Az kufr-o ze Islām birun sahra-yi ast / Ma-ra be miyan-e an faza sawda-yi astAref cho bedan resid sar ra benahad / Na kufr-o na Islām-o na anja ja-yi ast

(Beyond unbelief and Islam, there is a desert plain; In the midst of that expanse, we have a passion/longing. When the knowing mystic arrives there, he lays down his head [in prostration], for there is no unbelief, no Islam, and nowhere in that place.)

Many readers have come across Rumi’s oft-quoted immortal statement, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." But actually, it's a free, interpretive recreation by translator Coleman Barks (who cannot read and write Persian) rather than a literal translation of Rumi’s original Persian text. The original Persian quote and its translation appear in the beginning of the article. Cambridge-based orientalist, professor of Persian and arguably the greatest Western authority on Rumi, Reynold A Nicholson (1868-1945), considered this quote of Rumi as one of his most sublime thoughts that transcends itself in depth and profundity. En passant, Rumi belongs to the honoured category of wisdom teachers that would include: The Buddha, Plato, Ecclesiastes, Lao Tzu, the author of the Gospel of Thomas, Meister Eckhart, Shakespeare, Goethe, Whitman, and Emerson. He can stand with any of them in terms of his intellectual contribution and possibly beyond any of them in spiritual depth. Once, when the great German scholar Anne Marie Schimmel was asked to compare Goethe and Rumi, she responded, “The great........

© Free Press Journal