Abstract
Before expanding his discourse of non-dualism, Rumi had to use dualist concepts to bring to light and eventually reject the inner mechanism of the dual-thinking mind. By doing this, he demonstrated that the dualistic perception of the world—dividing aspects of the world into two opposite categories—is the natural product of the biological and physical world as well as the impulse of the mind. But this was only a step along the way: Rumi’s goal still remained to point people to a non-dual state, the ultimate reality, a time before all became differentiated, dual, and plural. He was trying to describe something similar to the division of yin and yang and their non-dual state of Tao. In Rumi’s writings, the major dualist divisions, apart from young-old, man-woman, day-night, and so on, are mainly between belief and disbelief, worshipper and worshipped, time and space, separation and unity. Rumi provides a framework for numerous examples; this chapter covers a few symbolic ones.
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Notes
See Marilyn R. Waldman, “The Development of the Concept of kufr in the Qurʼān,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 88, no. 3 (Jul.–Sep. 1968), 442–55.
Shams al-Din Ahmed al-Aflaki al-ʻArefi, Menāqib al-ʻĀrefīn, ed. Tahsin Yazici (Tehran: Donya-ye Ketab, 1362/1983), 312.
For the translation of this rubāʻī, see M. Vaziri, Beyond Sufism and Sainthood: A Selection of Rumi’s Poetry (Innsbruck: Dream and Reality Publications, 1998), 48.
The examples of the warriors of ghaza, or warriors for the sake of Islam are: sultan Mahmoud of Ghazni (d. 1030), Ottoman Murad II (d. 1451), and Zahir al-Din Mohammad Babur (d. 1530), among others invented who the image of ‘king-prophet-like’ conquerors. See the study of Ali Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A comparative study of the late medieval and early modern periods. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.
For this translation of rubāʻī, see M. Vaziri, The Guru of Rumi: The Teachings of Shams Tabrizi (Varanasi: Pilgrims Publishing, 2008), 66. The same optical fallacy of the observer in a boat and a “moving shore” was presented by the famous Japanese Zen master, Dōgen Zenji (d. 1253), in his Shōbōgenzō. He lived at almost the same time as Rumi.
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© 2015 Mostafa Vaziri
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Vaziri, M. (2015). Rumi’s Case Against Dualistic Thinking and His Wisdom About the World. In: Rumi and Shams’ Silent Rebellion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137530806_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137530806_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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