Rumi’s Popularity in the United States of America: An Investigation

Sanam Shahedali

Professor Akram Pouralifard, PhD

Iranian and Islamic Literature in English Language

3 June 2017

Over the past few decades, there has been great enthusiasm and admiration for the Persian poet Rumi in the United States of America. This paper investigates the reasons behind Rumi’s tremendous popularity in this country and how Rumi’s character and poetry have been modified to suite the spiritual taste of Americans. Investigations reveal that the Rumi that has been introduced in the US as one removed from his religious and cultural background. What is emphasized in popular translations and renditions of Rumi’s poetry is the universal, albeit mysterious and enigmatic, message of love, ecstasy and spirituality.

A Brief Introduction to the Life and Poetry of Rumi

Jalal al-Din Mohammad ‌Balkhi, generally known in Iran as Mowlana (our master) or Mowlavi (my master), was a great 13th-century theologian and mystic poet who is considered to be “the supreme genius of Islamic mysticism” (El-Zein 71). When Balkh, Rumi’s city of birth located in present-day Afghanistan, was overrun by the invading Mongols, the teenage Rumi and his family, including his father, Baha’uddine Valad, who was an erudite and ambitious Muslim preacher, fled towards Rum (Asiatic Turkey), , and eventually settled in Konya, Anatolia.

After his father’s death in 1240, Rumi took up his father’s position as an Islamic preacher in Konia. He also learned about Sufism following the intellectual and religious path of his time. Rumi’s life and his worldview was turned upside down when, at the age of 37, he met a wandering mystic known as Shams of Tabriz. As explained by Brad Gooch, author of a biography of Rumi, “The two of them have this electric friendship for three years – lover and beloved [or] disciple and sheikh, it’s never clear” (qtd. in Ciabattari p.3). Shams disappeared after about three years for unclear reasons and this was when poetry started flowing from Rumi, lamenting of separation, expressing ecstatic feelings of love and longing, and revealing mystical insight which aims at merging lover and beloved as well as earthly beloved and divine beloved into the concept of oneness. Rumi’s major works are Divan-i Kabir or Divan Shams Tabrizi which contains about 40000 couplets, and the great Mathnavi which contains about 26000 couplets.

Rumi in the West

Today, Rumi’s poetry has a massive following in the US and around the world. The Facebook page Rumi Quotes and the Tweeter page of the same name, which post inspirational and spiritual aphorisms attributed to Rumi, are followed by about 671,000 and  348,000 users respectively. Rumi’s poems have become inspirations for various singers including Madonna and Coldplay’s Chris Martin. As Andrew Harvey, one of the interpreters of Rumi’s poetry puts it, the Western mind is looking for a spiritual guide:

Rumi is increasingly seen for what he is – not only our supreme poet - but also an essential guide to the new mystical renaissance that is struggling to be born against terrible odds in the rubble of our dying civilization (qtd. in El-Zein 72)

Rumi’s Popularity in the US

In the past few decades, the ecstatic poems of Rumi have found great popularity in the United States of America, particularly through the English renditions of Coleman Barks and Deepak Chopra. His poems “have sold millions of copies in recent years, making him the most popular poet in the US,” reports BBC (Ciabattari p.1).

In her remarkable essay "Spiritual Consumption in the United States: The Rumi Phenomenon" Amira El-Zein thus explains the wide extent of Rumi’s popularity and influence in the US:

In 1994, Publishers’ Weekly announced that Rumi was the bestselling poet in America. Since then, Rumi’s fame continues to increase. The translations or rather the renderings of Rumi by Coleman Barks, for example, have sold more than a quarter of a million copies in a country where Pulitzer Prize winning poets often do not sell more than 10,000 books. Recordings of Rumi have entered Billboard’s Top Twenty lists, including the poems of Rumi sung by the Pakistani Nusrat Ali Khan. Among the artists participating were Madonna, Rosa Parks, Goldie Hawn and Deepak Chopra, as reported by the Los Angeles Times: `Deepak Chopra breathes Rumi’ s metaphors from the oasis – “I am your flower garden and your water Too” - into Donna Karan’ s fall fashion show, now playing on video in her boutiques. Cloud-color satins, storm-color cashmeres, glimpses of shoulders and shinbones, and Rumi’ (72-73)

Potential Reasons for Rumi’s Popularity in the US

El-Zein asserts that it was the acute need of Americans for spirituality that prepared a fertile ground for the seed of Rumi’s celebration in the US:

The ecstatic impulse which re-emerged for a short time with St Francis and some of the medieval mystics, such as St Theresa, seems to be coming back today in Rumi’s Sufi tradition. Rumi is also viewed by Americans as reviving in his verse an old Gnosticism and charismatic movements (72).

