The Anatolian: Rumi in his world

SPEAKING VOLUMES

In the Year of Rumi, the great Persian Sufi poet, there seems to be no end to the ways in which we celebrate his works. There are concerts of Rumi's work, plays that narrate his life, poetry readings in Persian and other languages.

There are also 'Rumi for the Bottomline' business workshops; 'Recover with Rumi' deaddiction courses; the Inspirational Rumi Tarot Pack; and Whirling for Beginners classes.

Rumi's lasting appeal is understandable; his work remains as fresh today, his voice ringing clear across the centuries. He issued an invitation in his poems that has perhaps even greater appeal to the cynical 21st century reader than it did to the world-weary 12th century listener: "Come, come, whoever you are/ Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving/ It doesn't matter /Ours is not a caravan of despair./ Come, even if you have broken your vow/ a thousand times/ Come, yet again, come, come."

Many see Rumi as the ultimate symbol of hope in the quest to bridge the distance between ideas of the East and of the West. Jalal-ud-din Muhammad "Balkhi" Rumi was born in Afghanistan""a land identified, often blindly, in our time with the Taliban, or as the hideout of Osama bin Laden, with UN troops and US bombings. His family were 12th century refugees, leaving their homeland when the Mongols invaded Central Asia. The route they took winds through a landscape familiar to readers of contemporary history: they stopped at Nishapur in Khorasan (located in modern-day Iran), went on to Baghdad and found their way to Anatolia, in present-day Turkey.

Iran then stood for more than Ayatollahs, fatwas and war; Khorasan is where Rumi met the great mystic Persian poet, Farid-al-din Attar. The province, like the city of Baghdad, was kind to poets, known for its riches and its grace. Baghdad was, in that age, a luminous centre of scholarship""many of the manuscripts that were lost during the Gulf War when the library at Baghdad was set on fire dated back to this century, and commemorated the great debates and the great literature of the time. It was where the region's most revered mystics, scholars, travellers, historians, writers, artists and poets gathered, and Rumi's father, Bahauddin, a theologian of considerable note, was welcomed by his peers.

Many sources agree that the name by which we know Maulana Jalal-ud-din Muhammad""Rumi""came after the family settled in Anatolia, part of a large and constant migration that lasted over a century. The word "Rumi" means, simply, "Anatolian"; "Rumi" referred to the old Roman Empire, and was the eastern corruption of the word Rome . The place Rumi's family had come to was hospitable to immigrants, and its literature encompassed tales from across Central Asia. The Book of Dede Korkut, a "dastaan" or story-cycle work, stretches from the 9th to the 11 centuries, has multiple authors, and includes folk tales and histories from herding tribes and nomadic groups as well as histories from more settled Turkmen.

Farid-al-din Attar, who had such a strong influence on Rumi, wrote his Conference of the Birds in 1177. This marvellous allegory recounts the quest of 30 birds who, guided by the hoopoe, cross seven valleys in order to find unity with the mythical bird known as the Simurgh. A few centuries later, in England, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Parliament of the Fowles (roughly 1382), which also featured a conference of birds.

Some scholars speculate that while Attar's work may not have been available in translation, oral versions of his story may have been passed from hand to hand, especially during the Crusades, and one version may well have reached Chaucer. Many centuries later, a young man called Salman Rushdie would call his first published novel Grimus""Grimus is a clever anagram of Simurg""and lean on the structure of Attar's tale to some extent. Rushdie's fascination with the Simurg story shows up much later, too, in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, where young Haroun's guide is a mechanical hoopoe with a wry turn of phrase and telepathic powers.

What most of us retain of Rumi is not this intricate background of entwined texts and of ideas being carried from one part of Central Asia to another by refugees, travellers, wandering scholars and pilgrims. In the minds of most readers, Indian as well as Western, Rumi is a one-off""Attar and Rumi's great love and inspiration, the dervish Shams Tabrizi, are his co-stars, but the three of them occupy an otherwise empty stage. If you step back and look again, at an imaginary timeline of world literature, this is roughly what you see. Basavanna, the great Vaishnava poet, was born in 1134; Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London in 1343; and Rumi was born in 1207""they belonged to different worlds, but shared similar world views.

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