Rumi Was A Therapist The 800 Year Old Psychology The West Forgot

TITLE: Rumi Was a Therapist: The 800-Year-Old Psychology the West Forgot | Dr. Francesca CHANNEL: Blogging Theology DATE: 2026-03-22 URL: https://youtu.be/QGHVEyQ7-ZM ---TRANSCRIPT--- Hello everyone and welcome to Blogging Theology. And today I’m delighted to be joined again by Dr. Francesco Bocker. You’re most welcome. As-salamu alaykum. Wa alaykumu s-salam. Great to see you again with those fantastic pictures in the background. What an amazing office you have. But uh Thank you, Paul. It’s always a pleasure to be here.

So for those who don’t know Dr. Francesca, she holds a master’s in neurocognitive psychology and a PhD in systemic neuroscience, both from the University of Munich as well as a diploma in Islamic psychology from the Cambridge Muslim College. And she’s also a visiting lecturer at the Blogging Theology Academy where she teaches the incredibly successful course on Islamic psychology.

Now Dr. Francesca also holds the only Mesnevian in Italy. We’ll come to that what that means in a second. Mesnevian is an ancient Ottoman tradition which now survives in the Balkans of reading Jalaluddin Rumi’s six-volume poem and commenting on it in a psychological, spiritual, and uplifting way. It’s an indigenous form of psychoeducation which can now which until now has been completely overlooked in the English-speaking world.

So how can commenting on poetry be relevant to mental health?

Yes, thank you, Paul, for the introduction. And I hope I will be able to build a case for why commenting poetry, and this is just going to be one of the different ways in which Muslims used to be able to take care of their mental health. Because nowadays we have come to think of mental health as something that arrives in a very specific format, right? It’s something you do once a week, you pay the therapist one-to-one, and it is the sort of asymmetric professional relationship. You say everything about yourself, the therapist doesn’t say anything except once in a while. And this format is fundamentally very different from what Muslims were doing.

So if we look at how classical Islamic societies tried to cultivate it, we see that there were many avenues. There was the avenue of large families in which it was natural to find the mentor to to which to talk and from which to model your role. And there was also institutionalized avenues. And one of them is the Mesnevihane. And these meetings, absolutely, even though they are poetry commentary meetings, and so we might think about something like an aristocratic tradition of like the British Academy lectures where people ramble about very complex topics and nothing about mental health is achieved at all, right? Just erudition.

But here it was something very different. First of all, it was centered around sohbet or companionship, meaningful companionship. And it is definitely indigenous psychoeducation, meaning that the scholar has to open their heart to deliver the class. And the the same Jalaluddin Rumi used to call this a shop of unity, dukkan-i wahdat, in which like everyone is looking at the same goal. There is not a therapist who’s just getting paid and the client struggling, no. Everybody’s doing exactly the same job.

And instead though of like putting our own individual traumatic experiences in the center, the Mesnevi uses stories. And we are going to discuss how does that happen. And these stories put the truth in the center, right? And also by using stories, and these stories contain for example as characters like parrot, lion, and merchant. So this method bypasses our defense mechanisms because if we imagine like the sheikh wanting to tell someone they’re like mistreating their wife, and if he’s just going to go at them that way, then defense mechanisms are going to jump up. No, but that’s not the truth the whole truth. You don’t know what she does to me and so on and so forth. While the Mesnevi just telling you the story of a rabbit and the lion is going to bypass and get the teaching really land.

Yeah, so that’s that’s quite fascinating actually. So you mentioned the Mesnevihane as an institution. Can you tell us a bit more about what it actually looked like? I mean, where did it happen and who led it and how did people participate in it?

Yes, the Mesnevihane is so unknown in the English-speaking world, it is very astonishing. It was something which existed in many forms in the Ottoman world. The heart of the Mesnevihane is the Mesnevihan, meaning the person, the reader, the one that reads the Mesnevi that has usually a formal certificate to do so, an ijazah basically, that arrives back to Husamuddin Chalabi who was the scribe of Rumi and his own closest companion. And then when Rumi dies in 1273, Husamuddin begins public reading, explaining the Mesnevi, and training the first generation of Mesnevihane, and from there it moved.

