The Forbidden Rumi

Songs to Shams, Songs to God   6

What a story! You finally meet someone in whose presence you are transported to God. You immediately go off together, hand in hand, and shut yourself off from the world behind the closed doors of your retreat room. Over the weeks and months to follow, you dissolve into each other through simply sitting in each other’s presence, gazing raptly at each other. (When God sits down before you, where else would you want to look?) When you emerge from your retreat, you are fundamentally different from the person who entered it so many months before. The only sane thing to do after an event like this is to live happily ever after, yes? But it wasn’t like that.

Rumi may have entered into retreat with Shams as a kind of devout shepherd, looking after his flock of followers, but he emerged as a hungry wolf, exhorting people to drop their pretenses, move beyond their rigid adherence to the outward forms of religion, and enter instead into a direct experience of God.

Rumi wanted the townspeople of Konya to recognize Shams as he had come to know and see him: as a direct conduit to the divine. For Rumi, Shams was a funnel that led to God. Exposed to the heat of Shams’ presence, Rumi would simply melt, and the mixture of the two souls would take both into the consciousness of union. This is what true religion is all about, and Rumi fully expected his former followers to leap into the divine fire with him.

Their response instead was to react mostly with criticism and outrage to the perceived heresy of two souls merging into the one God. For the orthodox mind, it is accepted that the founder of the religion would have had a direct encounter with the energies of God, but not, evidently, anyone else. The negativity around the companionship between Rumi and Shams grew so large that Shams had no choice but to leave, and Rumi fell apart with grief.

Songs to Shams, Songs to God    7

He began to write letters to Shams, begging him to return, and dispatched them to different parts of the Islamic world in the hopes that one of them might eventually be received. More than a year passed before he heard anything back. Yes, Shams would return.

The two great friends immediately plunged back into retreat, and a new round of dissolving and merging of souls began. The reactions of the townspeople continued much the same as before. This time, when Shams left, he was set upon like a hated predator and murdered.

The complete Divan-i-Kebir is considered to contain all the spontaneous utterances that Rumi ever made concerning his interaction with Shams. Some of the poems read like open letters to Shams. Some read like a historical recounting of their time together. Some of them praise Shams as God’s representative on Earth, while others rail in anguish at the cruelty of his teasing and the petulance of his departures.

Is Rumi addressing Shams alone in these poems? Or is he directly addressing God? The lines become blurred.

Songs to Shams, Songs to God    8

I was dead, but came back to life.
I was the cry, but I became the smile.
Love came and turned me
into everlasting glory.
Here’s how it happened:
He said to me, “You don’t belong in this house.
You’re not nearly crazy enough.”
I went and became raving mad
and bound myself in chains.
He said to me, “You’re not drunk. Get lost.
You’re not from this land.”
I went and got pie-eyed drunk
and filled my life with music and dance.
He said to me, “You’ve never annihilated yourself
so music and dance can’t touch you.”
I passed out of myself right in front of him
and fell to the ground.
He said to me, “You’re a sensible, learned man,
full of reflections and opinions.”
I became a silly fool and cut myself off from people.

Songs to Shams, Songs to God    9

He said to me, “You’re a candle,
the light to these people.”
I gave them all up.
I became smoke and spread myself around.
He said to me, “You’re the sheikh, the head,
the one who walks at the front, the guide.”
I told him that I’m neither sheikh nor guide.
I am the follower of your order.
He said to me, “You have arms and wings.
I don’t give anything to you.”
I told him that I desire his wings so that
I can cut mine.
His glory then spoke to me and said,
“Don’t give up now. You’re almost there.
I’ll soon grant you the favor you seek and come to you.”
And so he said to me, “O old love of mine,
Don’t ever get out from under my arm.”
And I said, “Yes,”and I stayed there. 

Songs to Shams, Songs to God    10

I Came Back to You

Come, O sweet-lipped beauty,
Drink this haram wine*
if you have the nerve.
If you have a heart like the sea,
pick up the wine that reveals
what being human is really about.
I came back to you
because I couldn’t find the kind and decent things
I found in you anywhere else.

*Haram: Religiously forbidden.

Introduction

Songs to Shams, Songs to God
He Took Me Under His Arm 
Split Wide Open
I Won’t Repent His Love
How Can I Fool Him?
Water
Stay with Me
Conversations with God 
The Greatness of Absence
How Happy a Time
What a Bird!
Love Letter to Shams
Death Is Life for You 
More Than These
What Can I Do?
Give Up Yourself
I Keep Smiling 
Why Are You Deceiving Me?
He Embraced Me Like His Own Soul 
The Placeless Place
Everyone Else Is a Stranger
Beautiful One
The Promise Is Sweet
Still Say Nothing
Flying High On Your Wine
Offer Your Wine
Please Don’t Go
It Wasn’t Like That
Shamseddin
The Road Is Narrow 
Don’t Go Away
Lifting the Curtain
His Trace
Wherever You Are
Don’t Go Anywhere Without Me
Your Blessing Is Unconditional

