72: Rumi, Love, and Mysticism with Omid Safi

Host: Brandon Nappi 

Guest: Omid Safi 

Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast 

berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast

Brandon:    Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast. I’ve been thinking a lot now that my two daughters have gone away to college, about this ritual that we used to have weekly on Sunday evenings as a way of sort of marking the transition from weekend to the work week, the school week, and as a way to heal the Sunday scaries. 

And every Sunday night for years and years my daughters and I, we would sit, we’d light a candle, we would practice Zen meditation, we would follow our breath, we would practice centering prayer, and then we would read a poem by Rumi. And it was absolutely touching to me that when my daughters went off to college, there were two books that each of them wanted to take with them. One was their Rumi anthology, and the other was their Mary Oliver anthology, which is another source of inspiration on Sunday nights after those moments of contemplative prayer. And we did that from, gosh, when they were old enough to talk to the days when they were in high school, and it’s one of those cherished memories. 

Rumi is, believe it or not, the best-selling poet in the United States today. How is it that a medieval poet is the best-selling poet in the United States? But, you know, this clarity, intimacy, this kind of mirroring back of the divine to us as readers makes Rumi so endearing. And in my life, one of the great interpreters of Rumi has been Omid Safi, a scholar at Duke, who’s always sort of been a bridge for me in my life to help me understand Rumi in his historical context, in his spiritual context. And it’s been a real dream of mine to have a conversation with Omid, and I’m thrilled that he’s with us. He’s a scholar. He’s a practitioner. I don’t know that he would describe himself as a mystic, but to be in his presence feels mystical. Someone whose deep conviction about the power of love to heal the world is almost palpable. 

And I was prepared to start the conversation with the brokenness, with the chaos, with the challenge of the world, and Omid wanted to begin with the beauty of the world, maybe not surprisingly. You know, both Omid and Rumi have this kind of unshakable faith in the presence of the divine breathing throughout this beautiful and this broken world. And his willingness to hold both was striking to me. So I’m so excited about this conversation. I feel profoundly thankful that I was able to spend an hour with a scholar, a mystic, and a practitioner of this magnitude. 

Let me tell you a little bit more about Omid Safi, if you don’t know him. He’s a teacher in the Islamic mystical tradition of radical love and serves as a professor of Islamic studies at Duke University. Omid’s passion for teaching has been recognized through the 10 times that he has been nominated for Professor of the Year awards. Good Lord. Omid has published extensively on the foundational sources of Islam and Sufism. His Memories of Muhammad is an award-winning biography of the prophet. His most recent book is radical love teachings from the Islamic mystical tradition. Omid is committed to the intersection of spirituality and liberation and is offered the annual Martin Luther King lecture from the very spot of Dr. King’s assassination on what does Martin have to say to today’s America. He often appears as an expert on Islam in the New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, PBS, NPR, NBC, BBC, CNN, and other outlets. He has a podcast called Sufi Heart at the Be Here Now Network. He’s just a great light and luminary. I’m so thankful for his generosity of time.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Omid Safi as much as I did.

Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We convene sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who explore the creative vision needed to lead change in our aching world. I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, lecturer at Yale Divinity School and executive director of the Office of Transforming Leaders at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I’m so glad you’re here. 

Omid Safi, welcome to the Leaders Way podcast. We are so, so thankful to have a practitioner, a scholar, a mystic, and a great luminary here in our presence. So thank you for being with us. 

Omid:            Thank you so, so much. It’s really lovely, Brandon, to be with you and with your viewers, with your listeners, and to share in this what I hope will be a heart-nourishing conversation. 

B:         You know, your work has been so important to me in my own leading of retreats and teaching of contemplation and meditation. I’ve often looked to Rumi, this beautiful sage soul who is outside my own tradition and yet whom I felt so connected to. And you’ve helped me learn about him and his teaching. I wonder if you could start by just sharing your own path. It’s one of my favorite parts of the podcast and having these conversations is learning how did the divine lead you on your journey to get to do what you do today. I’d love to hear that story. 

O:        Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for that. And you know, we’re all partaking of the water of life that flows in these different fountains and streams. And sometimes it pours down from overhead and none of us have a monopoly over it. And I think the best that we ever get to do is to remind people, as Rumi says, that you’re standing with parched lips, dying of thirst, standing knee-deep in the water of life.

So it’s really, you know, not anything that I or anybody else is bringing or discovering somehow. It’s actually just reminding people of the truth that we are already deeply, deeply immersed in this all-encompassing love that at our best we get to call God.

