Rumi's Origin Story
By Leo Gura - September 20, 2024
At a young age, Jalal al-Din Rumi acquired a reputation as a great scholar of conventional Islamic texts. Rumi was a Sharia jurist and teacher, giving sermons in mosques. He taught classes in a school founded by his learned father, who was himself a renowned theologian, known by all around as the Sultan of Scholars. Rumi’s reputation for learning was so great that students flocked to his lectures and hung on his every word.
Then, one day, a dirty homeless man crashed one of his lectures, sitting in the back, singing, laughing, howling, and disrupting the class. He seemed like a madman. So Rumi’s students grabbed this insolent bum to throw him out of the class. But Rumi stopped them and asked the man, “Why are you here? What do you want?”
“I am Shams-i Tabrez,” the madman said, “and I have come for you.”
To the astonishment of his students, Rumi closed his book, cast off his scholar’s cloak, and said to the class, “My teaching days are over. This is my master.” He walked out of the classroom with the madman, never to return.
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“Why should I seek? I am the same as He. His essence speaks through me. I searched for God and found only Myself. There is no reality but God. Don’t look for me in human shape, I am inside your looking. No matter where I am, that is where God is.” — Rumi
That is the difference between scholarship and spirituality. You will not find God in the classroom, unless perhaps he comes to howl at one of your lectures.
Source: Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary
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