Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Hello and Salam, dear listeners, welcome to history speaks, a podcast that brings into conversation the islamic historical tradition with contemporary concerns. Today we have the pleasure of talking with Dr. Cyrus Dargar, professor at University of Central Florida in the department. Cyrus is a dear friend and much admired colleague. I'm eagerly anticipating our conversation regarding virtue ethics within the works of Jalaluddin Mohammed Rumi, the 13th century jurist, philosopher, poet, and really a polymath better known as Molana Rumi in the muslim world, or Rumi in the west, particularly focusing on his magnum opus masnavi. His Mustnafi is considered second only to the Quran in muslim scholarship. Cyrus, welcome and thank you for meeting with me and allowing me to share your work with a wider audience here.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: At oh, thank you for having me.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Most welcome. It is our pleasure, really. Cyrus I'll start with two broad questions. The first will be about the purpose of storytelling in Maulana Rumi's work, and second, I'll ask you to speak a little bit about the biography of Maulana Rumi. This broad overview will, I hope, situate the listener, and then I would like you to share with us key insights from one story from the masnavi. We would love to have more, but I think the podcast, the structure only allows for one story.
So for my first question, Cyrus, let's begin by discussing the advantages of narratives centered on imparting meaningful societal morals. This topic has come to my attention due to a recent observation. A considerable portion of television content, though not all, appears to lack depth and fails to offer viewers substantial moral insights or models of good virtue. This is a profound issue because media seems to be the main form of input about life for young people. In my initial observation, I noticed a recurring trend in movies and tv shows where religious individuals are often shown as unintelligent, thoughtless, and weird. This representation does not offer any meaningful insight into their faith or spirituality. Instead, it perpetuates stereotypes, presenting them as mere imbeciles and distorted characters. Very one dimensional that I observed not only not always, but many too many a time that children often became mere props when featured in tv shows and you don't gain meaningful insights into the dynamics of parent child relationships. Finally, there appears to be a noticeable surge in the presentation of antiheroic characters on screen, contributing to the gradual normalization of unsavory behavior. I bring up these thoughts as an introduction, setting the stage for a deeper exploration of the islamic or Malana Rumi's approach to storytelling, which aims to instill good morals and virtue ethics in the reader. Specifically, Cyrus. I would like to understand how Maulana Rumi incorporates ethics into storytelling with a strong emphasis on virtue. Maulana Rumi's intention isn't merely to tell stories for the sake of storytelling. Rather, he uses storytelling as a tool to educate, inspire, and offer examples for self improvement.
I'm interested in learning about the significance of this approach, both in his time and its relevance for the present day.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: That's a great question.
It's also one that I've been dealing with now for years.
What is Rumi doing in terms of storytelling? How is it related to his ethics? And the most interesting part of that question to me is, what does it mean for those of us alive here and now?
Well, in terms of what he's doing. So Rumi comes from a very rich, islamicate background of allegorical storytelling. And not all of his stories are allegories. But allegory plays an incredibly important role in what he does.
If you look at the tradition of allegorical storytelling and islamic thought, there's a lot there. Sufism has it. And it especially becomes, in Persian, sufi literature.
It really takes off with a poet who's about two generations before Rumi, named Sanai.
And Rumi acknowledges Sanai as the origin of great allegorical spiritual storytelling in the form of poetry, especially in the form of Mesnavi poetry. These rhymed lines and what Senai had done was tap into the great allegorical tradition among the muslim philosophers, such as Ibn Sina. In literary studies nowadays, very often, allegory can be dismissed. The idea behind the way we see allegory is that in allegory, there's this one to one correspondence. So, for example, if I'm telling you a story about, let's say, animal farm, each animal represents one different thing. The farm represents this. It's like a code.
But I would say that in Rumi's time and in Rumi's writings, there's a much more profound way of looking at allegory, which is that the whole world that we live in is allegorical. Everything around us represents something that we can't see. And not just one thing, but many things. So if a person has a dream, it's not that you take the dream and then you just interpret the dream one way. That dream could have multiple interpretations. A verse of the Quran can have multiple interpretations, one even somehow different than the other, as you go deeper and deeper into those interpretations. So there's representations in terms of language, but even the very things you see are methods of communication between the ultimate and human beings. And so there's this searching for meaning and all of the things you see and in all of the things you hear. That makes allegory really powerful. So the first thing with Rumi's storytelling is allegory. Because if you were to say, oh, no, it's the story that matters. It's the poetry that matters. He's coming. He's a poet. I don't think Rumi would be keen on being called a know. He had disparaging things to say about poetry itself.
