Rumi Revisited

Author Coleman Barks spent over three decades perfecting Rumi: The Big Red Book. According to his friend Robert Bly, he's succeeded in giving "the horse a clap on the rear." The new collection includes Barks's work on Rumi's spiritual instructor (Divani Shamsi Tabriz) as well as tweaked and reworked versions of Rumi's poems. Colman explains why the quatrains and ghazels in his labor of love are uniquely presented:

The quatrains are more playfully, less thematically, divided. As I say in the Organizational Note (p. 364), the expanse of Emily Dickinson's 1789 short, title-less poems in the Harvard edition is dismaying to the eye. So in order to give some pattern to this array of Rumi's short poems, and some spaciousness too, I set them in 27 sections, 25 under the aegis of a constellation (Taurus, Leo, Pegasus, Orion, Pisces, etc.), and two under the name of another celestial body: the Milky Way (our home galaxy seen from the side) and the Black Hole at the center of it, which I have presumptuously named. Somebody had to. Bijou. It is that maelstrom that gives our galaxy its spiraling, dervishly outflung arms.....

Colman also suggests that his dedication to the project was borne from the desire to show why Rumi's teachings are particularly applicable in a world plagued by Islamophobia:

Islamophobia is real and deep and widespread in this country. This much we can know for sure. I sat recently watching a baseball playoff game with a very well-educated man, who seriously recommended that we "Nuke Tehran. Hit them hard. That's all they understand. Like Dresden." Sheer Idiocy. I visited Tehran in May of 2006. I tried to describe that beautiful, gentle, European culture to him. Not much help. There is a lot we do not see. The lines of Islamic men bowing down, touching their foreheads to the ground, sitting back, standing up, bowing again. They are doing a form of prayer that acknowledges unity, not political or religious solidarity with each other, but in praise of the mystery of oneness within all living beings, all things, all molecules even. That is the essence of Islam that I meet in Sufis today, that I saw in Bawa's eyes. There is a sweetness and a coolness, a profound courtesy, and a peace in Islam that we are mostly blind to in the West, and in the media particularly.

For more on Rumi, check out a Rumi of One's Own.