And there were many settings in which the Mesnevi was taught in the Ottoman world. There was in the tekke or the lodges where it was central and weekly. And then there were the great imperial mosques, the Suleymaniye for example, for those that know that the Turkey. Incredible place. you you you have been there, right? Yes, you know, lots of times. It’s an extraordinary place. Yeah.

Yes, and even there it was it was a ritual to read the Mesnevi and commenting it. And then there were specific institutions built just for the Mesnevihan for the public. And we have some in the neighborhood of Fatih in Istanbul. And then we have even the sultans, right? The Ottoman sultans used to attend the Mesnevihane, financed institutions. And then we had the sultan’s palace in his own home. He used to attend and listen to this. And then finally the madrasas. So it was part of a person’s education and erudition and learning as well as cultural psychological training.

So the format is actually quite beautiful. It has its own rituality. You have two pedestals, one for the main reader that reads from the Mesnevi and explains and the other for like a backup reader that might correct them if they make mistakes. And it has its own climate, its own vibe really. It’s not dry at all. It’s there is a lot of emotion, a lot of connection, a lot of empathy going on, and a lot of devotion and sincerity. It’s really a beautiful environment that this institution cultivated.

And one thing that really strikes me in doing clinical work on on this side, right, is that in the West the average person never hears in an in an average week anything uplifting. Like this is just not a thing that the Western man has access to. They just listen to like grim, bleak, depressive things or productive things. But this component of something uplifting, deep, with done with companionship and empathy, this is just completely absent from from our world.

So you said this institution survives in the Balkans, which is actually one of the indigenous Caucasian countries or Muslim communities in Europe. So can you tell us more about that?

Yes, and this story is very beautiful because we all know that in 1925 Turkey banned all tasawwuf and all Sufi orders. And so also the Mesnevihane was outlawed in the homeland. But it continued to live in the Balkans and it continues to do so until now, especially in Bosnia. And in Sarajevo there is a long list of authorized Mesnevihans. And in the last century we count about five. And many of them really kept alive not only the tradition of reading, but also the tradition of connecting, of having really a society that comes around week after week and keeps talking about these very important topics and changing therefore the psychology, the connection, the way people live with each other.

And by the way, even in Bosnia, even in the Balkans and in the Ottoman world, Mesnevihan was not only held by the the by the Mevlevi order, but also by many others. It was considered a shared heritage of of spirituality, of poetry, of learning. So this is not something which is just associated with one particular branch, but it was considered a cultural, societal paradigm.

Now before we go any further into the psychology, let’s perhaps discuss what the Mesnevi is itself. For people who may not know it, what is it exactly? And can you give us a sense of its of its scale, of its ambition?

Yes, so it’s a book to start with. It’s a book in six volumes and it’s incomplete, unfortunately. And the full title is Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, which means the rhyming couplets of deep meaning. And this has been dictated by Rumi. Actually, Jalaluddin Rumi wrote many other things. Also this is the one is very important, but the Masnevi is like the later part of his life, his most mature teachings. And the idea is that it was dictated to this Husamuddin starting 1258, finishing 1273. So it’s a very long work. And the whole idea is for it to be an educational inheritance of of Rumi.

And when we read it and we’re like, okay, this is poetry, we imagine like lyrical sort of descriptions of the environment, nothing of that sort. It’s very emotionally dense. It’s very systematic and the structure is of stories within stories. So, you start It’s like Matryoshka, right? You start with one, you enter another and it’s very complicated to to find your way through it. And this is exactly like the human psychology. If you do therapeutic work with people, it’s exactly like that, right? You start talking about their school experience and then you move into their family and then you move into their current problem. But everything is keeps open and if you’re a very skilled therapist, you’re able to then close each story and provide healing. The same is the Masnavi.