There are times in his divan where he puts down poetry.
William Chidick discusses this in the sufi path of love.
There's even one line where he says something like, I have been delivered from these verses. In Ghazal's o king and Sultan of eternity, Mufta Alun Muftalun. Muftarlun has hounded me to death. Muftalun is like he's counting the verses. Because he was doing a lot of this sort of like. It's almost like he's saying, I'm sick of saying he's counting out the meter.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Poetry for him was just like a form.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: It was a form. Yeah, it was a form.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: It's not a purpose. It was not his main kind of thing that he was doing.
[00:07:46] Speaker B: It's not poetry for poetry's sake. Precisely. He says, on another occasion, he says that I have friends, they come over. This is in the fihi mafi. This is like the collection of sermons of Rumis. He says, I have friends, they come over. They want me to do this poetry thing. So I recite poetry. I do it to make them happy.
I don't think it mattered to him so much that it was poetry. Which is odd considering how ingenious his poetry is.
Even if you just look at it in terms of poetic skill, in terms of the vividness and the imagination behind his images. And the way certain things tie together, as we can discuss later. Multivocality. All these things. It's amazing. But that's not what he's valuing. So what is he valuing in the storytelling, in the poetry? He's valuing the kernel of truth that comes in through this husk you take out, like with a fruit.
You're getting to the core of it. And that's the meaning, the ultimate meaning that he's expressing through this poetry. In terms of ethics, even ethics itself.
Virtue ethics. I discuss virtue ethics in Rumi's poetry. But it. It's not an end in and of itself. He wants the human being to cultivate these ethical traits so that the human being can move beyond ethical traits. You see, because the animal soul, which is what you're balancing out with ethics, is getting in the way of things. So first you have to master the animal soul, you have to master the self, but then you have to annihilate the self. You have to get rid and transcend and move beyond the self.
And lastly, I'll just end on this note, if we have a minute, this method of allegorical storytelling, because we were talking about today and how it impacts us today, it's difficult to do in modern art, in contemporary art, it's very difficult to be allegorical.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: That's really interesting.
Could a little bit more about that?
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think it depends on the art form we're talking about.
But one of the differences between, as I see it, traditional art, contemporary art, is that any sort of moral or theme, it really shouldn't be explicitly stated or explicitly represented. Right? A movie or a novel or a poem that preaches to you the way that Rumi preaches in his poetry. It doesn't fit what we consider art, which is this sort of honest representation of life. But one of the figures that I've spent time studying, precisely because of my fascination with figures like Rumi and Atar, the persian poets, is an iranian director by the name of Majid.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: Majidi, I was going to say, is allegorical.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Yeah. And people who know me hear about him all the time because I talk about him all the time. And so I'm sorry to bring him up again, but he's a great example for me. I mean, his movie Bida Majnun, which is translated as the willow tree, is the finest expression of bringing the Mesnavi to life. The Mesnavi being, of course, Rumi's magnum opus'great. Work. The long narrative poem, the masnavi of Rumi. His movie, Magid Majidi's movie the Willow Tree, is the finest example of bringing to life the masnavi that I can imagine, really, that I've seen. The movie begins with the masnevi. It's about a scholar who studies the masnevi. And it ends with the masnevi. It ends with the. I don't want to ruin the ending for those who want to see it, but it ends with the masnevi. It takes parables from the masnevi, like the parable of the ant, for example, and scatters them throughout the movie. But if you were to watch the film, the beauty of the film is that you could appreciate it solely as a representation of a human life, of one life in the contemporary sense, that you would expect from neorealism, neorealistic cinema. But at the same time, and if a person were to look deeper into the symbols that are in this movie, you'd realize that they're not actually quite symbols, they're allegories. And the film is allegorical.
