Rumi's Gift to the Prophet

Gomishan is a name I might never have heard in my entire life had I not attended a Maulid invitation. This small town in Bandar Turkaman, far in the north of Iran, holds a face the world rarely imagines when it hears the name Iran. Its inhabitants are Turkmen people, the majority of whom follow the Ahlusunnah. They live side by side in a country better known as a Shia nation of Persian ethnicity.

The Maulid event had only just begun after Isha. I sat among Turkmen women whose language I did not understand at all. Only Atefeh, a young woman most fluent in Persian there, occasionally translated the proceedings. When the tavashih, praises for the Prophet in the Turkmen language, began to be chanted, Atefeh’s eyes welled up. I looked at her and suddenly realised there is a kind of longing that needs no translator.

At the end of the gathering, I embraced Atefeh and the Turkmen women. I did not understand their language, but the warmth felt familiar, like the embrace of fellow selawatan congregants in my village. Two cultures, two languages, but one shared breath: longing for a man who died fourteen centuries ago, yet has never truly departed from the hearts of those who love him.

That experience brought me back to my childhood, when I sat squeezed together on the floor of the surau, listening to the call-and-response selawat, while the women distributed rice and side dishes they had been cooking since dawn. It turned out that the longing I found in a remote corner of Iran was not something foreign. Rather, it was the longing that had grown up with me since childhood.

Then the question arose: what makes longing for someone separated by fourteen centuries able to pierce the barriers of language, ethnicity, and even school of thought? Perhaps the answer lies not merely in the Maulid ceremony, but in the figure whose exemplary love remains alive long after his death.

One of the most powerful voices keeping that longing alive is a Sufi poet named Jalaluddin Rumi. Interestingly, the breadth of Rumi’s love and outlook, often regarded as tolerant and inclusive, did not arise from distancing himself from Islam. Franklin D. Lewis, in Rumi: Past and Present, East and West, shows that Rumi’s spirituality is deeply rooted in the Islamic tradition he studied from childhood, including the example of the Prophet Muhammad. Rumi’s spiritual longing, therefore, is a path that leads ever deeper towards the Prophet who was his exemplar.

Rumi himself stated it very firmly in one of his quatrains from the Divan-e Shams: ‘I am the servant of the Qur’an as long as life remains in me, I am dust at the threshold of Muhammad the Chosen. If anyone quotes my words other than this, I disavow him and that utterance.’

That statement is almost like a pledge. Behind the breadth of his thought and the language of his love, Rumi places two things as unshakeable foundations: the Qur’an and loyalty to the Prophet Muhammad.

For Rumi, discussion of the Prophet Muhammad does not stop at his life as a human being born in Mecca, receiving revelation, and conveying the message. Behind that historical figure, Rumi sees a far deeper essence, beginning not from history, but from love.

In the story of the Mi’raj, Rumi writes that God’s love and the secret of His affection for the Beloved became the primary cause for the unveiling of all the veils of creation. On that night of meeting, Rumi writes, God said to the Prophet: ‘Were it not for you, I would not have created the universe.’ This expression, known as Laulaka, is for Rumi not merely praise of the Prophet’s virtue, but an affirmation that creation is not a standalone cosmological event, but an event of love, and Muhammad is the point at which that love reaches its perfection.

Elsewhere in the Masnavi, Rumi describes love as a force capable of boiling the oceans, crushing mountains into dust, splitting the sky, and shaking the earth. Yet amid all that power, he writes one line that becomes the core of his view: with Muhammad, love finds its true partner. Because of that love, Rumi writes, the heavens and the earth were created, so that humanity might understand how exalted love itself is. Rumi even calls Muhammad the ‘Sovereign of Laulaka’, the secret that is the core of the entire universe.

From that point, Rumi’s worldview about the Prophet takes its most complete form: if the universe exists because of God’s love for Muhammad, the Prophet’s presence is not merely an event that has passed, but an energy that continually animates all existence. Rumi writes it plainly: ‘Rend your veil, O Muhammad, for the world is only a body, and You are the spirit that gives it life.’ (Masnavi, Book 4, verse 1454)

In Rumi’s cosmology, a body without a spirit is merely a corpse. It exists, but it does not live, does not move, does not feel. By calling the world a body and the Prophet its spirit, Rumi places Muhammad as the source of life that continues to flow to this day.

From the love that created the universe, Rumi then shows another side of Mustafa that is perhaps most touching: not only the Prophet as the beloved of God or the spirit animating the world, but also the Prophet who is present so close to the suffering of ordinary human beings.

Rumi writes in Masnavi Book 6, verse 482: ‘The best of people is the one who benefits other people, O master. If you are not a stone, why are you in a barren field?’

That parable is simple but sharp. A stone exists, but it provides no shade; it is merely silent. For Rumi, to be human means to bring something to the lives of others, and Mustafa is the highest exemplar of that principle.