And also the books have pairing and mirroring in themes, like many works of the classical Islamic world. For example, the right has this sort of mirrors composition in it. Well, the Masnavi does have that too. So, for example, we have book one and two about diagnosing the nafs. So, what about your ego? How to understand your ego? Book three and four, reason and knowledge. Are we intellectual? Are we experiential? How to deal with this? And then we have book five and six about dissolving the ego. How to actually stop this voice that never leaves us alone. So, this is really an arc of maturation that is usually finished within years because I’ve been doing this for three years. I’m still half book one, right? In my circle. So, it takes a very long time and that’s also part of the virtue of this.

Amazing. Now, there’s a famous epithet I’ve come across when describing this work. It’s called the Quran in Persian. The Quran in Persian. Is this really justified?

Yes, and they know that people get really mad about this, but I would like to explain what what this means. This means that the content of the Masnavi is trying to explain the contents of the Quran to a Persian audience. So, it’s not like just a commentary. It’s not just a tafsir. It is much more. It’s trying to translate what is in the Quran and what Rumi understood of it for a whole culture, for a whole spirit. And then I think eventually he was also able to benefit many more than than the Persians, right? With with his with his wisdom.

And Rumi himself when he was writing this, he said that he wanted to put in it the roots of the roots of the roots of religion. So, the idea is that this is so infused with Quran. There is 528 direct quotes of the Quran and about 2,000 indirect quotes of the Quran in it. And it’s fundamental when one does the Masnavi Han to bring this to light so the people can then back when they’re reading the Quran, remember, oh, this also relates to this. So, also the Quran becomes a very alive book because for many people, especially in the West, unfortunately, the meanings of the Quran they’re not very clear to them, especially the inward meanings are not very clear. So, again, the Masnavi is related to the Quran, but it is not a tafsir.

It’s taking the themes the and for example, we have a lot of stories about Musa, Ibrahim, Yusuf and creation and so on and then they’re become drama dramatized. So, as great theater can do as great poetry, great art can do, which are ways in which Islam arrived in many places. For example, we have also like in Indonesia, right? With the shadow theater. That was a way for people to know Islam and the same way happened with the Masnavi in Persian.

So, let’s look at the the stories themselves. You said that the entire Masnavi is essentially a psychological work. But can you take us into specific stories and show us how they function as therapy? Perhaps we can start at the very beginning of the book in book number one, the the song of the reed.

The song of the reed is r e e d. Yeah. So, the Masnavi starts with this with this song, right? It’s a prelude. Which and it’s so beautiful. I really invite everyone to at least read this part. It’s just a couple pages. There is a flute which is crying in pain. And the reason that the flute the voice of the flute the sound of the flute is so dramatic and it’s heartbreaking because we know how how a flute is made, right? It’s cut from the reed bed and it’s cut from its origin, therefore, and therefore it becomes a lament of separation.

And this is the explanation of the first line of the Masnavi, which is listen to this reed how it complains. It is telling about separations.

And what Rumi does in this in this verses is to tell us what the human soul is in this life. It’s existentially homesick. That’s what our spirit is because the reed is us, right? We have been separated from our origin in in the Quranic terms from being close to God, right? Before embodiment, we we know very well of the day of Alastu and how we we testified in front of Allah Subhana Wa Ta’ala of him being the creator. But now we’re not testifying so much close to him. So, we have that wound inside us of longing and nothing in this dunya can really fulfill can really feel satisfy that longing.

And so, here is the insight that Rumi does not tell us, you know, it’s this is pathological. You have depression, right? It’s just meditate it away or whatever. But he says, no, it’s very purposeful. It’s very useful to suffer, right? This separation is not a symptom that you need to suppress like much of Western psychology does like our insight would be. He says suffering, the crying is our engine that drives us towards returning towards Allah because we feel like we have been separated from him.