For those who haven't seen the film, this is not ruining it. But basically it's the story of a professor who studies persian mystical poetry. He studies Rumi and Hafes, and he is blind.
But through the miracle of surgery, he goes to France and they perform this surgical procedure. And he can see again, because he had lost sight when he was in his childhood. So the potential to see was there. And when his sight is restored, his insight begins to change and die. And his relationship with God changes. I'll leave it at that. So I think it is possible to do allegorical storytelling. To do this sort of virtue building storytelling that Rumi does. I think it is possible to do in the contemporary arts. But not just to copy and mimic previous forms, but to think like Majid Majidi does. To think insightfully about how do we translate this to contemporary media, contemporary forms, contemporary themes. Because he's also concerned with issues like refugees, issues like people who have disabilities. All kinds of issues that matter to us now.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Responding to the world around us.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Doing it in a very particular form.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:14:09] Speaker A: So this was really. I think it's really helpful to hear that Rumi. For the Molana. Rumi did not imagine himself to be like a poet per se, but he used poetry for allegorical storytelling.
But let's move on to our second question. And it's, again, a general question. And the question pertains to, like. I would like you to provide some biographical information about Maulana Rumi. He holds fame as one of the most renowned poets in the United States. Right. However, an insightful article from the New York Times from a while ago pointed out that there is a tendency to overlook or erase islamic aspects from both Moulana Rumid's translated poetry and the understanding of his identity as a person. Likewise, more recently, when the rock superstar Sinead O'Connor passed away, her muslim faith was deliberately obscured in mainstream media. It's disheartening to see that while she was celebrated for her fiercely independent and countercultural personality, her obituaries overlooked her islamic beliefs and the fact that she practiced her faith as a hijab bearing muslim woman even during her concerts. Could you please provide information about Maulana Rumi's training, his self identification, and the importance of his religious belief in understanding his.
You know, you could also comment on the harm caused when someone's identity is erased.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: That's an excellent way of framing the biography, to think of it as an erasure of Rumi himself.
There's a wonderful article about.
So first of all, for those who want to study the historical Rumi, there's an excellent book by Franklin Lewis, the late Franklin Lewis, a wonderful person, a wonderful friend, who recently passed away. He was at the University of Chicago, who has written really the definitive volume on the historical Rumi. And it's just called Rumi, I think it's called Rumi past and present, and I can't remember the rest. But anyways, it's published with one world and it's excellent, it's big Tome on Rumi, and he's gone through all the sources and even impacts on contemporary culture. But a summary here, I think would be in order. So Rumi is from an area that we know, Khorasan, he's from the eastern Iran, if you want to call it that area, though not part of Iran today, the contemporary Iran. Anyways, he was from Vach, in fact, and he was born in twelve seven. His name was just Muhammad, son of Muhammad, but they had all these alcohol, all these laqabs, so he was given the title Jalaladin. His father was called Baha Odin Walad, or Baha aden Valat.
And actually, to understand Rumi's biography, for the first part of it, you have to understand who Bahadin Balad, his father was, because it was his father who was a star preacher, he was a hanafi preacher, persian preacher. So we have actually preserved Bahadin Valad's sermons, and I've actually been able to, for example, find themes in the masnavi, in Bahadin Valad's sermons.
But there seems to have been a drying up of patronage for Bahadin valet. And as a scholar, as many of us scholars know, we need patrons to keep our scholarship going, to keep his school going. And so he took his family, including Rumi, and they explored different places where they might settle. So they explored, they went to Baghdad, Mecca, probably Mecca for, of course, Hajj Damascus, and they finally found patronage in close to what's malatia in modern day Turkey, Akshar, as they call Akshar, in what is today Turkey, and then eventually moved slightly to what is today Kunya, which is of course, now the center is where you would visit the shrine of Rumi and all that why that's important is this tells us a lot about who Rumi was. Initially, Rumi was like his father, a hanafi preacher. He took over his father's college, the college that he established there. He also inherited his father's followers. So while his father was the head teacher and preacher at that location. Rumi became the head teacher and preacher at that location. And was an important person politically as well in the area.
Now we get to the part of the biography that's been the stuff of legend.
