I first heard the poetry of Molana Rumi when I was a child staring out at the Hudson River from an eighth-floor apartment in New Jersey. My father was reciting a poem about the mastaan—the Lovedrunk—tearing off their chains, or “mind-forg’d manacles” as William Blake would say. The meanings eluded me at the time, but the propulsive, muscular rhythms of the original Persian text left their impression.
Article continues after advertisement
My parents were young doctors who had emigrated from Iran to America with one suitcase of clothing and two suitcases of books, among them, a 1936 edition of the Masnavi, Rumi’s vast book of narrative and didactic poetry, handed down from my grandfather. Eventually they would host monthly poetry nights, a Persian tradition called shab e sher. Friends would come over and recite poetry in rounds till the wee hours of the morning. I was one of the children on the fringes, listening in, having no idea that Rumi would become a companion for life.
Looking back, I see the medieval sage and mystic’s verses as a luminous antidote to the bewildering materialism of American life. Looking around at our warring and ecologically devastated world, I hear them as urgent calls to reconsider the ways we treat each other and our world. Always, I hear the beauty, tenderness, exhilaration, and care that suffuse his poetry.
Rumi brought everything he had learned and everything he had seen of the world to his poetry. He brought his ecstasy and despair, his wonder and frustration.
Water is my second volume of translations of Rumi’s poetry, following Gold, and like Gold, it is drawn almost entirely from Rumi’s collection of lyric poetry, the Divan e Shams e Tabriz which contains more than 3,200 ghazals and quatrains. Like Gold as well, Water comprises fifty-four poems. Given the vast body of work there is to choose from, my selection is inevitably partial, in both senses of the word. My choice of material was intuitive, but as I worked on the book, as the book came together, it took on a specific character of its own. Gold highlights Rumi’s rhapsodic, ecstatic side. Water, by contrast, is Gold’s moody cousin. In its pages, Love responds to and is born from the challenges of earthly existence.
Rumi was an ecstatic, but he was also a man of his time and world. As a child, he was exposed to both extreme beauty and brutality. When he was around eleven years of age, he and his family left their home in present-day Afghanistan and began a ten-year journey through what are now Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, sometimes traveling with a caravan of up to three hundred people, sometimes fleeing towns ahead of the Mongolian army which was pushing across Asia and wreaking havoc on village after village.
We can imagine Rumi traveling through majestic landscapes of desert, mountain, meadow, and forest, inhaling the scent of wildflowers, gazing at skies brimming with stars, waking to choirs of birds, and wandering through rose gardens, cypress groves, peach orchards, and bazaars of aromatic spices, all of which make their way into his poetry. In one ear, he would have heard folktales, poems, scripture, and the lively banter of the caravan; and in the other, news of the atrocities and panic sweeping the land as Genghis Khan’s armies invaded nearby towns, massacred inhabitants, and left behind smoldering ruins.
The son of an erudite Islamic theologian, Rumi was encouraged to pray, fast, and study scripture as well as mathematics, philosophy, literature, and the languages of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, all of which shaped his worldview and eventually his poetry. Rumi would follow in his father’s footsteps to become a theologian in Konya, offering sermons to thousands, until around the age of forty when Shams of Tabriz, an itinerant Sufi mystic, drew him from the pulpit into a life of poetry and music.
Religious conservatives of the time were wary of music and sought to delimit its presence in daily life, but Shams embraced it as a portal to the divine. With Shams’s guidance, Rumi became an avid practitioner of sama, as deep listening and whirling dance were called. “Music, the sweetest orator of all, / has climbed into the pulpit,” he affirms in one of his poems. “I’ll sell my tongue now / and buy a thousand ears.” Music awakened Rumi’s muse. During sama gatherings, while whirling to the beat of a drum, he improvised his poems, which friends hurriedly scribbled down.
Rumi brought everything he had learned and everything he had seen of the world to his poetry. He brought his ecstasy and despair, his wonder and frustration. Many of his poems are sung in praise of divine Love. Others describe the beauties and mysteries of the natural world. Others yet confront the tragic dimension of human life. In Water, for instance, we hear Rumi address the warmongers of his own time:
What kind of lightning are you, setting farms on fire?
What kind of cloud are you, raining down stones?
What kind of hunter?
Caught in your own trap—
a thief stealing from your own house.
