In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  LLOYD RIDGEON: Rumi occupies a stable middle ground, in the respect that he’s not intellectual, he’s not wild or untrammelled. He represents a form of Sufism that does emphasise that degree of mysticism whereby people can really understand what God is all about, become near to God.

  Carole Hillenbrand turned to the poetry, starting with the Divan, an enormous work of some 3,500 poems or more, with lyrical poems called ghazals, as well as quatrains and odes. Most of the time, the poems are about love, the passionate yearning both for God and also for a human beloved, and many are written in the first-person singular.

  CAROLE HILLENBRAND: There’s a wonderful line in the Divan: ‘We were once in heaven, we were friends of the angels, let us all return there, that is our city.’ In other words, there’s yearning to be re-joined to where we were in eternity before we were born. It’s an echo of the Qur’an, which says, ‘We belong to God and to God we are returning,’ and, in the meantime, the human soul is yearning to be reunited.

  The poems are quite short, Alan Williams said, like sonnets, about fifteen to twenty lines, and they seem to have been composed almost by improvisation, experimenting with some fifty-five different meters across the collection. He read first from the original Persian, before giving his own translation of one of the most famous lines of the Divan, using a meter similar to the original.

  ALAN WILLIAMS:

  Dead was I then

  I came to life

  Weeping I then

  Started to laugh

  The kingdom of love came

  I became kingdom of perpetual love

  This then goes on for another twenty verses, that’s one single verse I’ve just quoted. They’re quite long by English sonnet standards, but they’re very discrete, each one of them is like a jewel of many facets to contemplate.

  There is great variety in the imagery among the complex set of ideas, and they are flashed through with brilliant insights.

  CAROLE HILLENBRAND: They come like comets from outside in the darkness and shed light on us. Or, alternatively, like fireworks that spread sparks in wide directions or, indeed, sometimes the inspiration coming from the imagery is like an electric current, sometimes on and sometimes off. But all these images have an incredibly powerful effect on the listener. And the listener is the word, because they’re musical as well.

  The Masnavi is Rumi’s second masterwork. There is a distinction between his two major works, Lloyd Ridgeon said, the Masnavi and the Dīwān-e Shams, in that the Masnavi is didactic, teaching the specifics of what the dervish would do, what the Sufis were doing, whereas the Dīwān-e Shams is very different and has Rumi’s own personal experiences.

  LLOYD RIDGEON: When you read the Divan, you can actually get to understand what Rumi personally is experiencing in terms of his separation from Shams, in terms of his love for Shams, and so forth. In the Masnavi, you get very short stories and sometimes they’re short and then he digresses and comes back to that short story again; it’s something that really hooks the reader.

  One of the themes in Rumi’s work is mercy, one of the predominant features of Sufism, and it is expressed in the very first line of the Dīwān-e Shams, which Lloyd Ridgeon translated as ‘sudden resurrection, endless mercy’. It is an idea of mercy, fed into an ecumenical perspective in Rumi. He engaged both men and women, which may help explain why Sufism was popular in the medieval period, and he touched on experiences that related to Muslims, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians.

  MELVYN BRAGG: He converted, we are told, (besides Muslims) Christians and Jews as well?

  LLOYD RIDGEON: Well, that’s what we’re told by the hagiographies, now whether that’s true or not is another question. But it’s certainly possible to read those kinds of stories into the Masnavi. There’s a very famous story about Rumi and the blind men, when, of course, the blind men go into the room and each touches a part of the elephant, one person touches the tail, one person touches the elephant’s ear, another the leg, and they all have an aspect of the truth.

  Carole Hillenbrand mentioned another line attributed to Rumi, which suggested he was respectful of all faiths: ‘I am not a worshipper of the cross or the crescent / I am not a Zoroastrian or a Jew.’ While not found in Rumi’s original works, this captured the spirit of what he was saying and, ‘as Voltaire would say, if it didn’t exist, then it ought to have done’.