And you know, it’s interesting when you pause sometimes the daily conversation and struggle, the work and the effort, and to think about how did I get here. And you know, it’s interesting. It’s always in retrospect that we start to connect some dots and maybe sometimes seek to discern a linear connection that as you’re living your life, it may not always be apparent. And that’s probably true in my own case as well. I’m very fortunate to have been raised in a family where, as is so typical in many Muslim cultures, mystical poetry is just the currency of a daily life. It’s what perfumes your social interactions.

And people may not even always label it as explicitly religious, but they sense it as something that is beautiful and lovely and sublime and refined and gentle and delicate.

 And you know, maybe we’re not so accustomed, sadly, of thinking of religion in a context where gentleness and poetry can be its dominant voice instead of bombast. And so, you know, my father introduced me to a lot of mystical poetry and the books of Rumi and Atar and Hafez and Saadi, these great Sufi poets and sages, they were, you know, what we were reading in our household, as do the vast majority of people of my ancestral homeland, which is Iran. We’re not that special. We’re not all that different. 

And as I moved into my late teens, and I was, you know, I was, and maybe I still am a bit precocious, and I really was interested in the big questions of life. I fancied myself something of a philosopher at that young age. And I noticed that I had a couple of pretty distinct areas of interest. I was deeply interested in love poetry, which comes from the heart of the Islamic tradition, the Sufi tradition, as we call it, this mystical teaching where the love of God and the love of humanity and the love of creation form one love. And we’ll talk about that more, I trust. 

And then at the same time, I was also interested in questions of justice, questions of redemption of society, where you look around and you just know somewhere deep in your truest heart that the way that things are is not the way they ought to be. Where you know that there’s a better way that’s necessary, not only possible but necessary. I started doing a lot of reading in religion, primarily my own home tradition of Islam, but you know, being a nerd, also studying the Christian tradition, the Jewish tradition, a little bit of the Hindu and the Buddhist tradition. And what I couldn’t figure out for the longest time was what did all of this love poetry have to do with religion?

I knew that it was lovely, I knew that it was irresistible, every time that I would get my heart broken, which was often, being as I like to say, a hopeful romantic. There’s nothing hopeless about being a genuine romantic, you’re always full of hope. It would be these mystical poetry that I would turn to of people who experienced an intensity and an intimacy of love that felt true to my own experience, but I couldn’t figure out how this was religious. 

And that work really took me well into my 20s until I started to see that in very subtle and beautiful and profound ways, Rumi, whom I loved and adored, and he, I felt like I was living with him. I felt like he was the glasses through which I was seeing the world, that he’s quoting the Quran all the time. At one point he calls himself, I’m a devotee of the Quran. 

And then finding out that in his own lifetime, people called him the child of the soul of Muhammad. Right, the child of the soul of Muhammad. That there’s this intimate connection that he has with the Prophet, that Christians of his time period, he lived in a place that was probably one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the world at that time. He was a Persian-speaking Muslim. The rulers were Turkish Muslims. The majority of the people of the town were Christian, Greek-speaking, orthodox Christians. There were Jews, there were Armenians, there were Kurds, there were Arabs, oh my, you know. And the Christians of the town loved him, adored him, sat in on his circle, and whenever they would be asked, you know, why are you, who after all are such committed Christians, why are you sitting with this unapologetically Muslim sage, they would say, we never thought we would see another one who would so perfectly embody the love of Christ. And when we are with him, we feel like we are experiencing a second Jesus.

And they didn’t feel like they had to change their religion. They didn’t feel like they had to be anything other than who and what they were. But there’s something about these people. So really what has kind of kept me sort of going is that question of how is this love poetry religious at some point morphed into what if I have it backwards, right? What if real religion, true religion is something that is poetic, that is melodic, that is gentle and subtle and beautiful and playful and represents a kind of combination of tradition, of a transmission that has come to you through centuries and millennia of people sharing their experiences of God and trees and humanity with a clear mandate for each one of us to experience our own experience of God. 

And that has kind of led me to what if the reason that so many people from all faith backgrounds find themselves somewhat disenchanted with religion is because we’ve ended up with simply religion as a kind of identity marker where, and I say this gingerly as somebody who occasionally studies theology, where the voices of theology and even the ritual dimension which have their place, they absolutely have their place, but they’ve taken a central role that at the end of the day love deserves to have. And that’s an ongoing journey.