So, to him we want to return. And so, also another another example is that the reed when it’s really telling the story of of of its anguish, what does it do? Produce beautiful music and other people’s hearts are touched by the voice of the flute. So, that’s the same of our suffering, right? Of our internal unrest. It can become a voice for beauty, a voice for good. And this is a key point not only of the Masnavi, but of the whole Mevlevi idea. And the whole key of the Mevlevi path, I would say if I were to like really summarize it very fast is that suffering and love have a transformative power.

And the first story then that you encounter after this prelude is about a king and a handmaiden. It’s at the the very beginning because it’s about diagnosing. That’s why the whole the whole poetry is about psychology, right? So, there is a bit about your existential situation and then we’re about diagnostics. And what he says is that if you treat symptoms instead of the root disease, you’re going to fail.

The story is very simple. There’s this king falls in love with a handmaiden. Immediately she becomes really ill and he gets all the finest physicians and they all fail to treat her. And Rumi tells us that they relied with arrogance on their own expertise, on the outward signs and they never said inshallah in their treatment. And then in desperation, this king prays. This physician appears and does something that the others didn’t do. So, he sits with this woman, takes her pulse, asks about her life and she opens up and he figures out that she’s in love.

And then there is a very complicated and I don’t want to spoil it because the conclusion is very strange. But anyway, the point is that she’s love sick. So, she’s sick psychosomatically and the physical treatment would not have worked because the origin was emotional, was spiritual. So, we are here with this with this book being written centuries ago, right? About something that Western medicine did not recognize until the 20th century, right? But the deeper teaching is that it is not about medicine. The deeper teaching is that the physicians represent the empirical approaches. They’re very limited. While the final physician represents spiritual insight. So, Rumi is telling us there are ways in which we suffer that the intellect alone cannot access. So, we need a different type of seeing, a different type of therapy.

And this is exactly the argument that I want to make about the Masnavi Han. That we need specific spaces for that specific type of suffering which definitely would not work in a paid one-to-one weekly session at at a therapist.

One other example, when book three, there is I love this story. It’s a story of a chickpea is the the protagonist and there’s this chickpea which is boiling in a pot. And the chickpea is very angry with the cook because this cook stirs the pot and and he gets hurt, right? He doesn’t like to be cooked. And he’s trying to jump out and every time that he jumps, then the cook pushes him down with the ladle. And the chickpea protests, you know, why are you doing this to me?

And the cook is very tender towards the chickpea. He empathizes so much. And he says, look, little chickpea, I’m not boiling you because you’re hateful to me. No, it’s so that you may get taste and savor so that you can become nutriment and mingle with the vital spirit. And then the cook tells the chickpea, I was also like you. I was fresh from the ground and then I boiled in time and boiled in the body, and these were two fierce boilings. And the cook is not being cruel, but is accompanying through a gruesome process this chickpea. And so the chickpea becomes very happy at this point, and ask the cook, “Please boil me some more, right?”

And there is this beautiful moment of surrender of the chickpea, which is really we can see it in our own life, when our ego stops fighting our transformative processes, and actively consents to it, and all beauty of human growth comes out. Now, in modern psychology, we we say this thing exists as post-traumatic growth. So, the idea that we suffer, yes, but if this is met with the right orientation, it doesn’t leave us like traumatized in the stereotype, right? I’m going to be triggered for life because something bad happened to me. No, it can actually bring us wisdom, strength, resilience, compassion. And Rumi had it so clear. As far this is incredible, but he doesn’t tell it to you saying, “Oh, you you are suffering, please be patient like people tell usually, right?” And nobody likes to hear that. What he says is that he tells you the history of a chickpea, so you laugh, you empathize with the chickpea, and then you’re healed somehow.

Now, you mentioned earlier that the story somehow bypass our defense mechanisms. The story of the parrot and the merchant I think is is a masterclass in this. So, tell us a bit more about that.

Yes, this is a very long story in book one. It has a lot of breaks, a lot of pauses, but I’m going to try to summarize the main points. We have this merchant. The merchant has a beautiful caged parrot, and he loves this parrot so much. And before he’s leaving for India, he asks the parrot what gift would it like, right?