It's probably the most beautiful part of his biography is know he is this sober minded Hanifi preacher.
Who did not engage in sama. So what is sama? Sama is for those who don't know. It's an ecstatic dance or a kind of movement.
That occurs along with the recitation of poetry in the love of God.
So like, for example, the whirling dervishes.
Which come from the mevlevi order, which comes from Rumi.
That is a form of one form, one expression of sama. So he did not engage in that. And he didn't engage in the recitation of poetry and all that. Until a major event unfolded in his life. And that is the encounter with Shamsa Tabrizi, or Shamsadin Tabrizi. So Franklin Lewis has really put forth a lot of effort into tracing who is this mysterious tabriz. It seems like he actually just was someone from Tabriz. So he actually came from Tabriz to Kunya.
But the meeting between the two. There's so many stories about it, about what actually happened.
I have to pick my favorite since we're pressed for.
So. Okay, well, one of my favorite versions of their first encounter. So Rumi is sitting somewhere. He's sitting in his little room with an open door. And all these books surrounding him.
And this disheveled man, who really looks illiterate and looks like he doesn't belong. Comes up to him and know, what is this? Pointing to all the books. And Rumi says, you wouldn't understand.
And then the man points to the books and they all catch on fire. And then Rumi says, what is this? And Shams says, well, you wouldn't understand.
There's so many versions of this. It's a really great. I highly suggest you read the stories of Rumi and Shams's encounter. But whatever it was, it was life changing.
And as the two got to know each other, they learned from each other. They taught each other. And they became absorbed with each other.
And Rumi began to change. He began to engage in the recitation of poetry. He began to engage in Sama.
Legend has it that his students were distraught.
I always look at it like this. I always think about the fact that if you're in any kind of very closed community. Or any kind of tight knit community. As a spiritual community tends to be as they were.
And your leader starts to ignore you, starts to seem to be changing. And spending less time with you.
Feelings such as jealousy can crop up. And that's what legend says happened.
They conspired against Shemps. So Shams leaves two times.
One time he leaves, and Rumi can't handle it. He writes all this poetry, how he needs Shemps to come back. And it works beautifully because Shemps means sun. So in all the poetry, it's all about the sun darkening and the sun disappearing. And where's the sun? And he sends his son to his own biological son. To go bring Shams back.
Shams comes back one time and then disappears for good. Legend has it that he was murdered. But Franklin Lewis has done away with that legend. It seems that he probably just went back to Tabriz.
So when Shams is gone for good.
Rumi finds another person to make his spiritual intimate. By the name of Salahideen Faridoon Zakub.
Zakub means like a goldsmith. So he was probably among the craftsmen. What was happening in that time was that there was a kind of blending of Sufism and guilds and craftsmen. That's really exciting. It's saying thing to talk about later, maybe.
And for ten years, Rumi made him his deputy, his successor, his spiritual compliment.
But then Zakub passed away. And that's when Rumi became a spiritual intimate. And forged another very close friendship. With a man named Hossamuddin Chelabi. Chelabi was the son of an important figure in the local. In Kunya's Ahi order. Which is an expression of futua. Another something we could talk about later. But very important spiritual movement. Parallel to Sufism. And at times related to Sufism, Futua. And so anyways, I'm sorry, I'm wrapping it up. But this is the end of the story of the life of Rumi. As far as we, you know. Chalabi helps expand those who are under Rumi's tutelage. And in Rumi's purview as a spiritual leader. Because he brings in people from the Ahi order, from his own order.
But the other important thing is that Chelabi was the one who encouraged Rumi to write the massive 25,000 double line. So it's basically. I mean, it's like 25,000 couplets. Narrative poetry. The Mesnavi. The Mesnaviya Matanavi. Which is what we're really talking about today. The long narrative poem. Now, before that, Rumi had written a lot of poetry. But it was very often, as I said, improvised, extemporaneous.
There's shorter.
So there's shorter poems on the theme. Usually of love or something like that.
But this was a planned poem. This was a poem that he would write in advance. And Chelsea was an important part in that.
Chelsea doesn't make it throughout the. He doesn't live till the very end. But as far as I remember.
Oh, no, Chalabi does live. Actually. No, I'm sorry. Chalabi does live. But then soon after, when he passes away.