B:         Well, thank you for sharing your path with us. I was heartened to learn what you shared a number of years ago from a friend, a dear friend Helen, who I hope might be listening, who grew up in Iran and grew up hearing Rumi and memorizing poetry, because this is what I did with my own children, not even knowing this, that once a week we would get together and we would read Rumi. And one of the great parenting highlights and consolations of my entire life was as my children, both of them did this intuitively as they were packing up to go to college. One of the last things they ran up to their bedrooms, each of them did this exact same thing, and grabbed their anthology of Rumi off the shelf. And they thought, “I cannot go away without these words.” 

O:        Right, right. You know, nowadays journey, traveling, in a bizarre way is kind of an isolated and isolating experience. And, you know, sometimes I like to walk up and down the aisles on airplanes, and almost everybody has their device out, and they’re staring ahead, and in airports and on their plane, people have their headphones on. And if you’ve paid extra money, maybe your seat has a personalized screen that caters to you. It’s almost as if how can we insulate you from contact with a person who’s happened to be seated next to you for two hours. 

But in the medieval times, for thousands of years, you wouldn’t go through the desert alone. You went on a caravan, and there was safety in going on a caravan. If you don’t know your way through a desert, well, the odds are not in your favor. But you want to go with a guide who has a track record. And it’s not because they have a Google rating, it’s because people know that this person has gone through this desert 500 times, and they’ve come back 500 times. And I think when we send our children out into this world, we don’t want to send them alone. We want to send them in a caravan of love, of sages past and present, some of whom might be well known and famous, and many of whom are ordinary, decent, loving kind people who embody what it means to be seen by somebody. And sometimes the sages that they want to take with them are in books.

Sometimes they’re in stories, sometimes they’re in a song. 

B:         So I wonder if you can help us understand this sage, in particular Rumi, who so many of us want to take with us, for so many of us has become a kind of mirror to our, you know, what’s most true about ourselves and the world. And help us locate him, understand his world, and maybe you could understand his world, and maybe you could also help us understand these terms, which are associated with him, Sufi, mystic. You know, are those words that you use to describe him, and how can we understand what those words might mean? What do they reveal about him and his experience and his teaching? 

O:        Yeah, yeah, thank you. So, you know, one of the things that I usually start my own experience of Rumi with is to remind myself that for many of us today, you know, we look around the world and understandably, we feel like we live in an age of chaos. And there are certain people in certain political positions who are masters at chaos and disorder, and things that take years and decades and centuries to build up, they tear down with the stroke of a pen. And that’s true locally. It’s true nationally. It’s true for our only home that we have in the almost infinite universe. It’s the only planet we’re found to live on.

And, you know, it takes a special kind of stupidity to destroy the one planet out of gazillion galaxies that human life can flourish on, and then to destroy it in a matter of 100 years in ways that it has never been in millennia. Temperatures rising, coastal places being in danger of going underwater, hurricanes coming in unprecedented ways, the polar caps melting, and internationally, of course, you know, we now live in an age of evil men.

And it’s not one or two countries. It’s Russia. It’s Israel. It’s India. It’s the United States. It’s the rise of far right anti-immigrant parties in Europe. And these people really like each other. They get each other. They’re all networked. And as, you know, Dr. King has said, those of us who love peace have to organize better than those who are committed to war.

And sometimes just when it seems enough to throw your hands up and to say we are doomed, nothing can be done. And mind you, just so, you know, I don’t pretend to have love be something that’s about fluff, but it’s real. Some of your audience members may or may not share the same sentiment. For me and for my community, we have lived through two years of a genocide, of seeing babies under rubbles, of parents being handed plastic bags with remnants of their children. And to know that that’s my tax dollars and my government, which is to echo Martin and Riverside, it’s responsible as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. So I sit with that. And anything I have to say about love is in the context of that. 

And then I think about Rumi. My beloved sage lit up with the love of God that is spilling over towards humanity. He lived in an age of the Mongol onslaught. And, you know, numbers are hard to dig up after 700 years, but the estimates are that somewhere like the Mongols wiped out more than 5% of the world’s population. Right? And it might have even been higher. Entire cities of hundreds of thousands of people that they turned into rubble. And in fact, Rumi and his family were what today we would call refugees. Right? We think of him as a sage, as a poet, as a mystic, as a scholar. All of those things are true. But he was one more thing. He was a refugee. He was someone who fled his ancestral homeland into that place where present day Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia meet. And he moves west. Why is he moving west? Because the Mongols are coming from the east. I see. Right? And he is not Pollyanna-ish. He knows the world in which he lives. 