And what happens here is that the parrot says that when you will see all the wild parrots that live in India, please tell them about my condition. Ask them if it is fair that they fly free and I sit in a cage. So, the merchant, who is a good man, keeps his word, and travels to India, finds the wild parrots, tells the message, but as soon as he finishes speaking, one of the Indian parrots falls to the ground dead.

And the merchant is so struck because he he’s a nice man, right? So, he’s like, “Oh my god, what have I done? I said something so horrible, this parrot died.” And so he returns back. And he’s really hoping that his favorite parrot doesn’t ask him anything about the incident. But the parrot does because he’s very curious parrot, doesn’t forget. And so the merchant says, “Yeah, I I told I told them what you asked and and and unfortunately that parrot dies.” And also his parrot immediately dies. And the merchant at this point is is desperate, right? He’s horrified, he’s regretting so much.

But what is happening here is that the Indian parrot actually sent a coded message. And the coded message was, “The way out of the cage is to die. Play dead.” So, when the merchant throws the dead body, what he thinks is the dead body of his own parrot, the parrot flies away. Flies away and earn his freedom, right?

So, psychologically, of course, this is a psychological story. So, the cage is the ego. It’s our attachments, identities, comfortable prisons, whatever. And the teaching is so simple. You will not think your way out. Yeah, the only way is to find a kind of death. Finish it. It’s It has to be over. And this is what in tasawwuf is called fana, right? Annihilation of the self.

And again, this is not a teaching that people will take if you give it directly to them, right? If you tell someone, “You really love your job too much, you have to stop and you have to die for your job, right?” Heavy as a dead thing to you. Nobody will take that advice. They’ll be, “No, this is important to me, whatever.” While if it is encoded in action, in in a demonstration, this works. Like the Indian parrot, that does not explain the story, right? Performs it. And this is exactly how the whole Mathnawi works. The stories do not like explain it, but they perform the transformation.

And this also translates a lot in expectations about therapy because people nowadays they want to go to the therapist to feel good. But what Rumi is telling us, this does not feel good at all for a while until it does. But to arrive to that level of the death, and in classical Islamic spirituality even had like four types, four colors of death, right? It’s a very It’s Die before you die is the saying attributed to Ali ibn Abi Talib and so on. So, this is really pointing to a whole different way to see growth, psychological healing, and what the human adventure is about eventually.

Gosh. Well, can I ask you about the the story of the man who knocked on his friend’s door, as it’s known? It’s It’s a very short story, but it seems to contain the entire teaching of the Mathnawi in very small miniature form. So, what what what’s that about?

Yes, I think that it relates so much to what we were just saying. Again, we’re in book one. There is a man that goes to his friend’s door and knocks. And the friend asks, “Who is there?” And the friend says, “It’s I.” So, the friend says, “Go away. Go away. At such a table there is no place for the raw.”

And so the man goes away, and he spends a year burned by this fire of separation. He’s missing his friend very much, and then he returns and knocks again next year. “Who’s there?” “It is you.” And the friend says, “Since you are me, come in. There is not room for two eyes in one house.”

Now, that’s just it. That’s just the story, but it contains some of the deeper teaching of Rumi and of the Mathnawi in it. Because the word raw here, the kham, is really a technical term. It’s opposite of pukhta, cooked, means spiritually mature.

And Rumi, when he was wanted to say his own autobiography, he says that the result of my life is just this. I was raw, I was cooked, I was burned. So, the metaphor of cooking is really the key for Rumi. So much that in the in the Mevlevi tradition, when you enter the the chilla, the 1,001 days training before becoming a dervish, the person that used to take care of the spiritual education was called as chidede, which is the head cook. The head cook. So, this metaphor of cooking the soul and cooking things, and also service in the kitchen is fundamental to the Mevlevi tradition for the same reason.