Songs of Advice, Songs of Admonition
Search There
The Best Nourishment
Fasting
Divine Road
Choose Love
God’s Ocean
Watch How God Opens the Door
The Journey Starts Here
Ascend the Mountain of Love
Don’t You Recall?
These Two Worlds
Outside the Sack
A Rascal in the Bazaar
Just Do It
Your Overflowing Secrets
The Drunks of Union
Ahead of the Thought
The Land of Absence
Love Is Its Own Proof
Advice to the Drunk at Heart
Light and Shadow
Words into Dust
Time to Journey
Come as You Are
The Language of the Heart
Free Wine
The Perfect Host 
A Helper of Hearts
A Life Without Art
God’s Artistry
All That Is Good
Open the Door
Donkey and Ox
Checkmate
The Caravan’s Bells
Steal Pearls
This Temporary World
Some Advice
Music at the Tavern of Eternity
The Eggshell of the Body
Open Your Door
Heaven’s Door
Reborn
Submerged in Absence
Life Is Coming to the Rose Garden
The Path in the Heart
The Rose’s Plea
Why Are You So Reasonable?
You Are in His Hand
Cries of Confirmation
Words of the Secrets
Hidden from the Eyes
You Snatched My Heart
The Moon’s Slave
Cut It Short

Songs of Heresy
You Can’t Get Away
I Came Back to You
Everyone Is Welcome to This School
A Stranger to Myself
I Am the One!
Wake Up from Your Sleep
He Is Beyond Praise

Translator’s Afterword

Nevit Ergin, a Turkish-born surgeon, is the original translator of the entirety of Rumi’s 44,829 verses into English. He has been a student of Sufism and the poetry of Rumi since 1955 and published his first Rumi translation in 1992. With the publication of The Forbidden Rumi, his translation of Rumi’s work is complete. He lives in California. Will Johnson is the founder and director of the Institute for Embodiment Training, which combines Western somatic psychotherapy with Eastern meditation practices. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Rumi: Gazing at the Beloved. He lives in British Columbia.

“For the past fifty years Nevit Ergin has been working to bring into English the entirety of Rumi’s vast Divani Shamsi Tabriz. This last volume is the most incendiary and it clearly dissolves the boundaries of organized religion and national ego that keep us from the table of friendship that Rumi invites us to. . . . We are very grateful to Dr. Ergin for his life’s work.”
Coleman Barks, translator of The Essential Rumi

"It takes a great deal of courage to read The Forbidden Rumi as it may press a lot of buttons, not only about your own pathway to God, but your views and prejudices about love, religion, heresy and Islam.

"All of Rumi’s poems have enjoined us to release the rules and open our hearts to our inner treasure of love, but these most controversial poems cut to the bone.

"This final book of Rumi’s poems is a must-read for any serious student of spiritual ecstasy. They pose questions that make us wonder and re-evaluate our views about a religion that is portrayed as governed by extremists. They reveal a hidden face of Islam that may surprise even moderate Islamists.

"Most importantly, these poems reveal that Islam too has always had a mystical, transcendent element that is its purest gift."
Lesley Crossingham, New Dawn, Mar-Apr 2007

RELIGION / POETRY

“For the past fifty years Nevit Ergin has been working to bring into English the entirety of Rumi’s vast Divan-i Kebir. This last volume is the most incendiary, and it clearly dissolves the boundaries of organized religion and national ego that keep us from the table of friendship that Rumi invites us to. . . . We are very grateful to Dr. Ergin for his life’s work.”
Coleman Barks, translator of The Essential Rumi

After his overwhelming and life-altering encounters with Shams of Tabriz, Rumi, the great thirteenth-century mystic, poet, and originator of the whirling dervishes, let go of many of the precepts of formal religion, insisting that only a complete personal dissolving into the larger energies of God could provide the satisfaction that the heart so desperately seeks. He began to speak spontaneously in the language of poetry, and his followers compiled his more than forty-four thousand verses into twenty-three volumes, collectively called the Divan-i Kebir.

When Nevit Ergin decided to translate Rumi’s divan into English, he enlisted the help of the Turkish government, which was happy to participate. The first twenty-two volumes were published without difficulty, but the government withdrew its support and refused to participate in the publication of the final volume due to its openly heretical nature. Now, in The Forbidden Rumi, Nevit Ergin and Will Johnson present for the first time in English Rumi’s poems on love and intoxication from this forbidden volume. The collection is grouped into three sections: songs to Shams and God, songs of advice and admonition, and songs of heresy. Rumi explains that in order to transform our consciousness, we must let go of ingrained habits and embrace new ones. In short, we must become heretics.

NEVIT O. ERGIN, a Turkish-born surgeon, is the original translator of the entirety of Rumi’s 44,829 verses into English. He has been a student of Sufism and the poetry of Rumi since 1955 and published his first Rumi translation in 1992. With the publication of The Forbidden Rumi, his translation of Rumi’s work is complete. He lives in California. WILL JOHNSON is the founder and director of the Institute for Embodiment Training, which combines Western somatic psychotherapy with Eastern meditation practices. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Rumi: Gazing at the Beloved. He lives in British Columbia.