Who Rumi was
Jalal al-Din Rumi was born in 1207 and died in 1273 in Konya, in what is now Turkey. He wrote in Persian. He was a Muslim scholar and a teacher of law, from a family of religious teachers.
In 1244 he met a wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, and his life turned around that friendship. The poems came after. There are two great bodies of them: the Masnavi, a long teaching poem in six books, and the Divan-e Shams, thousands of shorter poems, many signed with his friend’s name.
How the English Rumi was made
Scholars put Rumi into English first. R. A. Nicholson spent years on a literal translation of the whole Masnavi, published between 1926 and 1934. A. J. Arberry did the same for hundreds of the shorter poems.
From the 1970s, the American poet Coleman Barks reworked those into free, modern verse. He didn’t read Persian. His books sold widely, and most of the Rumi on our feeds is his, or copies his sound.
Some of his poems stay close. Others change what the poem is about. The change we found again and again is the religion. Rumi’s poems speak to God, quote the Quran and tell stories of the prophets. In the popular English, much of that is gone.
The lines, checked
For each line: where it comes from, what a literal translation by a named scholar says, and what changed on the way.
“This being human is a guest house.”
Rumi, reworked- Where it’s from
- Masnavi, Book 5, verses 3644 to 3684. Read the verse at masnavi.net.
- What the source says
- Nicholson (1934) opens:
This body, O youth, is a guest-house
. A new guest comes running in every morning, and Rumi says the guests come from the invisible world. - What changed
- The body became “being human”, and the guests lost where they come from. The section is headed with Abraham as the host, and a prayer to God follows a few verses on.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.”
Rumi, reworked- Where it’s from
- A quatrain, number 395 in Foruzanfar’s edition of the Divan-e Shams.
- What the source says
- Gamard and Farhadi (2008):
Beyond Islam and unbelief there is a ‘desert plain.’
Gamard’s note. - What changed
- “Islam and unbelief” became “wrongdoing and rightdoing”. Coleman Barks, whose version this is, was quoted in 2002 saying
I took the Islam out of it.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
Rumi, reworked- Where it’s from
- Probably Masnavi, Book 1, verses 3223 to 3227. Read the verse at masnavi.net. This is our own match; no scholar we found makes the link.
- What the source says
- Nicholson (1926):
your wound is the darkness of your (spiritual) states
. The light is the ray of a plaster put on the wound by a spiritual teacher, and Rumi adds that the healing does not come from us. - What changed
- In Rumi the light comes from outside, through someone who tends the wound. The popular line has it come from the wound itself.
“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
Rumi, reworked- Where it’s from
- Divan-e Shams, ghazal 598 in Foruzanfar’s edition; Arberry’s number 74. Arberry’s translation, archive copy.
- What the source says
- Arberry opens the line
Traveller, have done with legends
, and it ends on a phrase from the Quran (94:1), which Arberry marks in a note. - What changed
- “Have done with legends” became “unfold your own myth”. The Quran phrase stays in the English, but nothing says it is one.
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
Close to Rumi- Where it’s from
- Masnavi, Book 4, verse 1407, with a near twin at Book 3, verse 1146. Read the verse at masnavi.net.
- What the source says
- Nicholson (1930):
Sell intelligence and buy bewilderment: intelligence is opinion, while bewilderment is (immediate) vision.
- What changed
- Very little in the line itself. The next verse, usually left off, asks the reader to give up their understanding before the Prophet Muhammad.
“If anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look… Like this.”
Rumi, reworked- Where it’s from
- Divan-e Shams, ghazal 1826 in Foruzanfar’s edition.
- What the source says
- Arberry:
Whoever asks you about the Houris, show (your) face (and say) ‘Like this.’
Gamard’s note. - What changed
- The Houris, the companions promised in the Quran’s paradise, became sexual wanting.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Someone else’s- Where it’s from
- A Course in Miracles, chapter 16, section IV, written by Helen Schucman in the United States before 1972.
- What the source says
- It is not in Rumi. Ibrahim Gamard, a translator of Rumi from Persian, names the source.
- What changed
- The whole attribution.
“I go into the Muslim mosque and the Jewish synagogue and the Christian church and I see one altar.”
Someone else’s- Where it’s from
- Written in German in 1819 by Friedrich Rückert, a poet writing in the style of Rumi. Gamard’s note.
- What the source says
- Rückert’s poem was put into English in 1903 and later printed as Rumi in popular collections.
- What changed
- The whole attribution.
“Come, come, whoever you are.”
Someone else’s- Where it’s from
- Most likely by Abu Sa’id ibn Abi’l-Khayr, a Persian poet who died in 1049, more than a century before Rumi was born. Gamard’s note.
- What the source says
- It reached English as Rumi through a 1976 book by Reshad Feild, and from there into a hymnbook.
