God, for to Him we return. Rumi also takes up the Sufi saying of dying before one dies: the extinction of the ego in life anticipates physical death and takes away its bitterness. For the lover, death is not an end but a door.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

Love is the path: the reed cut from its bed longs to return

Through devotion and surrenderStated explicitly

Rumi expresses the human condition in the eighteen verses that open the Masnavi: the reed flute laments because it was torn from the reed bed, and its complaint is that of the soul separated from its origin. What brings it back is not reasoning, which often appears as insufficient in his work, but love, a fire that consumes the lover and leads him to the extinction of self (fana) in the Beloved. For Rumi that love was kindled in his encounter with Shams of Tabriz and is cultivated through the relationship with the master, listening, music and the ritual dance practised by his circle. All of this belongs within Islamic life: law and prayer are the starting point, not an obstacle.

Is a teacher necessary?

Without the master the path is lost; Shams was the fire that transformed him

IndispensableStated explicitly

Rumi lived the relationship with the master as the central event of his life: the encounter with Shams of Tabriz in 1244 turned a respected jurist and preacher into the poet of love, and his lyrical work bears Shams's name. In the Masnavi the need for a spiritual guide (pir) is a recurring theme: the disciple who wants the fruits of the path without bearing the master's discipline is ridiculed in the story of the man from Qazvin who asks for a lion tattoo and cannot bear the needle. For Rumi, the traveller without a guide goes astray, and surrender to the master is the means by which the lover learns to die to himself. After Shams, he transferred that relationship to successors.

Is the world real?

Forms are foam on an invisible sea: the world reflects the Beloved

Manifestation of the divineInferred from their doctrine

Rumi does not build a systematic metaphysics, but his poetry continually refers the forms of the world to a reality that exceeds them. Recurring images such as the sea and the foam, or the sun and its reflections, present creatures as passing appearances of a single source: the visible is real as sign and reflection, not as independent reality. The human error is to stop at form and forget meaning, to love the image without recognising where its beauty comes from. The Masnavi is built on this distinction between form (surat) and meaning (ma'na). At the same time, the world is the place where the separated soul learns to return through love.

What is love?

Love is the lament of the reed longing to return to the reed bed

Longing and unionStated explicitly

Rumi is perhaps the great poet of love as longing for union. The Masnavi opens with the complaint of the reed flute: ever since it was torn from the reed bed, its lament has made men and women weep, and all who are far from their origin seek the time of union. The fire that sounds in the flute, he says, is the fire of love. For Rumi love is the force that moves the cosmos and returns the soul to God; no reasoning can explain it, and in the same first book he calls it the astrolabe of divine mysteries. His encounter with Shams of Tabriz, to whom he dedicated the Divan-e Shams, turned the jurist into a poet: human love for the master becomes a mirror and path of divine love. The lover must be consumed, like the candle, until only the Beloved remains.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

Our shame proves that we choose: Rumi against fatalism

Real free willStated explicitly

The *Masnavi* returns again and again to the theological dispute between *jabr* (divine compulsion) and *ikhtiyār* (choice), and Rumi sides with responsibility. In Book I, the debate between the lion and the other beasts sets pure trust in God against effort, and the poem ends by vindicating the Prophet's saying: trust in God, but tie your camel's knee. In another passage of the same book he argues that our supplication shows our dependence on God, but our shame after doing wrong shows we could have acted otherwise. For Rumi the fatalist uses the divine will as an excuse; human freedom is real, even if it is a gift of God and is fulfilled in surrender to Him.

Why meditate or pray?

God looks at the heart, not the words: prayer as a lover's conversation

Friendship with GodStated explicitly

In Book II of the *Masnavi*, Rumi tells the story of Moses and the shepherd: a shepherd offers to comb God's hair, wash his feet and bring him milk, and Moses rebukes him for blasphemy; then God reproaches Moses for separating a servant from Him, for He looks not at words or form but at the heart and its burning. Prayer, for Rumi, is above all a dialogue of love with the Beloved, born of the separated soul's longing, like the lament of the reed flute that opens the poem. Alongside ritual prayer, which he respected as jurist and preacher, the Mevlevi tradition links his name to the remembrance of God (*dhikr*) and to *samāʿ*, musical audition with whirling, as forms of that same intimacy.