And Rumi has passed away. Rumi's son takes over the order. And that's when you start to really get with Rumi's son. You start to get sultan valat. You start to get the development of the Mevlevi order as an actual Sufi order.
So that's the biography of Rumi.
If I have a second, I could comment on the second part of your question.
[00:26:07] Speaker A: Sure. I mean, please.
[00:26:10] Speaker B: Okay. I don't want to take too long.
Just about erasure.
Well, I think you have to ask yourself the question. Who speaks on behalf of Islam nowadays?
The stereotypical muslim leader. If you're associating Islam with huge masjids and things like that. I mean, there really isn't one.
Islam is so diverse that you can't say that.
But I would say in Rumi's time, one type of muslim leader was the Hanafi. Sorry, persian preacher, like his father. What I'm saying is that not only is Rumi Muslim, Rumi is a leader. He's a community leader for Muslims. He's a scholar and a teacher. Yeah, he's a mufasser. The Masnavi is really an exegesis of the Quran, is what it's called. It's called the Quran in Pathavi, in Persian.
So I would think of Rumi almost as you would think of what we would call today an imam.
He's that Muslim, right? Yeah. And people have been uninterested in that element of his life, I think. Because they don't understand Islam as containing a lot of these ideas. And that's the real shame of it.
[00:27:45] Speaker A: I really love how you ended that. And it's sort of really interesting to me know. When we tend to think of someone as important as Maulana Rumi. We forget that no man is an island. There was a father who nurtured this. And then there were friends and family and colleagues who came into place who then further sort of helped nurture his spirit, his skill, his art. And it's too sad that we didn't hear of any woman that was his sort of partner in all of this. But, I mean, that's not to say that a woman was not that the mother, the wife, the daughter might not have been. It's just hard to recover that from what we have as textual evidence. So now, with this background that the audience, the listeners already have, let's look at a case study and let's look more closely at virtue ethics in Moulana Rumi's poetry. Could we discuss the story of the tale of the Sufi and the judge from your first book, the Polished Mirror? Storytelling and the pursuit of virtue in islamic philosophy and Sufism. Could you start by telling the audience a story? And then maybe the relationship between law and ethics and Moulana Rumi's writing? And then I have another question about that story. Once you just tell us the story.
[00:29:02] Speaker B: Okay, I'll tell you the story. I'll do a quick version.
Before I tell the story, I need to tell the audience, who hasn't read the masnavi.
The way stories work in the masnavi is. This is a bad metaphor, but it'll work for now. Sort of think of like russian nesting dolls type thing, right?
So Rumi will open up a story, okay? And then within that story, open up either another story or some small point. Maybe a discussion of a hadith or discussion of a verse of the Quran. And then he'll have to close that one. He'll close the other one. And then he'll come back to the main one. Okay, so in the masnavi, there are small stories and there are big stories.
That is to say, there are sometimes small stories that are contained within other stories. And then there's stories that contain other stories. Okay? The story of the Sufi and the judge is a big story. It's a story that contains other episodes and things in it. It's one of the major accounts. And it's in the end. It's toward the end of the masnavi. It's in the 6th death there. The 6th book of six.
Okay, so the short version sounds good. Once upon a time, there was a sick man.
And as was the custom at that time, the doctor comes to his house, visits him. Now, the doctor realizes that this man is going to die. He's that sick. But doesn't want to expedite his death by. For lack of, as the youngsters say, freaking him out. He doesn't want to scare him.
He wants him to enjoy the end of his life. And so the doctor gives him. He says, what you need. The only thing that will make you better. Is that whenever you have any impulse. Anything you want to do, do it right.
Now. The sick man takes this very literally. He feels like he has to do absolutely any impulse that comes to him. That anything he wants to do, he has to do at that moment.
So he tells the doctor, go. And then he decides. He has the impulse to take a walk by the riverbank. He's walking by the riverbank and he sees a Sufi. The Sufi is making wudu the abolition. Where it involves washing for prayer and for purity. For ritual purity. He's washing. And the sick man sees the Sufi washing. And has an impulse to slap him really hard on the back of the neck.