- What changed
- The whole attribution.
“Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen.”
Not in the manuscripts- Where it’s from
- The poem is not in Foruzanfar’s critical edition of the Divan. Gamard’s note.
- What the source says
- Nicholson translated an older version in 1898 and said himself that it was not in his manuscripts. That version names Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian and Muslim.
- What changed
- Hindu, Buddhist, sufi and zen were added in the popular English version.
“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
No source found- Where it’s from
- Not in the Masnavi, and not in the best-known English collections.
- What the source says
- A check by the US news site Jezebel found it in none of them, and the Rumi scholar Franklin Lewis could not place it. The report, reprinted.
- What changed
- We found no Persian behind it.
“What you seek is seeking you.”
No source found- Where it’s from
- We could not find it in any scholarly translation or concordance.
- What the source says
- Copies online give no poem number.
- What changed
- Unknown. If someone has the poem number, we’d like to read it.
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
No source found- Where it’s from
- We could not find it in any scholarly translation or concordance.
- What the source says
- It turns up only in quote collections, with no poem named.
- What changed
- Unknown.
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
No source found- Where it’s from
- We could not find it in any scholarly translation or concordance.
- What the source says
- It turns up only in quote collections, with no poem named.
- What changed
- Unknown.
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.”
No source found- Where it’s from
- It isn’t in Gamard’s concordance of Rumi’s quatrains, which covers 48 English books, every Barks quatrain included.
- What the source says
- Copies online give no poem number, and the wording varies.
- What changed
- Unknown.
Beyond the research
“Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations— Saying, ‘Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament hath caused man and woman to moan.’”
Rumi, Masnavi, Book 1, verses 1 to 2, trans. R. A. Nicholson (1926)
These are the first lines of the Masnavi. A reed is cut from its bed and made into a flute, and every sound it makes is about where it came from. Many of the lines above were cut from their bed too.
How we checked
For every line we looked for a poem number: a book and verse in Nicholson’s Masnavi, or a poem number in Foruzanfar’s edition of the Divan, the standard Persian text. Then we read a literal translation by a named scholar and set the two side by side.
We don’t read Persian ourselves. We relied on Nicholson, Arberry, and on Ibrahim Gamard, a translator of Rumi who keeps a record of popular English versions matched to the Persian. Where a match is our own, we say so.
When no poem number turned up, we say we found no source. That is weaker than saying a line is fake, and we keep the two apart. Anyone with a poem number for one of those lines can send it to us, and we’ll check it and change this page.
A question to carry
Whose words have I been carrying as Rumi’s?
Questions
Are Coleman Barks’s Rumi poems real Rumi?
Most of them start from a real poem. Barks didn’t work from the Persian: he rewrote earlier literal English translations, by A. J. Arberry, R. A. Nicholson and John Moyne among others, into free American verse. Some lines stay close. Others change what the poem is about, most often by taking out its references to Islam and the Quran.
Which translation of Rumi is closest to the Persian?
For the Masnavi, R. A. Nicholson’s literal translation (1926 to 1934). For the shorter poems, A. J. Arberry, and Ibrahim Gamard with Rawan Farhadi for the quatrains. Their English is plainer and sometimes old-fashioned. That is the cost of staying close.
Was Rumi a Muslim?
Yes. Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207 to 1273) was a Muslim scholar, jurist and Sufi teacher in Konya, in what is now Turkey. His poems are full of the Quran and the Prophet’s life, which is much of what goes missing in the popular English.
Is “What you seek is seeking you” by Rumi?
We couldn’t find it in any scholarly translation or concordance, and copies online give no poem number. That doesn’t prove Rumi never said anything like it. It means nobody quoting it has shown where it comes from.
Is “Come, come, whoever you are” by Rumi?
Scholars attribute that quatrain to Abu Sa’id ibn Abi’l-Khayr, a Persian poet who died in 1049, more than a century before Rumi was born.
Sources. Rumi, The Mathnawí of Jalálu’ddín Rúmí, ed. and trans. R. A. Nicholson, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial New Series IV (London: Luzac, 1925 to 1934). Translation of Books 1 and 2, 1926; Books 3 and 4, 1930; Books 5 and 6, 1934. Verse by verse, with the Persian, at masnavi.net.
A. J. Arberry, Mystical Poems of Rumi (University of Chicago Press). Archive copy.
Ibrahim Gamard and A. G. Rawan Farhadi, The Quatrains of Rumi (2008).
Ibrahim Gamard, Corrections of popular versions and Three fake Rumi verses, dar-al-masnavi.org.
Rozina Ali, “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi”, The New Yorker, January 2017.
Helen Schucman, A Course in Miracles, Text, chapter 16, section IV.
This page is our reading of the scholars above. It will change when they, or our readers, show us something we missed.