Rumi’s Moral Tale and Modern Suicide Bombings
Comments on Article in ‘Daily Jang’
by Dr. Zahid Aziz
The Light (UK), April 2008 Issue (pp. 4–6)
An article in the Urdu Daily Jang, London edition, 28 February, by its columnist Dr. Safdar Mehmood, was of interest to us in more ways than one. It relates one of the moral tales from Rumi’s Masnavi and draws a parallel between the villain of the story and the present-day Muslim fanatics. Our first interest in it stems from a debate on our blog (www.ahmadiyya.org/WordPress/), in which a virulent opponent of the Ahmadiyya Movement alleged that Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad had described a scene of illicit sexual relations in graphic terms. We replied that he had used no such terms but quite harmless language, and that in fact he was simply condemning the immoral behaviour of some members of a certain Hindu religious movement. This particular extreme movement on the one hand levelled all kinds of vile allegations relating to the marriages of the Holy Prophet Muhammad and the teachings of Islam on sexual relations, and on the other hand the same movement considered it allowable under its religion that its followers could resort to extra-marital sexual relations in order to conceive male children.
When our opponent persisted with his accusation against that writing of Hazrat Mirza sahib, I pointed out to him that the internationally renowned Muslim spiritual leader Maulana Jalal-ud-Din Rumi had written parables using far more sexually explicit terms to condemn hypocrisy and evil of all kinds. Even a British oriental scholar at the beginning of the 20th century, and translator of Rumi’s book Masnavi into English, namely, Prof. R. Nicholson, was shocked by Rumi’s language. However, in the 1960s, a Pakistani historian and academic, Dr. Afzal Iqbal, had exonerated Rumi by arguing that this usage was not “pornographic” but necessary to convey the depth of evil that Rumi was exposing.1
Anyhow, the response given by our adversary to my argument that Rumi had portrayed such depictions was that he was prepared to reject the writings of Rumi, and Rumi was no authority that he was bound by. I pointed out that it was all too easy for him, posting to our forum under a pseudonym, to make this declaration but he would be unlikely to take this stand openly in front of Muslims as a known person. He would not risk their ire and wrath because an anti-Ahmadiyya activist, like him, seeks popularity among the general Muslim public. That is the name of the anti-Ahmadiyya game. Rumi is too highly renowned and revered among Muslims, as I showed by some quotes, for our opponent to denounce him so casually.
It was some weeks after our debate that I came across the article in Jang mentioned above. The columnist briefly introduces Rumi as follows:
“You are aware that Maulana Jalal-ud-Din Rumi (1207–1273) was a great spiritual figure, religious scholar, philosopher and poet. Allama Iqbal considers him as his mentor. The Masnavi of Maulana Rumi is a living book which will remain till the Day of Judgment. This is the reason why some scholars refer to his Masnavi as ‘the Quran in the Iranian language’.”
This, then, shows the high repute of Rumi. Even supposing our anonymous debater is prepared to disown him, Rumi is certainly an authority for Muslims generally.
Now to the moral tale from Masnavi quoted in this Jang column, and what it illustrates according to the columnist. This instructive story relates that there was a muazzin (one who calls out the Azan) of a mosque whose voice was very coarse and jarring to the ears, and people disliked his manner of giving the Azan [call to prayer]. Out of respect, however, they did not want to mention it to him. They then came up with the plan of collecting money to send him for Hajj [Pilgrimage], as they would then have relief from him for several months (as in those days this was the length of time that journeys to and from the Hajj took). Naturally he was most thrilled, as very few could go for Hajj in those days, and rushed to leave. On his long travel to the Hajj, he once broke his journey in a mosque, and when the prayer time came, he out of habit went up the minaret and sounded the Azan. After the prayers, a local wealthy man entered the mosque. People in the mosque were surprised to see him because he was a Zoroastrian, not a Muslim. He came forward, looked for the muazzin, and started lavishing great gifts and money on him! Everyone was even more startled now, and asked him why he, a non-Muslim, was being so generous to a muazzin in a mosque. He replied:
“My daughter wanted to leave her religion and become a Muslim. All of the family were trying to convince her not to embrace Islam but she was determined. Today she heard his Azan which repelled her so much that she has changed her mind, so I am grateful to the muazzin for this and want to reward him.”
Dr. Safdar Mehmood then explains that this story comes to his mind by the suicide attacks, upon Muslims by Muslims, in Pakistan. Do the perpetrators not know, he asks, that by their actions they are repelling non-Muslims further from Islam and alienating the people of the world from the religion of God?
Dr. Mehmood refers to surveys and studies showing that after the September 11, 2001 attacks, one side effect was that interest in Islam by the general public in the West increased and the circulation of the Quran went up as people wanted to find out more about Islam. However, since suicide attacks spread in the Muslim world itself, and lately in particular in Pakistan, Islam is being confirmed in their minds as a religion of violence and, he writes, they are being alienated from Islam just as the Zoroastrian girl in Rumi’s story became disenchanted with Islam because of the ugly sound of the Azan of that muazzin.
He further writes that a Muslim intellectual living in the West has advised him in God’s name
“to make those carrying out suicide attacks understand that by their actions they are misleading the people of the world about the peace-loving religion of God and that their final abode is not the garden of paradise but hell”.
He ends his article by saying in despair:
“I am wondering how can I make them understand this?”
We may offer him the following analysis, written by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1899:
“A Jain or a Buddhist is afraid of and avoids killing even a mosquito or a flea, but, alas! there are many among us Muslims who, while they kill an innocent man or commit wanton murder, are not afraid of the powerful God, Who rates human life higher than that of all the animals. What is this callousness and cruelty and want of sympathy due to? It is due to this — that from their very childhood, stories and anecdotes and wrong views of the doctrine of Jihad are dinned into their ears and inculcated into their hearts, the result being that gradually they become morally dead and cease to feel the heinousness of their hateful actions; nay, rather, the man who murders another man unawares and thus brings ruin to the murdered man’s family thinks that he has done a meritorious deed; or rather, that he has made the most of an opportunity to win favour with his community. As no lectures or sermons are delivered in our country to stop such evils — and if there are any such lectures, they have an element of hypocrisy in them — the common people think approvingly of such misdeeds.” (Jesus in India, p. 1)
The answer to the question which puzzles Dr. Mehmood,
“how can I make them understand this?”,
is to refute the commonly-prevailing, false concept of jihad and show that the Quran, the teachings of Islam and the life of the Holy Prophet Muhammad have no part in such intolerance and wanton violence.
Footnotes:
- See Afzal Iqbal, The Life and Work of Jalal-ud-Din Rumi, London, 1983, chapter 7. ↩︎