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A SUFI ALLEGORY OF MYSTICAL LOVE

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Laylā and Majnūn is the best-known love story of the Middle East, and for the Sufi is an allegory of mystical love. Sufis are lovers of God, wayfarers travelling through the desert of the world, making the journey from separation back to union with God. For these mystics the relationship with God is that of lover and Beloved, and it is the longing for their Beloved that turns them away from the world, drawing them deeper and deeper into the mystery of the heart. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, PhD, is an author and a Sufi teacher in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order.

(Photo by Rina H)

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RUMI’S USE OF MOVING COLORS AND SHAPES IN THE DIVAN-I SHAMS

by Fatemeh Keshavarz

In The Kaleidoscope of Love, Dr. Fatemeh Keshavarz explores the dynamism and sense of play in what she calls Rumi’s ‘kaleidoscopic poems’, providing a sense of the way Rumi used them to portray what is hard to put into words, namely the plurality and the fleeting nature in the experience of love. Dr. Fatemeh Keshavarz is a professor of Persian and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, Washington University-St. Louis. Among Keshavarz’s works is her book “Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran.”

(Artwork by Martin Harris)

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JUDITH ERNST and VASUDHA NARAYANAN ON EROTIC POETRY AND DIVINE LOVE IN THE SONG OF SONGS AND HINDU TRADITIONS

Interview by Llewellyn Smith

Llewellyn Smith interviews distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at the University of Florida, Vasudha Narayanan  and visual artist Judith Ernst on erotic poetry and divine love in Western and Eastern traditions as  found in The Songs of Songs and Hindu traditions; both women have been profoundly  influenced in their work by these writings.

(Photograph Krishna with Radha ©OMKR/Dreamstime.com)

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AN INTRODUCTION

by Coleman Barks

For the occasion of Tagore’s 150^th Birth anniversary, Coleman Barks sets the scene for the introduction of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali to a Western audience. This resulted in his receiving the Nobel Prize in 1913. He was the first Asian to receive that honor.  Poet, writer and translator of Rumi, Coleman Barks is currently working from the original notebook prose translations of Gitanjali made by Tagore himself on his sea journey to England in 1912, to produce new free verse renderings. Coleman Barks has been collaborating with Persian scholars for thirty years to bring the poetry of Rumi and other mystic poets to the general public.

(Photograph of Tagore 1916 by Eward Curtis)

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A Conversation with Professor John McGuckin

Interview by Llewellyn Smith and Christine Herbes

“Yes, God reveals himself through the heart more than the head. And so when you read the scripture, read it as prayer. You know until, as they say, something strikes you in the heart and you feel the warmth, and then stay with that. Now that’s a very, very different approach. Its like a practitioner going to a tool shed with inspiration leading him or her to the tools needed for the spiritual work of the moment, as opposed to a theologian who sees scripture as a whole set of texts, legal constitutions. That’s the difference.” – John McGuckin

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by Ahmet Karamustafa

It is well known that there is a special relationship between the Mathnawi and the Koran. The bond between the two is most popularly epitomized in the lines that are affixed to the title pages of lithograph copies of the Mathnawi:

How can I describe that eminent personage?

Not a messenger is he yet he has a message

The spiritual Mathnawi of Mawlavi

Is the Qur’an expressed in Pahlavi.

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by Kenneth Avery

Shibli was an example of a holy man who feigned madness or was occasionally mentally disturbed, thus escaping persecution. Dols argues that Hujwiri’s report should be rephrased to say that Shibli’s intelligence saved Shibli but Hallaj’s madness destroyed Hallaj. If Shibli was genuinely deranged, he was not legally accountable for his behavior: “Madness was an excuse, perhaps the only possible excuse, for the unmeasured expressions of divine love and the unitive experience that the early Sufis were expected to conceal, while maintaining an esoteric prudence.

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