Can reason know the ultimate?

The reasoners' leg is made of wood: love sees further

The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly

In the *Masnavi* Rumi distinguishes between the partial intellect (*ʿaql-i juzwī*), calculating and bound to appearances, and the universal intellect, which is divine light. He mocks the former with famous images: in Book I he says the leg of those who argue by proofs is wooden, and a wooden leg is very unsteady. Against it he sets love, which knows by union rather than demonstration, and the vision of the purified heart. He is not simply an anti-rationalist: he was a jurist and preacher trained in the religious sciences, and he values intelligence placed at the service of love. But access to God does not go through logic but through the seeker's transformation, which in his case came with the encounter with Shams of Tabriz.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

Do not become a monk: the path is walked in the midst of people

Contemplation in actionStated explicitly

Rumi lived at the centre of urban life in Konya: he was a jurist and preacher, a family man, teacher of a large community and adviser to rulers. The conversations collected in Fihi ma fihi are largely addressed to Muʿin al-Din Parvana, the powerful Seljuk vizier, whom he urges to govern justly without attachment to power. In Book V of the Masnavi, the story of the peacock that plucks out its feathers to escape vanity serves him to reject monasticism: the point is not to mutilate oneself or flee, but to fight the ego amid temptations, since without them there is no virtue. The Mevlevi practice, with its whirling dance, likewise unites the inner and the visible. For Rumi contemplation does not require abandoning the world, but living in it with the heart turned towards the Beloved.

Barons Court, Londres · Reino Unido

The Study Society, Colet House (London)

The Study Society

The Study Society was registered in 1951, four years after Ouspensky's death, at the initiative of his pupil Dr Francis Roles, to continue his work as a school of the Fourth Way. It is based at Colet House in west London, which presents itself as a spiritual gateway in the centre of the city. Its current programme brings together meditation, the Movements, study groups on the Masnavi and meetings devoted to Rumi, the dervish turning and a Sunday Advaita gathering. Its main website sometimes rejects automated requests; the Colet House site responds normally.

Chisholme House (Escocia), Sutton Courtenay (Oxfordshire), Londres y en línea · Reino Unido

Beshara: Foundation course and Masnavi study

The Beshara Trust

Beshara is the educational offering of the Beshara Trust, a British charity founded in 1971. Its foundation course takes the metaphysics of Ibn Arabi as its starting point to explore what it means to know oneself and the world in the light of the Unity of Existence, combining an introductory weekend, fortnightly online sessions and an optional residential at Chisholme House in the Scottish Borders. It also runs study groups on Rumi's Masnavi and other texts of the Sufi tradition. It is funded by philanthropic donations and voluntary work, and bookings are made by contacting the trust.

Centro Cultural Mevlana, Konya · Turquía

Şeb-i Arûs: commemoration of Rumi in Konya

Ministerio de Cultura y Turismo de Turquía

Şeb-i Arûs, the wedding night, is the name the Mevlevi tradition gives to Rumi's death on 17 December 1273, understood as his reunion with the Beloved. Every year, in the days leading up to that date, Konya holds the international commemoration ceremonies organised by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, with concerts, lectures and performances of the sema, the whirling ceremony of the dervishes, in the hall of the Mevlana Cultural Centre. The cultural activities are free and the final ceremony on the 17th requires a ticket. It is the time of year when most pilgrims come to the city.

Konya (distrito de Karatay) · Turquía

Mevlana Museum: Rumi's mausoleum in Konya

Ministerio de Cultura y Turismo de Turquía (Mevlâna Müzesi)

The Mevlana Museum occupies the former lodge of the Mevlevi dervishes in Konya, built around the mausoleum of Jalal al-Din Rumi, constructed in 1274, a year after his death. Beneath the famous green dome lie Rumi, his father and other members of the order. The lodge was closed in 1925 under the law that abolished the Sufi orders and reopened the following year as a museum, now run by the Turkish Ministry of Culture. It holds manuscripts of the Masnavi, musical instruments and the dervishes' cells, and remains one of the most visited places of pilgrimage in the Islamic world.