Rumi--Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings, and Poetry of Jalal Al-Din Rumi by Franklin D. Lewis

Author:Franklin D. Lewis [Lewis, Franklin D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Biography & Autobiography, General, Spirituality
ISBN: 9781851685493
Google: y9uWSAAACAAJ
Amazon: 1851685499
Barnesnoble: 1851685499
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2007-11-01T17:44:52.515000+00:00

A better place for me’s the Sufi lodge

but even there I’ve not a moment’s peace

A crowd of porridge-guzzlers look me over

eyes full of ejaculant, hands on their balls

even those vowed celibate among them

steal furtive glances and massage their cocks

(M6:3856–8)

The boy concludes that when the Sufi convent behaves like this, there is no hope for him among the ordinary worldly folk, who make little pretense to piety and chastity! He explains that he cannot even stay in the women’s quarters because, just as the wife of Pharaoh had made advances to Joseph, so too would he be attacked and then the menfolk of those women would blame him for molesting them, scream bloody murder and have him drawn and quartered.

The boy concludes that he has no respite either with men or with women (and this boy is ugly: how much worse in the case of a handsome one!). Rumi, the poet, takes the boy’s side in this tale and means for the reader to sympathize with him, on the principle that reason would dictate freedom from harassment for every woman and every boy, but there is a shortage of reason to go around (M6:3861). A pile of bricks will not deter the devil, so long as temptation is involved. One has to be protected from temptation by the chin hairs of piety that come with divine grace.

Clearly, the cult of the ephebe lived on in medieval Iran and men fancied androgynous pre-pubescent boys, at least until they sprouted facial hair. Under normal circumstances, Muslim women were largely segregated from non-related men, and appeared in public only in a veil, so adolescent boys often became platonic and also libidinous objects of desire. This homoerotic environment, however, should not be equated with homosexual orientation. For one thing, amorous attention was from the dominant party, the phallocrat, towards the penetrated party, male or female. When a boy passed a certain age and grew facial hair, he himself became a member of the sexually dominant class and would no longer submit to penetration. Violation of these social norms led to scandal and legal prosecution.

Furthermore, the men attracted to androgynous boys (marked as effeminate by their hairlessness) also desired women, married and had children. In any case, Rumi condemns such sexual exploitation, both on humanitarian grounds and because it contravenes the law of Islam. Sexual pleasure may be pursued and enjoyed, but only within the confines of marriage.

The suggestion that the relationship between Shams and Rumi was a physical and homosexual one entirely misunderstands the context. Rumi, as a forty-year-old man engaged in ascetic practices and teaching Islamic law, to say nothing of his obsession with following the example of the Prophet, would not have submitted to the penetration of the sixty-year-old Shams, who was, in any case, like Rumi, committed to following the Prophet and opposed to the worship of God through human beauty. Rumi did employ the symbolism of homoerotic, or more properly, androgynous love, in his poems addressed to Shams as the divine

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.