Rumi was very much aware of the disfiguring power of what Sufis call nafs eh amaareh—the imperious ego—one aspect of the transmutable nafs, or self. “Enthralled by stuff and status,” prone to greed, a lust for dominion, narcissism, and even brutality, the imperious ego blocks out or, for all its bluster, hides fearfully from the divine. It is, Rumi often says, an “uncooked,” immature aspect of human nature, and perhaps because it is all too fixated on hording worldly goods, it is all too tragically evident in worldly life, taking the reins time and again.
A foundational assumption in Sufi philosophy is that the nafs is not a 0xed, static entity but a work in progress, a malleable entity, compounded of desires and distractions, which needs to be directed into true awareness. If one has an active conscience, a willingness to examine oneself honestly, and a commitment to spiritual practice, Sufis suggest, evolution into a more compassionate, relaxed, loving, and selfless state of existence is possible. And this process, they believe, is life’s most important and fruitful mission. As Shams said, “Souls come to Earth to ripen…to attain the true wealth of maturity…the nafs has to evolve, this is the only way…”
Throughout his poetry, Rumi describes his own transformation and encourages ours while questioning the value system that puts plunderers on pedestals, prioritizes material gain over spiritual connection, and champions control over others rather than mutual fulfillment. In the process he redefines maturity, wealth, success. For Rumi the true king is not an authoritarian, lost in ego, devoid of conscience, wreaking havoc on the world, but Love’s servant, a generous, selfless force, “nourishing as mother’s milk.” “Master,” he says, “I’ll leave you [in the fire] / till you’re cooked, / till you’re no longer a slave to your mind, / till you’re its master.”
His poetry is filled with startling leaps of imagery and thought, praise and critique, confessions and invitations, and through it all, his concern for humanity is palpable.
In Water, the word “Love” appears 96 times. An intangible force with a very tangible impact, Love takes on many forms in Rumi’s poetry. Most often he speaks of what the Greeks call agape, a boundless, divine Love, and less often of eros or romantic love. Sometimes there is no distinction between the two, and sometimes how we approach one opens the way to the other. In the poem that begins, “Tomorrow I’ll visit Love’s tailor,” Rumi notes the ephemeral nature of romantic love, visiting the tailor in his “robe of melancholy, passion, entanglements, and infatuations.” The tailor “snips at it. / He snips away one lover, / stitches in another. // This seam might hold. / This seam might split. / I give my heart anyway.” Knowing the risk and loving anyway, he comes to know divine union. Whether this or that connection endures or not, a larger Love, a shoreless Ocean of Love, a Oneness continues to beckon and is ours to experience if only we allow ourselves to.
In Rumi’s poetry, this capital-L Love incarnates itself in all sorts of ways. Sometimes Love is aabeh hayat—the water of life, a force that bubbles up from the depths of the soul and flows through us, watering the ground within and between us, ensuring that gardens rather than battlefields emerge. Sometimes Love is a fire burning away egoic narratives and projections that obscure our sense of interconnection and keep us separate. Love is a stream and a shoreless ocean, wine and bread, a teacher and friend—“its face, a torch, filling the house with light.” It is warmth and civility. It is our ultimate home, “Wherever [we] go, it goes with [us].” Love, challenges us, wakes us from our slumber, “illuminates our blind eyes,” “washing off the weight of days,” “arriving from no side” and standing “on every side.” Love is a 360-degree embrace of creation, a compassionate acceptance of what is, and also a force that drives us to discern and refine, creating more welcoming worlds within and without us. Love is our unobscured essence, at the root of the root of all creation, a force that brings life into existence and sets all particles whirling. Above all, Love is a practice. “Child of flesh and bone, you are a child of soul. / Love is your trade, your mission, your calling. / Why do you busy yourself with so many other tasks?”
Rumi is rooting for us. His poetry is filled with startling leaps of imagery and thought, praise and critique, confessions and invitations, and through it all, his concern for humanity is palpable and his central commitment—human liberation through the cultivation of Love—unwavering. His poems are ravishing and rapturous, knotty and demanding. As I can say from my own experience of many years, they do not let you go. Rumi is a dazzler and he is also a good friend. In the midst of life’s challenges, his lines are lifelines.
__________________________________
From Water by Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori. Copyright © 2025. Introduction copyright © 2025 by Haleh Liza Gafori. Available from New York Review Books.