So now, remember, the sick man feels like he has to do whatever impulse comes to him. So he slaps the Sufi hard on the back of the neck. Now, the Sufi is so enraged by this. The way that Rumi describes it. He says that the Sufi has this urge to rip out all of the mustache hairs of the sick man. But the Sufi knows better than to do this. He knows that if he were to do something. And the sick man were to die. He would be liable. And he might be punished or even executed. So instead, he drags the sick man to the judge. And he demands that the judge give him his due. Which for the Sufi is one of two things. Either because the Sufi knows his law pretty well.
Either the sick man has to be paraded around the city. And embarrassed by being put on a donkey and carried around town. Or an equal strike. He has to be struck the way that the Sufi himself was struck. Now, the judge looks at the situation. He looks at the sick man. And he determines that the man is too ill to be able to tolerate a strike. And he asks him, he says, well, how much money do you have? He asks the sick man, how much money do you have? And says, I have no more than six durhams to my name.
He says, you're going to need some of that to live. You have to buy food and all that. So he determines that his judgment is that the sick man give the Sufi half, three durhams. And that's the end of it.
The Sufi is enraged. He feels that justice has not been done. And he brings evidence to that effect. But the sick man's happy. Because he realizes how easy it is. To slap someone in the back of the neck. And have a light sentence. So now he has the urge to slap the judge. He slaps the judge and he says, you know what? Here, you can take my other three durhams. I don't need any money, because I've been cured. Now that I've slapped the judge, I've been cured. So he gives away his money, he leaves. And then what ensues is this really fascinating discussion. Between the Sufi and the judge. Where the Sufi tries to understand the judge's position.
And the judge is explaining to him the nature of human suffering. Based on the fact that he himself was slapped. And while it bothered him, he says, deep down, I wasn't moved. And that's really the end of the story. So that's the crux of the narrative.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: Okay, so the story obviously is fascinating. And I loved how you explained the whole russian doll situation in the Mustnavi. I think that's a really helpful sort of thing for the audience to know. But I was especially interested in the role that compassion plays in this story. And the role that it plays. Compassion, meaning, plays in social justice.
With the lasting impact of enlightenment era. Which has elevated rationality. To the highest echelons among intellectual faculties.
The incorporation of compassion within the narrative of the Sufi and the judge. Signifies crucial insights. Into the boundaries of rationality. And it underscores the necessity for additional virtues.
Such as compassion. Within the realm of legal proceedings. So, can you tell us about the role that compassion played?
[00:35:11] Speaker B: Yes, it's a great question. What interested me in the story was exactly this element of. If you want to call it compassion. But just the fact that we are seeing islamic law in action in this story, right? So Rumi is telling a story to his contemporaries. And to them. This must seem the way judges either do practice or should practice, right?
And if you think about it, it's very different from even the phrase islamic law, right? Because islamic quote, unquote law or sharia. Is epitomized in the story by the Sufi. The Sufi is coming at him with what he knows from the books. In the books, when a person hits you this. And there is no leeway, there is no maneuvering, there is nothing to it. But the Sufi isn't a judge. In fact, the Sufi isn't a very good Sufi, really, by the way. Because he's supposed to practice what's called fatua futua, young manliness. Javon Mardi, as it's called. In Persian, it involves a lot of virtues. But one of them is to be forgiving and overlook when other people harm you. To let it go, not hold things in.
Instead of showing fatua, the Sufi is obsessed with what we could call legalism, in a way now. But if you look at the actual representation of God's law or God's commands, that's the judge. And how does the judge look at the situation? How does he deal with the situation? He does it on a very personal level.
He wants to know who this man is, the accused. Not just what happened, but okay, you're guilty. But who are you? What made you do this? What can you tolerate in terms of a punishment? If I strike you, will you be okay? If I take your money, will you be okay? You see the care. He's a caring person. He's invested. And it's not the kind of caring. Because this is getting to something I'm working on now. This topic of. I'm working on empathy. It's not something that we would call empathy or anything like that. Because he's not putting it.
He's managing to remain distant.