So, what’s happening here is that in a year, in in accepting this suffering and in maturing through this suffering, the ego is is dissolved, right? That I that at the beginning was separate and was different, uncooked, became ready.

And in my work as a therapist, such stories are so fundamental because many of the people that I work with are really trapped in this exhausting self-loop. My needs, my rights, my trauma, my identity. And these things are very important, but at some point healing requires a different orientation. Healing requires you to accept, dissolve the boundaries of the ego, and recognize yourself in the other. And there is no way in which you can do this with cognitive behavioral over-explanation. There is this kind of burning, of cooking, which is really needed.

Now, in in the present time in our world, we’re living through what many people call a mental health crisis, record levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and what some scholars call a meaning crisis. How does the Mathnawi tradition speak to these modern problems?

Well, the the Mathnawi spoke to many contemporary problems in in in terms that are sometimes difficult to understand. That’s why, for example, in some circles they believe that like Rumi was misogynist or whatever, but because he spoke to the actual the problem of misogyny in his own time. So, he was someone who would really tackle head-first any problem in his own society.

But let’s start, for example, with loneliness. We’re in the epidemic of loneliness. If I’m not wrong, in the UK you even have a minister for loneliness or something like that, like some specific position. Gosh. Yeah. So, people are nowadays they look connected, but they’re very isolated. And even therapy does not help because you go to the therapist alone, you process pain alone, and you’re not really in any sort of company of of a therapist. Which kind of company is that, right?

But the Mathnawi Khan really tries to target this loneliness structurally. It is a communal gathering. It is a sohbet. It’s not something that just the Mathnawi Khan and you listen on it on YouTube. That’s not the way this works. It’s live It’s a physical gathering. So, you sit down with others, and you all have the same orientation. Already this is very healing because we usually we are at work, right? We might We might be Muslim caring about spirituality, and next to us there’s someone with a completely different idea. Next there is an Islamophobe, then someone and and then you feel scattered all over the place. Well, in the Mathnawi Khan you have the same interest, the same orientation. You listen to the same stories, maybe you’re moved by the same verses.

And something happens that Rumi himself describes that you attain to knowledge by argument. You attain a craft or skill by practice. But if voluntary poverty is your choice, companionship is the way, not hand and tongue. So, he’s saying that you have to find the circle of people to have spiritual growth.

And now to the meaning crisis, we have this philosopher John Vervaeke that says that modern people are disconnected from themselves, each other, the world, and the future. And the Masnavi addresses all of this, right? So, we have seen already in the examples that we talked about. The song of the reed is about being connected to yourself and even to your deepest pain. Um to others is the suhba, right? The companionship that you experience in the Masnavi khana. And then this the idea of polishing your heart, of looking into for these stories reconnects you with the world. And the entire arc of the book prepares you to the afterlife, so connects you with the future. But a hopeful future, right? That is so fundamental. The message of hope, the message of optimism, one of the fundamental Islamic virtues so forgotten nowadays. We’re all about talking about you know, of course there are worse, of course there are horrible things. But we were never supposed to think that the we are doomed. We are doomed. This feeling is is a Muslim feeling actually. We incorporated it from other faiths.

And again, this crisis, loneliness, meaning, nowadays they are medicalized in the Western world. And this is a disaster, right? And as someone who studied neuroscience, this is really a disaster. But the default response to human suffering is prescription, no meaning. But here the classical Islamic model is saying, did you address the heart, right? Does the suffering have a meaning? Is it a sign that you’re searching for your origin? Is it actually helpful? Is it actually good, right? And so the Masnavi helps you really healing spiritually, cognitively, emotionally, at all levels.

So, we’ve got social media and narcissism. What would Rumi say about Instagram and TikTok?

Yeah, well well, Rumi would really say that you’re worshipping the idol of the nafs. And maybe calling it like self-care, right? So, of course this whole culture of self-promotion, being seen, likes, followers, this is nafs al-ammarah. It’s the the ego that commands evil, which is running wild. There is there is this very detrimental role of of social media in which it simultaneously inflates the ego, right? So, the nafs wants wants wants, and it shows bad ways in which to want, right? It normalizes the most evil and harmful ways to want.

