wild, nourishing nature..................

 

     If a plant is left too long in its grow-bag, its roots reaching the plastic will turn round and round and round, and finding no outlet into wild, nourishing nature, will, having nowhere else to go, re-enter the exhausted sour soil and, thriving till now, the plane, root and branch will begin to sicken.

     It would be foolish to suggest that Hebrew prophecy, Greek philosophy and science, Roman engineering and law are an exhausted sour soil, but it mightn't be at all foolish to suggest that they lack certain kinds of cultural nourishment that we now need.

-John Moriarty, Dreamtime

Amongst...............................

The perfect mystic is not a ecstatic devotee lost in contemplation of Oneness, nor a saintly recluse shunning all commerce with mankind, but "the true saint" goes in and out amongst the people and eats and sleeps with them and buys and sells in the market and marries and takes part in social intercourse, and never forgets God for a single moment.

-attributed to Abu Sa'id Abul Khayr

Rumi and the Mongols..................

     Yet as Genghis Khan was establishing his brutish militarist state in Central Asia - an absolute threat to the religion of Islam - curiously resilient were the mystical practices of Sufism, already established in the western provinces and revivified by those Khorasni immigrants, including Baha Valad and his family.  Sufi lodges became welcome cultural outposts of refinement, where sheikhs, or spiritual leaders, offered messages of hope and transcendence, friendship and love, as well as musical concerts, poetry, and dance, evoking rapture.  Sufi orders, loosely similar to Western religious orders, were beginning to multiply and would become more formalized in the next decades and centuries.  As the German Middle East scholar Annemarie Shimmel summed up the contrast:  "This period of the most political disaster was, at the same time, a period of highest religious and mystical activity."
     The full force of the Mongol campaigns would be concentrated in two aggressive phases - the first, the conquest of Central Asia, and the second, commandeered by the grandsons of Genghis Khan, marked by excursions into the Middle East and Anatolia in the 1250s.  A newly configured world map spread contiguous Mongol-controlled territories from Korea to Hungary.  From the age of ten until his death, Rumi coped with the turmoil caused by this churning realpolitik of the Mongols.  Yet either ignoring, or because of, the pain and suffering caused to his family and community, as an adult, Rumi stuck resolutely to his surety of an "invisible hand" in these dark historical events: 

          While everyone flees from the Tatars
               We serve the Creator of the Tatars

He framed the issue even more starkly for his circle, often immigrants from Khorasan, writing, "If you are afraid of the Tatars, you don't believe in God."

-Brad Gooch, Rumi's Secret:  The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love