And I think this is the part that I try to take solace and encouragement and heart from. It’s so easy for me, as it is for many of us, to kind of give in to the politics of doom and despair. And yet, in the prophetic tradition, which I take that to be the best and the highest of any religious tradition, right? Whether it’s Malcolm X, Martin, and Ella Baker, and Vincent Harding, whether it’s Rabbi Heschel, and others, you know, Heschel always says, “There’s only one thing that’s forbidden: despair.” That’s the only thing that’s ultimately forbidden. And hope is the most prophetic quality. And hope not as optimism, not as this cheap thing of the sun will rise tomorrow, but that, you know, as the Proverbs say, “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” 

And that’s Rumi’s experience. He sits in the midst of the Mongol onslaught, millions of people being slaughtered, entire civilizations being destroyed, and he sings about love. He sings about the love of God, which has been unleashed upon this creation. And this is our way home. And I think about that as the relevance that it has for us today. You know, people use this word Sufi in some different ways. Many of us, and on my days where, you know, I have to wear my nerd hat, I would say it represents the most intensely spiritual and mystical dimension of Islam. It’s the very heart of the Islamic tradition. 

And indeed, that’s how most Sufis tend to use it. There are some Sufis who expanded even further. And they say that the message of the Sufis is the message that has been the heart of all the religious tradition. It’s a religion as old as Adam and Eve, and that it is simply the path of love and devotion that runs through all the great religions and all the indigenous traditions. And that’s also a sense that we get. These words like mystical get tossed around a lot. And you know, you always want to make sure that your response is rooted in a lived compassion.

I have the great blessing of taking people on these pilgrimages and retreats all over the world. And we go to Turkey, we go to Morocco, we go to Spain. Next month we’ll be going to Macan Medina. And I would say that a majority of the people who come on our pilgrimages describe themselves as “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Right? So what spirituality has come to mean today is that I’ve been traumatized in religious spaces, that far from being places where I feel the love of God, I feel that I have been judged. I’ve been in some cases brutalized. I’ve been traumatized. I’ve not felt seen. I’ve not felt loved. I’ve not felt safe. And so I’ve had to retreat to this inner realm of spirituality. And you see how distant that experience feels from what we just said a minute ago about Rumi and the Sufi tradition representing the heart of religion. Right? We want the heart of religion to be the most beautiful part. 

But what do you do if the religious part has been patriarchal, has been tribal, has been racist, has been nationalist? Right? What does religion have to do with nation? And so you understand where folks are coming from when they use these labels of “I’m spiritual but not religious.” And you hope that you can show them not just words, but a reality, a space, a community that is religious and safe. Religious and welcoming, religious and prophetic.

When it comes to this word mystical, which I do like, you know, the Sufis say that there is a mystery, mystical mystery, there’s a mystery to what it is to be human. That you’re more than just this flesh creature that is seated across from me. And one of the most beautiful teachings of the Sufis is God, whenever God in any tradition speaks in an I voice, you want to sit up and take notice. Right? Those are powerful revelations. 

And so there’s one of these passages that the Sufis love to quote shared between God and the prophet in which God says, I am the secret of humanity and humanity is my secret. I am the secret of humanity and humanity is my secret. And that has a profound implication for what we do with each other, how we interact with one another. And the Sufis are the ones who always remember that when the prophet, peace be upon him, would visit the house of God in Mecca, the house that is built by Abraham, maybe even older. He addresses it by saying “How beautiful you are, and how luminous is your fragrance. And yet by the one in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, I swear that the life of one single single human being is more precious to God than even you are. Than even you are.”

So sometimes thinking about the world that Rumi comes from, and the world that we’re both creating and participating in. And people say things like, “Your life would be so much easier if you just wouldn’t talk about some of this political stuff.” And I’m not completely naive. I know that there’s mechanisms of censorship. And people say, can’t you just talk about love for humanity? But don’t use words like genocide. That scares people. Don’t say Palestine.

Well, what am I to do when my entire life has benefited from a teaching in which my prophet says that the life of every single Palestinian and Israeli and American and Indian and Chinese child is more precious to God than the house of God, than any temple. So how dare I be silent when any one of these eight billion houses of gods are being trampled upon. 

So I think there’s a very natural way that the love and the mysticism shows up as profound concern and needed demand for justice. 

B:         If you’re enjoying the Leaders Way podcast, you might like to join us in person as a Leaders Way Fellow. The Leaders Way at Yale is a certificate program exploring spiritual innovation for faith leaders. The Leaders Way at Yale combines the best of divinity school, retreat, and pilgrimage. Fellows meet in person at Yale for a week over the summer, then continue their learnings and mentor groups online. You can also take an online course or workshop with us here at Yale. Our learning space for faith leaders is hopeful, practical, and imaginative. Learn more on our website at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu. Clergy and leaders from every country, denomination, and seminary background are warmly welcome to join us for all of our programs. Now, back to the show. 