And even we arrive to things that are very concerning from a spiritual side. For example, this whole trend of manifesting, manifestation culture, right? This is actually an inversion of the spiritual world. So, it’s not like Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala is disclosing what he has for you, but it’s you with your wanting make creating this into reality. This is so concerning.

So, what Rumi would tell us to do is to work at the root cause, to try to dissolve, kill, cook this ego that wants the attention in the first place. So, uh and we’re back to the story of the man at the door. The story of the man at the door tells us that as long as we’re knocking and saying it’s I, the door stays closed.

Again, another point which is important that we’re going to talk about is how the whole internet culture talks about Rumi, because that is also quite concerning. And I believe that maybe many of the listeners got an idea of Rumi as something completely different.

So, what about the the way that Rumi is presented to us in pop popular Western culture? I know Madonna used to allegedly cite him. We have the Instagram quotes. We have even the Coleman Barks translations, a very famous American translator. But you seem to have very strong feelings about this.

Yes. Yes. Yes. So, I believe that to really understand what Rumi teaches to us as Muslims in the West wherever we are, we have to peel away a lot of layers. And the most concerning layers is this type of translations.

Now, Coleman Barks was a great poet in his own right, but he did not read Persian. He was not a Muslim. He just got He just did what he wanted to do with this with this poetic material of Rumi. So, his translations are more like poetry inspired by Rumi. And everybody’s free to do that, of course. But it’s completely stripping away all the Islamic roots of Rumi’s work, because that’s just not his own experience. So, his Rumi sounds like this Californian life coach, right? You can’t recognize him. You can’t recognize him as someone from Balkh, Afghanistan in in the 12th century, not at all.

And there are many poems that are so famous, and actually the meaning is the opposite. If we take the guest house poem, this is so famous. There are these different emotions that come in and you just have to accept and greet them and so on. This was really not about radical acceptance or whatever Buddhist inspired type of approach to things.

So, if we take it, some people, for example, there is Ibrahim Gamard who is a Mevlevi sheikh and has spoken about how these translations are a problem, and I learned about this through his work. So, he says that actually in this poem Rumi is praying to Allah from protection from the evil of sorrow and the evil that can happen from our states, ahwal, right? But the states, the emotions are something that Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala gives us for a meaning. So, even if they’re painful, they’re there to for us to get close to him. This is very different, right? Than just radically accepting.

And then a lot of cases are actually misattribution. There’s a This problem is very big with Rumi. When I find Rumi’s poems online, I can never many times find the original Persian at all. I can’t so these are actually fake quotes. They’re not real quotes at all. They’ve been made up, attributed to Rumi. Rumi becomes very popular in California. Everyone’s, “Oh, isn’t Rumi amazing?” But it’s not Rumi. It’s a a Western construction with just using the word Rumi attached to it.

Yes, it’s whichever guy, really. For example, there is this quote that I found, like, “I’m not a Christian, not a Jew, nor a Zoroastrian, nor a Muslim.” Like, he never said that. It’s nowhere, right? And many of the most popular these Rumi quotes just nowhere. Then there are some that, yeah, can show his thought, but not his. For example, the famous come whoever you are, even if you’ve broken your repentance 100 times, this is not the house of despair. These are actually words of a later poet which are found in Konya, but they’re not Rumi’s.

But all these things matter because Rumi had the message, and we cannot just copy-paste it and smash it together with any other message and pretend to be healed. Things have to be done coherently, and the reason why the Masnavi khana always happened through this ijaza, through this transmission, is just to preserve the genius of what Rumi had to say. So, especially that if we do this in the West, this copy-paste approach, what we’re losing is actually Islam.

