by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
At dusk, the shaft of light striking Rumi’s tomb is emollient as pale jade. It has been a long, hot day in Konya, I’ve been writing in a café-terrace overlooking the famed white and turquoise structure of the tomb-museum complex. I sip my tea slowly, facing the spare, elegant geometry of the building that appears as a simple, intimate inscription on the vast blue. For once I am studying Rumi’s verses in Persian, not repeating English translations or paraphrasing in Urdu. “Bash cho Shatranj rawan, khamush o khud jumla zaban,” “Walk like a chess piece, silently, become eloquence itself!” I’m reciting to myself in the din, in awe of the kind of magnetism that would pull one as a chess piece. Only the heart understands this logic, not any heart, but the one that has been broken open, the one that is led to the mystery in cogent silence.
For once, I am letting the music of Rumi’s diction guide me: “khamush” (silent) and “khud” (self), a sonic coaxing of paradox, two words beginning with the same consonant, the first ending in “sh’, a sound that evokes the hushing of the ego’s voice, the softly-fading whisper of self-annihilation, the second ending as a sonic anchor in “ud,” suggesting the triumph of the self as it sheds worldly desires, alchemizing from base to the gold it was meant to be. This meditation yields the word “khuda” or “God,” who is paradoxically both “closer than the jugular vein” and a “hidden treasure,” in the words of the Qur’an, to be revealed actively, painstakingly in the hidden recesses of the self– as Rumi and the Sufi tradition teach. The divine resides in the self’s silences and music, solitude and communion, longing and ecstasy. Rumi’s path to love passes through such paradox; to be a Darwish, is to “linger by the door,” content to make a home of the beloved’s threshold where he gives himself up to gnosis through praise. Read more »