You might find this latest installment of the bi-weekly Hamblin/Peterson Deseret News column of some slight interest:
“Reformation and counter-reformation”
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One of the most interesting writers of classical Islam is the Anatolian poet and Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (AD 1207-1273). He is also known as a jurist and theologian, and as the head of a mystical community. But he is most famous today as the author of a huge collection of rhymed Persian couplets called the Mathnawi (or, depending on your language and pronunciation, the Masnavi or several other possibilities). The title simply means “couplets.”
Rumi is especially popular among Iranians, Turks, and South Asians, typically under the title mawlana or mevlana (“our master”) or mevlevi (“my master”), or simply as Rumi (pronounced roo-MEE; meaning “Roman” or, more accurately, “Byzantine,” since he lived in former Byzantine territory under the Seljuq Sultanate of “Rum” or “Rome.” The Mevlevi Sufi order, which was founded after his death, is best known in the West as the “Whirling Dervishes.” They are famous for using music and ritual dance as means of meditation and of drawing near to God.
Rumi’s work has been widely translated, and I’m told that he has been, and may still be, the most popular or best selling poet in the United States. (He’s very fashionable among adherents of “New Age” thinking, though I’m not at all sure that they understand him as he would have wanted to be understood.)
He’s also very quotable. (You’re probably aware of the story of the blind men and the elephant, which appears in the Mathnawi.)
But I want to cite one particular passage of his poetry, which seems to me to be laying out a curious theory of a kind of “evolution”:
I died as a mineral and became a plant.
I died as plant and rose to animal.
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels bless’d; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,
I shall become what no mind e’er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! For Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones,
To Him we shall return.
In the end, he’s talking about a mystical union with the divine. But it seems to me not unreasonable to read him as talking, also, about a kind of human deification.
Anyway, I share the passage with you as something to think about.
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