IF we supposed that Jalaluddin Rumi has been lost in translation (Learning Curve, May 29), the meaning in his corpus remains. He says that Man has a soul, a spirit and a heart (Mathnawi 5: 3342) -- not just the body. Man is not only a material existence.
In studying the disciplines in the Humanities and Social Science, the heart is a window opening to the realm of spirituality and heavenly knowledge. Rumi advises us to liberate ourselves from the world of forms and remove the veil that hinders our vision from seeing reality.
I have referred to Rumi’s story of the blind men and the elephant in some of my writings.
That story reflects much of what was to happen to us now in the modern world beginning with early-modern civilisation in Europe about four centuries later. Then reductionism began to take root, and has since ruled modern epistemology.
The crisis of science and knowledge during the period leading to the European Enlightenment, which the West assumes to have produced indisputable “universal knowledge”, was the result of one of the worst and extreme social conditions to have happened to mankind. Europe then faced an agonising conflict between body and soul.
We find that the Rumi corpus and his system of thought embrace the Human and Social Sciences as in the multitude of disciplines and fields informing us on Philosophy, History, Art, Language and Linguistics, Anthropology and Sociology, among others.
In this sense, there is a veil between the human condition and the truth. For example, students of Philosophy, Literature, Linguistics and Language Studies may learn from Rumi in that “speech that rises from the soul, veils the soul”. Here, Rumi voices the paradox which lies at the heart of his poetry: the inability of words, of language to convey reality.
This also reminds me of the tenets and belief of those residing in schools of communication and media studies. The very belief of the communication academic fraternity that empirically observed words and language convey reality is subverted by the structure of Rumi’s epistemology.
The corpus that Rumi brings challenges the Humanities and Social Sciences. Rumi is the antithesis of modern humanism. But Rumi too was a man who was conscious of his environment -- both at the microcosmic and macrocosmic levels.
Then there was the sacred community, no notion of society comparable to modern society. He observed, analysed and evaluated things and people around him. He made empirical observations of people and things.
Like the savants in early modern Europe, Rumi was shaped by the language around him. He was integral to his society. I would not want to describe Rumi as an artist, a philosopher, a sociologist or an anthropologist. But unlike that of the modern man, Rumi was all at once a human being and integral to the Divine language.
Significantly, Rumi’s metaphors and analogies are drawn from daily life. For example, the changing seasons, especially the transition from winter to spring, become a metaphor for our spiritual awakening. The kitchen is equated with the world, cooking with our spiritual evolution, and food is either food for the sensual self or food for the heart. The Ocean is Divine Unity, while a drop of water is the human individual drawn inexorably towards the Source of his/her being.
Rumi’s references to the world of everyday experience are an affirmation of the Divine Unity in that “wheresoever you return, there is His Face (or Presence)” (Quran 2: 115). But recognition of, and awakening to, the Divine Unity is merely the first step on our path, the second step is expressed in another theme -- sometimes implicit, sometime overtly stated -- namely, “we belong to God, and unto Him we return” (Quran 2: 156).
We are generally not aware of our nature or falsely made aware by modern ideologies. In the Fihi Mafihi and Mathnawi, Rumi describes two kinds of intelligence.
The first is acquired through learning, in the manner of schoolchildren, from books and teachers, from reflection and memorising facts, from forming concepts and from the study of subjects that are new, yet we have become a little more than a tablet on which information is recorded. The other is Divine intelligence. It flows from within us, from the depth of our soul.
As is quite common, here Rumi uses the metaphor of water. Unlike the first intelligence, the water of divine knowledge never stinks with stagnation. It does not matter if it is prevented from flowing into the outside world, for it pours forth from the heart in an unending flow.
Seeing is a critical method of developing a science, a method, an epistemology. It informs us on the object/subject dichotomy and debate in the modern scientific corpus. For Rumi, what we see is what we are. What we see changes who we are.
In modern Social Science, the conceptualisation of society is often problematic. Seen as entities, there are dichotomies as well as boundaries. But a society denotes people - an assemblage of human beings subject to some form of power - an abstract entity, derived from our senses.
How do we measure what we measure of man in all his manifestations, including of other man and societies? This is where the Rumi corpus is fundamental. Rumi scholar William Chittick has drawn our attention to a fundamental methodology employed by Rumi in defining, analysing and synthesising our world.
To Rumi, what we see is a veil over reality -- “The world is a dream, a prison, a trap, foam thrown up from the ocean, dust kicked up by a passing horse.” But it is not what it appears to be. In his Fihi Mafihi, Rumi refers to the cry of Prophet Muhammad:
If everything that appears to us were just as it
Appears, the Prophet, who was endowed with such penetrating
vision, both illuminated and
illuminating, would never have
cried out, “Oh Lord, show us things as they are!” (Fihi Mafihi 5/18)
Rumi draws a fundamental distinction between “form” (surat) and “meaning” (ma’na). “In the face of meaning, what is form?” asks Rumi (Mathnawi I: 3330).
As in what we learn through scholarship -- the sciences, the disciplines -- we have to move beyond, or beneath what is apparent. Our task is not to be deceived by the form. We must understand that form does not exist for its own sake, but manifests a meaning above and beyond itself.
Pass beyond form, escape from names! Flee
Titles and names toward meaning! (Mathnawi IV: 1285).
The dialectics of Critical Social Science resonates with the mainstay of Rumi’s principle of the dichotomy between meaning and form. He refers to it in many different contexts and through a great variety of images and symbols. Rumi pairs together the terms secondary causes (asbab) and First Cause (musabbib), outward (zahir) and inward (batin), dust and wind, foam and ocean, picture and painter, shadow and light.
In the same vein, there is also existence and non-existence -- the face of meaning and form. From this perspective, very much relevant to disciplines like Geography and History and fields and themes such as Phenomenology, and the Built Environment, form is “place” and meaning is “space”. Or if we like, the reverse is also true -- form is space, meaning is place.
Knowledge comes from God and to Him it returns. To Rumi, knowledge raises the dignity of Man through refining his character and improving his life. Is the present corpus in the Humanities and Social Sciences embedded in the knowledge of the heart?
Man does not consist of the physical body alone as we are informed in the modern disciplines such as Anthropology, Sociology and History. In the study of man, the spirit needs to revisit the anthropos.