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about translation, because so many of us meet Rumi in English through translation, through a series of interpretive decisions that folks have made. And this is so important to understand precisely because of this bridge between love and justice that you’ve just made. If in fact, if in fact the kind of world that we create is based on what we believe about the power of love, the power of divine love, the power of divine love moving within us, then I’d love to understand this thing that stands in between me and this text a little bit. 

And so I have sort of a two-part question. I wonder if you could talk about translations. Do you have favorite translations? And maybe if you’re willing to read Rumi in, is it Persian that he would have written? So that maybe we can hear some of us for the first time what this immense gift would have sounded like, does sound like in its original tongue. 

O:        Yeah, of course, it would be my pleasure. So, you know, we’re very fortunate that there’s a number of really wonderful translators, very gifted translators who have been rendering Rumi into English. And Rumi’s masterpiece, which is called The Masnavi, it’s a six-volume book. And there’s a friend of mine, Javed Mujaddidi, who’s just finished the whole six volumes into rhymed English. And it’s taken him 25 years to do it. 

B:         Oh my gosh. I mean, this is a labor of love. And the last person to have translated all six volumes did it 100 years ago. 

B:         Oh my goodness. 

O:        That was a British scholar, you know, Nicholson. And yet, you know, so I think I would recommend for people to look into those translations. I have a course online which takes people step by step through a lot of Rumi’s teachings and stories. It’s in our illuminated courses webpage. But most people who are encountering Rumi do so through the translations of someone who’s a very good friend and someone whom I love dearly, even as I might occasionally disagree with a couple of his choices, named Coleman Barks. Coleman is a very gifted Southern American poet, beautiful poet, and a beautiful human being. He met a Sufi teacher who changed his life. And that teacher gave him the responsibility of, as it were, freeing Rumi from the literal translations that he had found. The only issue is that Coleman doesn’t read Persian. So he can’t actually access the original. 

So what he has done is to go back to the literal translations that that British scholar from 100 years ago did, Nicholson, and to render a painfully literal Victorian English into American free verse. Right? So it’s a double translation. And sometimes it’s like that game of telephone that people used to play 50 years ago. 

B:         This would have been the Rumi translations that my kids would have grown up with. 

O:        It’s a Rumi translation that’s on Instagram and Facebook. It’s the one that’s recited in weddings and funerals and church sermons. And they are lovely. And they’re powerful. And I recited them in my own wedding. Like this is not it. This is not from hate. This is like a deep work of love. But what does happen is Coleman is very sensitive to the fact that many people are traumatized by religion. And so he says, he’s very open about this. A lot of times when Rumi says, “God,” Coleman will just say, “How about if we say, “Beloved?” And Rumi has thousands of references to the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. And sometimes Coleman just drops those. He’s like, “Okay, this is sounding a little too preachy, a little too religious.” And there’s a funny meme that’s kind of going around. It has a picture of allegedly Rumi. And he says, “My poems are not about your ex-girlfriend.” And we should probably circle back to that at some point. 

But really the distinctiveness of the Sufi tradition is that things are never just about the love of God or the love of humanity. It’s simultaneously about this one love that is at once sensual and even erotic and sacred and spiritual and divine all in one. And it’s subtle and it’s ambiguous and it works at all these different registers. 

So I’ll give you like one example of a poem that is so beautiful that Coleman has done and I love, but it leaves a little something out. So I’ll read the Coleman translation first. It says, “Today, like every day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” And those last two lines, “Let the beauty we love be what we do.” There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. You could start a whole religion with those two lines. 

B:         Maybe some have. 

O:        Yeah, and I would probably sign up for adding that to whatever I’ve been blessed with in life. And then you read the original, “Emruz, chuharuz, kharabim, kharab.” “Today, like every day, we’re in a state of ruin. Our hearts are shattered. We’re ruined.” And then he goes on and that last line, “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” What Rumi was talking about was that there’s hundreds of what he calls ruku and sujud. What are ruku and sujud? Those are postures of the Muslim five times a day prayer. And in the prayer, there’s a moment in which you stand up straight. Your body makes the shape of the number one. You become the axis that connects heaven and earth together. Then you kneel before God. And then you take that, which you usually take to be your highest part, your head, your crown, and you bring it in humility to the earth from which you come from and to which you will return. So is it kneeling and kissing down? Sure. But it’s kneeling and kissing down as part of a Muslim ritual of prayer that is done five times a day. And Rumi himself did five times a day. And so did his entire community. And so do the people who have read and taken Rumi to heart over the last eight centuries. And to simply leave it as kneel and kiss the ground leaves out not only the religious components, but that Muslim component. And I think that’s the part that people like me are trying to recover, is to say, yes, this is beautiful. Yes, let the beauty we love be what we do. Yes, there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. And if what you found here is beautiful and moving and inspiring, remember that for Rumi, this is the key part. This is at the heart of the Islamic tradition.