Again, I said that there is hundreds, thousands of quotes of the Quran. Not only that, there are hundreds of quotes from the Hadith, a lot of verses about love of the Prophet and to just strip away and make it just as a general life coach advice. This is very dishonest. So, and it’s part of something wider, which is actually one of the focus of my academic work, which is how the West erased Islam from its own its own history.

And just to show how much Islam is intertwined, I want to read a verse of Rumi about it. He says, “I am the servant of the Quran as long as I live. I am the dust on the path of Muhammad, the chosen one. If anyone interprets my words in any other way, I am deplored by him, and I deplore his words.”

So, I think that makes it quite clear. I I wish Madonna had quoted those words when she allegedly cited Rumi. That would that would scare scare her off.

But so finally, Dr. Francesca, for someone who’s listening to this, who feels stirred, who wants to engage with the Masnavi authentically, and perhaps even experience a Masnevian, what would you tell them?

Yeah, so one can start with reading the translation, not the Coleman Barks one. You have a good one, Paul, right? I do. Here we are. Here we are. It’s the the Masnavi of Rumi, a new English translation with the Persian text and explanatory notes, book one by guy called Alan Williams. Now, this is just book one. Look at this book one. Look at this page. And on the back it’s got some very positive reviews by, you know, actual academics in various universities attesting that this is a faithful and reliable translation, and not a Coleman Barks kind of, you know, or what whatever he did did to it. So, he’s professor of Iranian studies and comparative religion at the University of Manchester here in the UK.

But this is a highly I understand that you you think this is a highly regarded uh as well, Dr. Francesca. Yes, yes, that’s a great translation. There are some others that are good, for example, one by Mojaddedi uh or by Nicholson, but it’s a little bit older style uh and these are great because you’re going to find some a very complex world which is very deep. It’s going to be outside anybody’s comfort zone and that’s the whole point, right?

Rumi’s poetry, especially the Masnavi, is not like the you know, bedside table reading for the evening uh for that No, it’s not that. It’s like medicine, medicine for the soul. And that’s what Rumi wanted to do. He called it the remedy for the hearts and the brightening for the sorrows. So, this is really deep work that one has to do already in in reading it. And the whole idea is uh trying to be changed by these stories.

And the most helpful way to do so is to seek companionships because this is not an individual work. Individuality is not helpful in in dealing with the Masnavi. So, even gathering among friends, because the Masnavi had a very few nowadays in the world, it just gathering with friends, reading it together, commenting it together, this can be really something uh transformative. And try to be in whole this process like little chickpea in in the pot, right? Resisting the urge to jump out, to drop out, and then being transformed.

And I believe that this is really the way that Muslims these and others, inshallah, we will do episodes also in which Muslims managed to maintain their spiritual health and stay strong through indescribable difficulties, the Crusades, the Mongols invasions. You know, very difficult things were going on in the times of Rumi and they stayed strong. So, why don’t we revive also these ways to provide help to the much suffering ummah, not just trying to replicate therapy commercial models of the West.

Gosh, yeah, absolutely right, absolutely right, Dr. Francesca. Uh and of course on Blogging Theology Academy, you uh are running a very successful course on Islamic psychology. Uh if you want to uh find out more about that, go on to the Blogging Theology Academy website, where you can see details of our upcoming courses, uh bloggingtheologyacademy.com, and you can see more about that course and and other courses as well.

So, uh absolutely fascinating, Dr. Francesca. It certainly renewed my interest in in uh Rumi and uh I’ll go go off and read this book by my namesake, Williams, Alan Williams. Um and that’s an interesting point you made at the end there for me. Uh I had assumed this was literature in the first sense, but you’re saying it’s primarily Of course, it is literature in a way, but it’s primarily medicine. It’s medicinal rather than It’s not Shakespeare. It’s not meant to be Shakespeare. It it’s meant to have a a transformative uh purpose and I hadn’t really appreciated that.

Thank you, Paul. Hopefully, it will be a good reading for you. So, uh So, thank you very much. Until next time, assalamualaikum, Dr. Francesca. Wa alaykumu salam.