In the preface he has written for A. Reza Arasteh’s book Rumi the Persian, the Sufi, Erich Fromm reveals that in an age marred with the fear of destructive wars rendered even more threatening by the advancements in nuclear technology and marked with “spiritual decay”, human beings have turned to a “new humanism” which expresses “faith in man, in his possibility to develop to ever higher stages, in the unity of the human race, in tolerance and peace, in reason and love.” (VII). He also mentions that modern man has turned to religious ideas that transcend strict theological and sectarian rules in “search for a meaning of life, for an aim to pursue which transcends that of material goods, power, and fame” (VIII). He believes that the works of Muslim mystics of the Eastern world, Rumi in particular, correspond to the aforementioned values, adding that:

Rumi the mystic, poet, the ecstatic dancer, was one of the great lovers of life, and this love of life pervades every line he wrote, every poem he made, every one of his actions (IX).

Chenaz B. Seelarbokus in Chapter 15 of the book Muslims and American Popular Culture traces the fascination of American society by Rumi to the New Age movement:

One can argue that the predilection of Americans for Rumi's poetry may be because Rumi, as presented by Barks, fits the demands of New Age spirituality, which Wouter Hanegraaff" has characterized as a "pervasive pattern of implicit or explicit culture criticism" whereby individuals exhibit a "general dissatisfaction with certain aspects of western thought such as one may encounter in contemporary culture." New Age spirituality is based on individualized personal experiences dissociated from religious institutions and tends to treat esotericism as universal." New Agers have adopted postmaterialist values and are interested in humanistic values premised on the community and equality, which create "a subjectivized rendering of the ethic of humanity." New Age is also deemed to have "an extraordinary ability to adopt and adapt ideas from the global spiritual supermarket, and then communicate them brilliantly." This is where Coleman Barks comes in (271-272)

Coleman Barks, whose English renditions of Rumi’s verses are said to have a major role in making Rumi popular in the US, believes that “there is a strong global movement, an impulse that wants to dissolve the boundaries that religions have put up and end the sectarian violence.  It is said that people of all religions came to Rumi's funeral in 1273. Because, they said, he deepens our faith wherever we are.  This is a powerful element in his appeal now” (qtd. in Ciabattari p. 11)

Mark Sedgwick, in his contribution to the book Sufis in Western Society with the chapter titled "The Reception of Sufi and Neo-Sufi Literature", argues that globalization, which aims at interconnecting all the nations and states in the world particularly through increased trade and cultural exchanges, can also be responsible for the popularity of Sufism and Sufi poets like Rumi in the Western societies, including the US:

One other way of understanding this is in terms of globalization. The nineteenth century was arguably the most dramatic period of globalization, since it was the period during which previously separate regional systems came together for the first time into a single global system. This was one factor in the increased availability in the West of non-Western literature, including Sufi poetry. Globalization also implies “localization,” however, as any of today’s global businesses know well. A global product must be adapted for local circumstances and tastes. Sufism became a global product in the nineteenth century, and during the twentieth century was localized for Western consumption by the neo-Sufis this chapter has discussed (192)

Jawid Mojaddedi, a scholar of early and medieval Sufism, points out a number of reasons for Rumi’s popularity today: The first is that Rumi directly addresses the reader, the second is the didactic nature of Rumi’s poetry which attracts “readers of ‘inspirational’ literature, the third “his use of every day imagery”, and the fourth is “his optimism of the attainment of union within his lyrical love ghazals” (qtd. in Ciabattari pp.13-14).

Another reason for Rumi’s American renaissance in the US is assumed to be his universal message of love. Rumi is seen as a poet who transcends “borders of faith, language and geography” to bear a universal message, namely the message of love and ecstasy, to the whole world at any time (Moaveni p. 2).

This point is re-emphasized by Lee Briccetti, executive director of Poets House, co-sponsor of a national library series in the US that features Rumi: “Across time, place and culture, Rumi's poems articulate what it feels like to be alive,” and “they help us understand our own search for love and the ecstatic in the coil of daily life” (qtd. in Ciabattari p. 7).

This emphasis on the theme of love has been accentuated by the popular English renditions of Rumi’s poetry, especially those of Coleman Barks and Deepak Chopra. Jane Ciabattari, in her report "Why is Rumi the Best-Selling Poet in the US?" thus reports about the former:

In 1976 the poet Robert Bly handed Barks a copy of Cambridge don AJ Arberry’s translation of Rumi and said, “These poems need to be released from their cages.” Barks transformed them from stiff academic language into American-style free verse.  Since then, Barks’ translations have yielded 22 volumes in 33 years, including The Essential Rumi, A Year with Rumi, Rumi: The Big Red Book and Rumi’s father’s spiritual diary, The Drowned Book, all published by HarperOne.  They have sold more than 2m copies worldwide and have been translated into 23 languages (p. 9).