B:         Thank you. I wonder if we could go back to my ex-girlfriend. 

O:        That’s your prerogative.

B:         No. Because I’m aware that Dante was also writing just about at this same moment, blending courtly love poetry, love of Beatrice. Beloved Beatrice. And also intermingling the love of God with his love of his beloved. And so can you flesh that piece out a little bit more? Because on the one hand, I presume it’s important to say, like, we’re not talking about your ex-girlfriend, but in another way, is there a both/and? 

O:        Absolutely. 100%. I had a very dear friend of mine, Nina, who shared with me a beautiful meditation on Beatrice at one point. And at least one of the ways that these things tend to be read is that there’s a progression that first you have a Beatrice, and then at some point you get to discard. 

B:         Oh, boy. 

O:        Yeah. And you get to go from the form to the formless. Right? All this Neoplatonism. Was that in the air for Rumi as well? 100%. I mean, he is the word Rumi. He was never called Rumi in his life. Rumi is Rome. And Rumi is the Roman. And so, but what was the Roman, the Eastern Roman Empire, Greek Byzantine Christian Empire, he’s living in a Greek cultural world in which ideas of Neoplatonism permeate everywhere. And so here’s one of the main differences between Rumi and Neoplatonists. And Neoplatonists have had so many beautiful, insightful ideas of how the one shows up as the many and the many lead us back to the one and all of that. And, and, I went to years of therapy, the best thing I learned was every time you want to say “but,” say “and”– that was worth its price in gold. Oh, my gosh. And Neoplatonism has a profound mistrust of the material of the level of forms. Right? 

And imagine what kind of a sad excuse of a love life is it when you see someone, you meet someone, you grow closer, you’ve grow in love. And then at some point you’re like, well, okay, I got what I needed. I no longer require you as an external form. So I’m going to retreat back to the formless. So carry on without me because you certainly have no need of like, I mean, we wouldn’t do that to a child, right? If we have a toddler and I’m very blessed to have five children and love them dearly. Like, you know, could you go up to a child and go, wow, you’re so cute. You’re so adorable. I no longer have a need for you because I’ve transcended you. You have outlived your purpose and your usefulness. Carry on, child.  

And so what the Sufi tradition does is to actually say something remarkably bold. It says God is both, and I think many Christian audiences can hopefully resonate with this, as can people of any religious tradition, God is both the manifest and the inward. God is the Zahar and the Bhatan, and that which you see, that which you touch, that which you experience and the hidden inward, both are from the divine, both in a sense are manifestations of God. And so that’s why, you know, when God creates everything in Genesis, he says that it was good. It was good and it was good, right? And so the Sufis always talk about love represents a dance between the form and the formless. And in admiring the form, you adore the handiwork of the great cosmic artist. But that love for the divine, the artist with a capital A, also shows up as care for the level of forms, right? If I see in a hungry person or a refugee or someone whose dignity is being trampled on, it’s not enough to say, “Well, I see God in you.” And as for the body, well, you know, we all have to die sometime.

No, real love is deep, profound, passionate concern for the form and the formless. And it’s not a bridge that you cross once and you’re done with it. It’s a movement, it’s a melody, it’s a dance back and forth and forth and back. And to come back to that example of, you know, this is, and it is not about your ex-girlfriend, Rumi has one of these experiences where, you know, he has an extraordinary teacher who sets his soul on fire and that teacher leaves. That teacher disappears, is probably killed. And out of jealousy from the circle of people around Rumi. And Rumi says that he has to spend years at finding the beauty that he experienced with this friend inside of himself. That sometimes it’s easier to note love with somebody else and then you come to locate it inside of you. 

But he doesn’t stop there, right? It’s not just simply, “I’ve transcended my friend. I have no need of external love anymore.” Once he locates that same love that he had first tasted it externally inside of himself, he comes back out and he re-establishes those models of love and friendship again and again and again with his wife, with his companions, with his friends, with his disciples. And I think that’s really the model. That’s really what the beauty of the Sufi tradition is. And it’s an odd thing to work in a context of a world which at times wants to pull you towards pure materialism, right? And it’s just about tantalizing you at the level of the senses. And then to have religious traditions which in some ways have become infected by that kind of shallow Neo-Platonism. 