  The ghazals of the Divan can be translated beautifully into rhythmic verses, but the Masnavi is much more demanding. Persian has no indefinite or definite article that is separate from the word and no pronouns that are commonly used, so trying to cram the syllables into an iambic line, Alan Williams said, was like fitting a quart in a pint pot. The Masnavi is written more fully as Masnavi-i Ma’navi, which Alan Williams told us meant the spiritual Masnavi or the Masnavi of meaning, the couplets of meaning. The text is vast and contains over 200 stories.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: Sometimes they’re extremely short, I mean two lines, and they can be in the mouths of animals, birds, flies even, people, of course, heroes from scripture, and so on, but all of these stories are just the husk, as Rumi calls it, they’re the husk because what he’s trying to get to is the meaning. And so the Masnavi is an ocean of meaning, and reading it is like being drowned, it’s like being plunged into a vast ocean.

  All of the images are ways to give the imagination food for thought. Alan Williams read the first of the thirty-five lines of ‘The Song of the Reed’, in Persian, and then gave his own translation.

  Rumi’s followers founded the Mevlevi Order of Sufis, known outside Turkey for their whirling dervishes.

  ALAN WILLIAMS:

  Listen to this reed as it is grieving;

  It’s telling of the tale of separations.

  ‘Since I was severed from the bed of reeds,

  In my cry men and women have lamented.

  I need the breast that’s torn to shreds by parting

  To give expression to the pain of heartache.

  Whoever finds himself left far from home

  Looks forward to the day of his reunion.’

  One of the most engaging things about Rumi’s poetry in the Masnavi, according to Lloyd Ridgeon, and his storytelling is that he used very simple language that everyone could understand. In Tehran today, people would be able to recite his poetry and find it comprehensible, whereas in the UK, Melvyn noted, ‘we can’t recite Chaucer back to each other’.

  One of these Masnavi stories, Alan Williams continued, looks like a romance when it starts, but it turns very dark. A king falls in love with a slave girl, only for her to fall sick and for him to discover that this is love sickness; she was already in love with someone else, a goldsmith far away in Samarkand.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: He then hauls this goldsmith all the way back to, presumably, Konya and poisons him, he poisons him slowly, so he turns ugly, the girl falls out of love with her lover and she dies. The whole thing ends badly but, in the meantime, there has been a divine messenger who comes down from heaven and tells the king what’s really wrong with the slave girl. And the king has fallen in love with the divine messenger because he knows that his love for the slave girl was just a love of form.

  One of Lloyd Ridgeon’s favourite stories in the Masnavi is about Moses and the shepherd. The shepherd is making a prayer to God, saying, ‘Oh, God, I’ll do anything for you, I’ll give you some milk, I’ll give you shoes.’ Moses, as a theologian, castigates him because he believes that he should not be using such inappropriate language, and the shepherd has to go away and feels downcast. God then chastises Moses for using such language to a poor shepherd, who was praising God in the way that he saw best.

  LLOYD RIDGEON: What’s most interesting about Rumi, of course, are his images. In his works, he talks, for example, about the ‘effervescence of the chickpea bubbling away in the water’, which is a metaphor for the individual and the experience of God. And it’s these kinds of images that make Rumi’s message really get across.

  While Rumi was w
riting, he was surrounded by political turmoil. He had travelled thousands of miles from the eastern extremity of the Islamic world, Carole Hillenbrand said, from Afghanistan to the western extremity, thinking that he was escaping from the Mongols. He was in exile, which added a dimension to his‘ Reed’ stories, severed from his original home. Then the Mongols came to Konya quite early on, in 1243, and they took over.

  CAROLE HILLENBRAND: Yet Rumi manages to evoke admiration in the Mongol protector, who is Persian. And apparently Rumi was very much welcomed by the Mongol agent and even did spiritual concerts in this man’s house. It’s a really difficult time for the whole of the Muslim world, dreadful bloodshed, demographic movements and so on. It’s just the worst possible thing to have happened, and yet he produces this sublime work.

