Oct 11, 2007 04:30 AM
Yilmaz Alimoglu

In 1207, a great mystic, saint and poet was born in Afghanistan. Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi – or just Rumi in North America – is the world's best-selling poet eight centuries after he walked the Earth. Preceding both Gutenberg and Shakespeare, he has been reborn in the age of mass printing. Rumi is a literary survivor.

This year marks Rumi's 800th anniversary. UNESCO named 2007 the International Year of Rumi and issued a medal in his name to commemorate his 800th anniversary as a voice in human life.

Many communities in the GTA and throughout Canada have been celebrating Rumi's life by organizing a variety of concerts and programs. One of the most notable celebrations was an event hosted by the Jerrahi Sufi Order of Canada and organized by Tevfik Aydoner at the Toronto Arts Centre in March. Ahmet Ozhan (the Elvis Presley of Turkey) performed at this event, as well as in Ottawa and many other cities in North America.

Eight hundred years after it was written, Rumi's poetry is still powerful enough to draw together people of different cultures.

Rumi is a publishing phenomenon, with more than half a million copies of his books sold in North America. There's a current of feeling so intense in Rumi's child-like simplicity that it becomes an infectious optimism. Rumi looks at the world around him and tries to correct his own behaviour by considering the good and bad acts of others like a mirror.

Rumi saw love as the foundation of all reality, and though his words are simple, the thoughts they provoke can support lifetimes of contemplation: "With passion pray. With passion work. With passion make love. With passion eat and drink and dance and play. Why look like a dead fish in this ocean of God?" This was Rumi's magic, his experience of love as a serious force in the world, not fancy or folly.

A devout Muslim, Rumi found himself drawn to the deep inner life of Sufism. A Sufi is part monk, part poet, part wanderer, and fully devoted in heart and practice to the precepts of unconditional love. It's a high ideal, and Rumi, if his poetry is any indication, fulfilled it. It is important to understand Rumi, especially these days because he teaches us that religious experience is about love, not hating one another. Rumi basically teaches us that we can be different from each other but we can still live in peace and harmony. It is not our job to judge each other.

Rumi was something of a wanderer, travelling extensively in the Middle East, always practising his devotions, and always taking counsel with the wise. It was his meeting with the dervish Shams-e Tabrizi on a November day in 1244 that transformed his life completely. Shams had travelled throughout the Middle East searching and praying for someone who could "endure my company" and accepted Rumi to be his student.

Everywhere Rumi went he taught and was taught, and his poetry brilliantly captures the humility and self-honesty required to realize the constant presence of love, a love often evoked as an affair with the invisible, the natural, an omnipresent reality curtailed only by looking away.

Let Rumi have the last word:

"O incomparable giver of life, cut reason loose at last!

Let it wander grey-eyed from vanity to vanity.

Shatter open my skull, pour in it the wine of madness!

Let me be mad, as you; mad with you, with us.

Beyond the sanity of fools is a burning desert

Where your sun is whirling in every atom:

Beloved, drag me there, let me roast in perfection!"