And we’re saying something different. We’re saying that the form and the formless, the body and the spirit, they mingle.

B:         That’s really powerful. And nearly every religious tradition at its mystical heart will say this in its own way. I mean, I see the statue of, I think, Buddha behind you, of course, in the Zen tradition, this form and formlessness, just mutually expressing each other, the intermingling of these, of imminence and transcendence in the Christian tradition. If anything, Jesus is anything, he’s a teacher of paradox and yet we so often miss this with the infection that you point to. Is there a kind of signature mistake that we make, especially here in the West or in American culture when it comes to Rumi? I mean, in some ways you’ve named one already. Are there others, are there other moves that we wanna make? Or is there a kind of God that we want to manipulate Rumi into and worship? Help us understand how we kind of stereotypically might often get it wrong. 

O:        I think there’s a couple at least that come to mind and they’re done with the best of intentions. One of them is that love is a ubiquitous plea. And there’s plenty of people looking to monetize it at every turn. And I come across so many people who describe their existence as being a loveless existence. And if there’s one thing that’s worse than being alone, it’s to be alone inside a relationship. And so you talk to people who talk about, “Well, we had something in the beginning, but now I feel like I’m in a loveless marriage.” Right? And how painful that sounds. And what we’ve done, especially in the modern West, which because of the extraordinary cultural influence that we have is now globally being exported, is that we’ve taken love, which as I say in my book, Radical Love, what love is for Sufis is the unleashing of God on creation. Love is the very core, the very heart of God that is erupting. Love is what brings us to creation. Love is what sustains us here. And if we can just get over our damn self for a minute and re-merge back with that cosmic channel of love, it’s going to carry us home. And love, because it is God, because it is all the colors of the rainbow, including the ones that we cannot detect with the naked eye, contains all the possibilities, all the hues.

And in the modern West, we have collapsed all of love to romantic, physical, sexual love. And when we try to expand it, we say, “Oh, it’s not just heteronormative, it’s also same-sex.” And that’s one or two shades of a rainbow. And instead, what the Sufis do is they take that narrow, rigid understanding of love, which if you can get it and it’s mutually reciprocal and if it’s good for you, mazel tov. Right? “Mabruk, great on you, good on you, you’ve done well. Give some thanks, feed some people.” But they take that narrowed down, collapsed version of love and they push back against it to maximize it. So they say that friendship is also love. The love for your parents is also love. The love for a child. The love for a teacher. The love of trees. The love of a dog. The love of a cat. One of these great Sufis, he’s the guy who I put on the cover of the Radical Love Book. 

This guy sitting over here, he has a person who comes to him and it’s like, “I’ve never had love.” And he’s like, “Do you love your wife?” He’s like, “No.” “Do you love your parents?” “No.” “Do you love your kids?” “No.” “Do you love your neighbors?” “No.” “Do you love your dog?” “No.” “Do you love your cat?” “No.” “Do you love the stranger?” “No.” He’s like, “Okay, what am I going to do with this guy?” And he’s like, “Do you remember when you were a kid and the first snowfall would come?” And the guy waits and is like, “Yeah.” “Do you remember going outside and looking up and picking one snowflake and watching it whirl around and try to catch it with your tongue?” He’s like, “Yeah, I love that.” And he’s like, “Then you know love because if all you’ve ever loved in life is a snowflake, you know love.” 

So in a sense, what the Sufis are reminding us is we appear to be lacking in love precisely because we are immersed in it. We are the fish in the ocean. And Sufis say these amazing things like, “God is closer to you than the ocean is to the fish.” So it’s a matter of readjusting our perspective. And then I think the other thing that we see as a really unfortunate error in the way that we read Rumi, I would say the way that we read any real religion. And you know, I myself benefit from so many of the people who share their wisdom and insight. But they’re all competing for hits and clicks and views. And I’m sure you know what it’s like to have a podcast and hope that people get to listen to you. And sometimes I might pour my heart and soul into creating a course. And then, okay, if only a few people listen to it, like, “Did I fail? Was this a failure?” You know. And thank God we’ve been quite fortunate in finding open, receptive hearts. 

But because people are competing in the marketplace of spirituality, you hear things like, “Follow this teaching, and in seven days, in 12 days, you will restore power to your life. You will get your ex back. You will have respect at the workplace. You will have nothing but success, success, success, success.” Right? It’s what I consider the greatest Christian heresy after white nationalism doing cosplay as Christianity, which is the gospel of prosperity. 