  The kind of poetry that Rumi was writing in the Masnavi was on an altogether different scale from the ghazal. He took on the voices of many different registers in the poem, Alan Williams said, speaking as the author, the sheik, a grandfather, the old man, telling stories as though talking to a child, interrupting himself with analogies that are quite intellectual. He segues from speeches into discourses that become quite mystical or become moral discourses.

  ALAN WILLIAMS: Then they turn into ecstasies. And then he stops the whole proceedings and says, ‘Silence.’ And there’s a behaviour, a procedure that the reader becomes used to, almost as if learning the ropes of how to swim in this ocean. And it’s really an experience of going through the stages of mystical elevation. The reader himself, herself, feels raised up inside, raised up in the imagination. It’s a cathartic experience reading it, an uplifting experience reading it.

  It can be difficult to assess how popular Rumi was in his own lifetime. There was a history written at the time by an individual called Ibn Bibi, Lloyd Ridgeon said, and he did not mention Rumi at all in this history of Seljuqs in Konya. In the generation after his death, there were aspects of veneration of Rumi and there were hagiographies written about him. Rumi’s son, Sultân Walad, composed poetry about the Masnavi.

  LLOYD RIDGEON: Other Sufi orders are composing their own commentaries on the ‘Song of the Reed’. And, by the sixteenth century, we have a very famous Persian poet called Jami who says that, although [Rumi] was not a prophet, he had a book, i.e. he’s comparing the Masnavi to the Qur’an – that’s an incredible compliment to Rumi.

  Rumi is extremely popular still in the former Persian Empire, the countries ending in ‘stan’, as Carole Hillenbrand put it, and in Turkey as well as Iran. There is a wide Iranian diaspora sharing his work, with 250,000 Iranians living in Los Angeles alone. There has been a ‘Rumi boom’ in the modern age, Lloyd Ridgeon noted, where everyone wanted ‘a piece of Rumi’.

  LLOYD RIDGEON: Even massive popstars: like Bob Dylan released an album of Christmas carols in 2009 and he did a video to ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ and, halfway through the video, you get images of whirling dervishes. We also have Madonna reciting poetry from Rumi. Philip Glass has been involved in a massive project related to Rumi. And it’s all part of this huge project, which has perhaps been spearheaded by people like Coleman Barks and Robert Bly. It just goes on and on and on.

  TITUS OATES AND HIS ‘POPISH PLOT’

  In 1678, Titus Oates claimed he had discovered a Catholic conspiracy to shoot Charles II. He knew all the details, as he had invented every one of them himself; it was one of the great works of historical fiction. For three years, his fabricated ‘Popish Plot’ inflamed fears that there were secret Catholics in power, conspiring to return England to Catholicism under the king’s brother James, Duke of York. Soon Charles banned Catholics from London; crowds paraded, burning effigies of the pope through the city; vigilantes hunted for signs of supposed sympathisers, throwing them in prison. There were executions of innocent priests, lords, even archbishops, and Titus Oates basked in the adulation of a grateful public. Though he was eventually caught out, the fear of plots and of the mob left a deep mark on politics and religious tolerance for decades.

  With Melvyn to discuss Titus Oates and his ‘Popish Plot’ were: Clare Jackson, senior tutor and director of studies in history at Trinity Hall, Cambridge; Mark Knights, professor of history at the University of Warwick; and Peter Hinds, associate professor of English at the University of Plymouth.

  Titus Oates in the pillory.

  In Great Britain in the 1670s, there was a perception among the Protestant majority that Catholics, in general, were a problem. There was a distinction, though, between those perceptions and the experiences that Protestants had of Catholics they knew.

