Piety and Poetry: The Role of the Senses in the Pursuit of the Beloved
Piety and Poetry: The Role of the Senses in the Pursuit of the Beloved
Rumi’s approach to liberation mirrors that of the Prophet, which is unsurprising as he (pbuh) was the well from which what we now call Sufism drew its template for piety. The eighth chapter of Ernst’s Teachings of Sufism describes an encounter with an attendant of his. When Rumi would hear that there was nothing to eat in the kitchen, “the Master would become expansive, and gives thanks saying ‘Praise be to God, for our house today is like the Messenger Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace” (Ernst 174) and would liken his kitchen to Pharoah’s upon hearing that it was ready. This gives some clear insight into his personal ethics, he considered poverty, or more specifically a lack of attachment to the material world, to be the way of the Prophet, and the way of the Prophet was to be his way back to the Beloved. In this class we have seen many examples of poets exploring the divine through the senses, music and wine and the ecstasies of lovers, but there are also those who seek the divine in the deprivation of these senses. Rumi in particular seems to be geared towards this orientation, “I counsel you to be aware of God both secretly and in public; to have little food, little sleep, and little speech” (177). Here, he equates these physical austerities with a consciousness of God. However, there are many dimensions to Rumi’s poetry, and paradoxically Rumi also wrote of wine in Bark’s translation of the poem The Many Wines, “God has given us a dark wine so potent that, drinking it, we leave the two worlds… God has put into the form of hashish a power to deliver the taster from self-consciousness” (Barks 6). He seems to contradict his advice to his own disciples here. How can it be consciousness of God flows not only from austerity and concentration but also from the abandonment of both? I will venture that Rumi is not simply blundering into self contradiction but is speaking with different voices for different occasions. Surely, he would adopt different rhetorical strategies for engaging with his disciples than for composing verse. He writes in the same poem, “there are thousands of wines that can take over our minds. Don’t think all ecstasies are the same!” (6) He speaks of thousands of wines here, he doesn’t seem to be referring to that one very specific elixir of fermented grapes. He refers to it as intoxication, but warns against worldly attachments, there is room then to infer that he’s talking of divine intoxication. Though he likens these states to sleep and to wine and to hashish, he warns against the misuse of the senses and worldly attachment. This reminds me of the class discussion on music. We discovered that Sufi masters recommend the use of music in the pursuit of God but contraindicate listening to it without taqwa. Rather than contradicting one another completely, these two rhetorical modes of Rumi’s may be reconciled by understanding contemporary views of the proper and improper orientations towards physical reality.
Rumi, Jalal al-Din, and Coleman Barks. The Essential Rumi. HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.
Ernst, Carl W. Teachings of Sufism. Shambhala, 1999.