B:         The prosperity gospel. 

O:        Right? It’s an abomination. It’s an abomination. Because God wants you to be rich. God wants you to be, you know, happy and successful. And of course, like, God loves you. But go to a genuinely poor person who is working their tail off to support their family and to work as hard as they can. And working much harder than you are. And then say to them, “Ah, you know, it’s really because God don’t love you. It’s because you’re cursed. Because you haven’t taken the course with Tony Robbins on the left.” You can’t take him to the course. That’s right. You know? Right. And so what real spirituality says is never, never “follow this teaching, and everything in life will be happy.” It never says, “Follow this teaching, and you will never know death. Follow this teaching, and no one that you love will ever suffer.” All that real religion can say is that the God of the mountaintop is also the God of the valley bottom. And the only promise here is that you will never walk alone. And as you walk through the valley of death, filled with shadows, God is with you. And when you climb the proverbial mountaintop and you think you did it all by yourself, God is with you because God is actually the mountain and the valley. And I think that’s really one of the aspects of understanding Rumi that it would be beneficial to do. 

B:         Thank you. Thank you so much for this encouragement and this wisdom. I wonder

if as a way of closing, maybe you’d leave us with some of Rumi’s words, maybe in Persian and then in English, and then maybe you could share with us why this particular passage is wanting to be spoken today. 

O:        Yeah, thank you. Thank you. So this is a translation that I did. It’s in the Radical Love book. 

B:         Yes, which is such a beautiful book, I want to say. Thank you. I’ve gotten it from my two daughters for Christmas. They’re going to come home from college, and they’re going to go back with another book about Rumi. 

O:        Oh, that’s wonderful. I’m honored to be part of their caravan and your caravan. 

So by the way, this is a poem, you know, it’s 750 years old, and it’s recited to this day by some of the most popular and beloved vocalists in Iran. And you know, it’s kind of worth just noting, what would it be like if whoever is the biggest singer in the world today, right? Beyonce or Adele or your favorite hip-hop person, if they were citing and reciting not Shakespeare, but actually Chaucer, and it landed, as people say. That’s really what this living tradition is. 

So I’ll do the Persian and the English sort of together. This is a poem that’s called “Say Nothing,” and it’s a reminder from Rumi that form and the formless. You say it, you bring it, you share the level of forms, and then you realize that forms are like the finger pointing at the moon, and you follow their trajectory, and then you hush. And then you hush because God is revealed in the silence, and as they say, everything goes as a poor translation. But you speak because you have to, right? You don’t just hush permanently.

So he says, (persian recitation)

 I serve that moon-like beauty. Say nothing to me unless it’s about her.

Speak nothing of sorrow. Speak only words of this treasure. 

And then the poem goes on, and he describes how Rumi has a visionary experience of love embodied. And he has a dialogue, and he’s trying to figure out what is this? Who is this love? 

Last night I became love-crazed.  

Love said, (persian)

Love saw me and said, I’ve come, don’t shout, say nothing. 

(persian)

I said, love, I’ve tried you before. I’m afraid of something else.

Love said, honey, there ain’t nothing other than me. 

Love said, there is nothing else.

Say nothing. 

And then Rumi tries to figure out, okay, what is this thing? 

I said, what a beauty. Are you an angel? 

Love says, no, not an angel. 

Are you a human? Nope, not a human, but say nothing.

(persian)

I said, what is this? What are you? Say it. 

Love said, hush, stay like this. Say nothing.

(persian)

I said, my heart, aren’t you describing God? 

Love said, yes, my child, but hush, say nothing.

That’s as close as Rumi comes in a poetic way to say love is not a feeling, love is not an emotion. Love is actually the unleashing of God. And if you take all the loves that exist in the world and you link them together and you expand them, you heighten them, you deepen them, that is what we call God.

And so that’s the reason why many Sufis tend to say things like, God is the perfection of love, harmony, and beauty.

B:         Omid Safi, thank you so much. I feel like your work in this conversation has been an unleashing of God. So thank you for all you do. 

O:        May it be, may it be, my friend, thank you for hosting this and for the space that you’ve helped create. 

B:         Thank you for joining us today on the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We hope you found the episode expansive and nourishing. If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your support helps us to continue bringing you sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who are dedicated to transforming our world. For more information about our guests and to catch up on past episodes, visit our website at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu. Follow the show on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast to stay updated on future episodes and events. Until next time, I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi. Walking with you as you lead with courage, wisdom, and compassion.