Summary
This book is supposedly the longest single-authored mystical poem in the world. Coming in at a little over twenty-five thousand Persian couplets which are the equivalent of fifty thousand European lines, the Spiritual Verses are twice as long as Dante’s Divine Comedy. Rumi, a Sufi mystic from the 13th century, puts together a group of fables that are connected by metaphor and style as opposed to any plot. Many stories turn out to be like a Russian nesting doll, containing many smaller, distantly related stories to further enhance the author’s ideas. Rumi, at points, floats above time and place to speak of universal experiences, while at other times he is firmly rooted in his Islamic perspective.
Thoughts
I am always slightly at a loss in reviewing a book like this. How can anyone give a “star rating” to spiritual text? The amount of arrogance it takes to make a definitive rating on something like the Quaran or the Tao Te Ching should be a crime, yet I’ve given star ratings to both of those books because as a ‘modern’, I subscribe to the delusion of chronological superiority, underestimating just how wise those that came before were. With that out of the way I will proceed. Most books you read expecting the text to tell you things, but with works like the Spiritual Verses, I find that this process is often reversed. We come to these types of text to tell them things, like a preacher that writes an entire sermon around a single verse, the whole idea of works is that there is more than meets the eye. This creates a problem for the casual reader, which in this case was me. Without the desire to spend the years required to really become acquainted with the author’s worldview and mythology, the text often felt hollow, and its morals flat. Much like my experience with the Tao Te Ching, I was left with the feeling of an outsider listening in on an exotic religious ceremony, there would be small tidbits that would cause me to nod my head in agreement, but on the whole, the experience of the text ranged from ambivalence to occasional antagonism. In the end, I think I will continue to, like the rest of my Western comrades, quote Rumi out of context, pretending that I completely understand what he is saying. This way I can cash in on his spiritual status without having to do the legwork required to have any of my own.