In fact, Barks, who knows little Farsi – the original language of Rumi’s poetry – rephrases the existing scholarly translations of Rumi and makes them more appealing for the contemporary Western reader through his cheerful and aphoristic interpretations of Rumi’s verses.

Deepak Chopra, American author and spiritual guru, was another Rumi interpreter, who, in collaboration with Fereydoun Kia, produced the book The Love Poems of Rumi, which is a collection of Rumi’s verses with the theme of love. Chopra admits that “They are not direct translations, but ‘moods’ that we have captured as certain phrases radiated from the original Farsi, giving life to a new creation but retaining the essence of its source” (12).

In her article "Spiritual Consumption in the United States: The Rumi phenomenon", Amira El-Zein distinguishes between the academic, scholarly English translations of Rumi such as the translations of Arberry and Nicholson, and the less faithful non-academic renditions of Rumi’s verses, which she calls “New Sufism translations” exemplified in the interpretations of Barks and Chopra, criticizing the latter approach for using Rumi “to treat depression and sell products.” (71-73). El-Zein sets out to expose how ‘New Sophism’ translations, in their attempt to forge a popular spirituality from Rumi’s verses, separate his mystic poetry from its Islamic and Quranic roots:

To illustrate this, the Islamic origin of each of the four components will be uncovered, and it will then be shown how Rumi has been transformed by the `New Sufism’ approach into a ‘product’ for spiritual consumption in the American market. Finally some conclusions will be drawn with regard to the transformation of Rumi’s works as they travel from their Sufi source towards their Americanization. Through an endless cycle of translating, interpreting, retelling, recycling, taping and videotaping, the work Muslim character of Rumi is definitely changing to fit the American market of spiritual consumption (76).

The idea that Rumi’s poetry is stripped of its references to Islamic thought is reaffirmed by Seelarbokus as well, particularly in connection with Coleman Barks’s renditions:

His presentation of Rumi is utterly distanced from Islam while emphasizing values and ideals that appeal to American popular culture. Rumi is presented by Barks in a language devoid of Islamic religious symbolisms, Rumi's metaphors and allegories are mostly taken at face value, and Barks's literary style is likely to make sense across a range of subcultures such that even those individuals who are not passionate about Islamic mysticism are able not only to enjoy the words but to find application of them in their lives (272).

Conclusion

Various potential reasons for popularity of Rumi in the United States of America have been enumerated in this paper. Among the most notable of these reasons are: America’s need for spirituality at a time of moral and spiritual decay; the atmosphere of New Age movement; globalization; the spiritual and universal qualities of Rumi’s poetry, especially his message of love which is emphasized in the popular interpretations of him poems by Barks and Chopra. The paper also investigates how Rumi’s poetry, surgically removed from its cultural, historical, and religious context, has found a new life as a semi-spiritual commercial product in the consumerism of the United States of America.

Works Cited

Ciabattari, Jane. "Why is Rumi the Best-Selling Poet in the US?" BBC, 21 October 2014, pp. 1-

14, www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140414-americas-best-selling-poet. Accessed 3 June

2017.

Chopra, Deepak. Introduction. The Love Poems of Rumi, translated by Chopra and Fereydoun

Kia, Harmony Books, 1998, p. 12.

El-Zein, Amira. "Spiritual Consumption in the United States: The Rumi Phenomenon." Islam

and Christian–Muslim Relations, vol. 11, no. 1, 2000, pp. 71-76.

Fromm, Erich. Preface. Rumi the Persian, the Sufi, by A. Reza Arasteh, Routledge, 1974, pp.

VII-IX.

Moaveni, Azadeh, "How Did Rumi Become One of Our Best-Selling Poets?" The New York

Times, 20 January 2017, p. 2, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/books/review/rumi-brad-

gooch.html?mcubz=2&_r=0. Accessed 3 June 2017.

Sedgwick, Mark. "The Reception of Sufi and Neo-Sufi Literature." Sufis in Western Society,

edited by Ron Geaves, Markus Dressler, and Gritt Klinkhammer, Routledge, 2009, p.

192.

Seelarbokus, Chenaz B. "Thoroughly Muslim Mystic: Rewrite Rumi in America." Muslims and

American Popular Culture, edited by Anne R. Richards and Iraj Omidvar, Praeger, 2014,

pp. 271-272.