And you're right. So compassion is an incredibly important part. But another important part of this is the recognition in the story. That everybody has a perspective that should be valued. So there's no figure in the story who you'd say is completely right or wrong. You can understand the sick man's actions. When you understand that the poor man thinks his life is on the line here. By doing these actions right. He's literal and he's a little bit unwise and unintelligent, fine. But you can understand his perspective. The Sufi. You can completely understand his perspective. The man was just minding his own business and he gets hit.
It's easy to say that someone should be forgiving. But until you're in that position where you've been just for no reason, assaulted.
It's not the same thing.
And then you have the judge. And the judge, in a way, he's us. But then what Rumi does, which is brilliant, is he brings him into the story by having him be slapped.
Goes from. Yeah, he goes from being this objective observer. To being just dragged into all the affairs. And that's what I point to when it comes to Rumi's ethics. Where I say there's a kind of narrative ethics going on in the story. Which is an ethics that considers everyone's particular situation. Right? It meets people where they are. And there's also in the story I'll end on this there's also in the story a hint of what you're going to see a lot more of in later literature. With the rise of the novel, I argue a kind of polyphony, as Bhartin called it. The blending of different perspectives. Right? So that you realize that the world we live in is know. You have your experience, and I have my experience, and we come together. And the great author can represent all of them together without imposing her or his own voice. Now, that's the part that's missing. Rumi does impose his own voice at the end. I mean, he does come and tell us in a way. But it's often hard to tell where Rumi is in the story sometimes.
Is he the judge? Is this the voice of the judge, or is this the voice of Rumi? It's not always clear, by the way. But, yeah, I think it's very complex. And to me, it's a beautiful example of the way virtue ethics and courtroom drama and islamic law were practiced in this time.
[00:40:25] Speaker A: I mean, again, it goes back to what we started out speaking, which is that Rumi's voice, I suppose, is there because he is using storytelling for a particular purpose. So therefore, I guess at some point, he has to insert his voice. So now let's just move to my last question. And I think this also might be helpful for the listeners to sort of understand sufi poetry. Your first book is called the Polished Mirror. Could you help us understand the use of the term and its significance and connect it back to Molana, Rumi and the mastavi?
[00:41:03] Speaker B: Happily.
So I came upon the title the polished mirror later in writing the book.
And when I came, I came upon it as a way of describing what the ten different authors. There's more than ten. There's like twelve different authors in ten chapters.
What brought them all together? So the book is divided into two halves.
Philosophy and Sufism. Right? It deals with islamic virtue ethics from these two angles, from the Falsafa tradition that starts with the translation of greek texts into Arabic. And not just Greek, from Sanskrit and Persian. All kinds of things were making their way into Arabic.
So the philosophical or Falsifa tradition.
And on the other hand, Sufism, the science called elmata saw that also developed in this time period that I'm interested in. And what I began to realize is that when it came to ethics, virtue ethics, the cultivation of good character traits and human perfection, achieving human perfection, what they shared was this image of the mirror, which is probably best told by Ghazali. So Abu Hamid Khazali has this story. I probably don't have time to get in the story, but the point of the story is that you achieve virtue not by acquiring good traits or you achieve knowledge, in his version of knowledge, not by acquiring bits of knowledge, but by tearing things down and getting rid of what you don't need, right? By cleaning the heart. By polishing the heart and then reflecting the ultimate, reflecting the attributes of God. Right now, in the philosophical tradition, it's a bit different. The reflection that happens is a reflection between is when the human rational soul can reflect the active intellect. But still, this idea of being reflective and passive and receptive, right? And even the image of the mirror itself is repeated so often that it brought everything together for me. And I began to realize how much and how often philosophers were borrowing from Sufism and from Sufis, or even in some ways having dual affiliations, working on Falsifafa and Tisawaf, working on both sometimes. And then, on the other hand, how much Sufis were working with ethics from the philosophical tradition. There was a lot of intermingling going on, so that's what led to the title of the polish mirror.
[00:44:02] Speaker A: Fascinating.
Thank you so much, Cyrus. And thank you for speaking with Nidhan's History speaks podcast. Personally, I'm appreciative of the opportunity to engage in this conversation with you. I'm confident that the audience will derive both enjoyment and significant insights from our discussion. Thank you again.
[00:44:21] Speaker B: Thank you.