  CLARE JACKSON: The day-to-day reality is that Catholics are a very small minority, the underground nature of Catholic devotion makes it quite difficult to know exactly how many, but maybe 60,000 out of a population of 5–5.5 million. So just over 1 per cent or, even in a densely cosmopolitan city like London, not more than 2 per cent, but disproportionately perceived to be a much greater threat than that.

  There was a whole edifice of penal laws, dating back to the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, that made attendance at Church of England services on a weekly basis compulsory for all adult men and women, with an obligation to take communion at least three times a year. Some of the penalties for recusancy would be standing fines of £20 a month, which may equate to £2,000 a month in today’s terms, so really quite ruinous. For all that, most Catholics aimed to observe their faith unobtrusively and, when it came to people in their locality, neighbours and friends, Protestants might be much more nervous about reporting on Catholics who would then face financial ruin.

  History cast a very long shadow over this period, Clare Jackson continued. In the Elizabethan period, there had been conspiracies associated with Mary, Queen of Scots, and there was the threat of the Spanish Armada, then there was the Gunpowder Plot under King James and then the Irish Rebellion of 1641, which was aimed at annihilating Protestants in Ireland.

  CLARE JACKSON: One of the themes that we hear in the Popish Plot is ‘41 is come again’. Also, geographically, Protestantism is not doing that well at this stage in European geopolitics, it’s been consigned to the northern peripheries. The big European superpowers, France and Spain, are Catholic, and Protestantism is flourishing, but very much on the fringes of Holland, northern Germany, Scandinavia, Scotland and England. But there’s always Ireland out to the west.

  This fear of potential encirclement, geographically, together with a history of popish plots was a toxic mix. Added to this was a fear of post-Reformation orders like the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, who had international finance and backing for their mission to bring England back into the fold of the Catholic Church and would loom larger in popular imagination than the quiet majority of Catholics.

  There was also suspicion of Charles II from before his Restoration in 1660, when he had been courting the favour of Catholic powers to regain his throne. Once restored, Mark Knights said, Charles sought to moderate the rather punitive religious settlement that parliament wanted to impose on Catholics and on Protestant dissenters, and that created a lot of suspicion about his real intentions.

  MARK KNIGHTS: Coupled to that was the fact that his brother James, Duke of York, had also shown evidence of his distancing from the Church of England and embracing the Catholic faith. Charles’s problem really was about perceptions of Catholicism at court. And those are also exacerbated by the fact that, from 1670, his mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, was both Catholic and French and therefore personified the two fears that Englishmen at the time had about the threat from popery.

  In 1672, England went to war against the Dutch, the only other major Protestant power in Europe at the time, in alliance with Catholic France. That was one of the big turning points in popular opinion.

  MARK KNIGHTS: Why was the king taking Protestant England to war against Protestant Holland in alliance with Catholic France? And that, retrospectively, seems a turning point; Edward Dering, for example, who keeps a diary in this period, records in 1681 that that
’s one of the major points in this anxiety about ‘the growth of popery and arbitrary government’, as Andrew Marvell was to put it.

  Titus Oates was something of a rogue, with a history of disappointment and humiliation. That was how Peter Hinds began to describe him, and those were some of his better qualities. He was born in 1649, the son of a Baptist preacher, and his life went from bad to worse.

  PETER HINDS: He was sent to a couple of schools and he was expelled, usually for reasons to do with money; he got into disputes about money. He went up to Cambridge, he was sent to Gonville & Caius College. He was transferred to St John’s College and then he was kicked out of Cambridge, again over a dispute about money, so he left Cambridge without a degree.

  MELVYN BRAGG: He wouldn’t pay for a coat that somebody had made for him.

  PETER HINDS: Exactly, a dispute over a bill with a tailor.

  By 1670, Titus Oates managed to get a licence to preach and took holy orders. In 1673, he found a living in the village of Bobbing in Kent, but this went badly and his parishioners accused him of drunkenness, lewd behaviour, unorthodox views, blasphemous views, even and stealing. He was dismissed from this living and became a curate in Hastings for a while, where his father had a living.