Rumi on Religious Tolerance

Religious tolerance is a significant issue among western thinkers, due to the widespread immigration and subsequently the subject of multicultural societies formation. They pay attention to the political, epistemological, moral and legal foundations of religious tolerance, especially the approval of equality of religions principle and the need to observe human ethics and protect the civil rights of all existing religions’ followers. Raising this issue in the Middle-East -whose people are currently suffering from terrorism, violence and bloody wars under the pretext of religious differences- is more necessary than in any other part of the world. There are valuable experiences in Islamic mysticism for the realization of multicultural societies free from violence and a peaceful life for people with different beliefs together, which can be considered as an effective pattern. Among Muslim mystics, Rumi has exhibited the highest level of religious tolerance in both theoretical and practical terms.

 

In order to reduce the scope of religious conflict and sectarian strife of his time such as the Crusades and the sectarian wars of the five Islamic religions that pervaded their world at the time, Rumi as a great thinker introduced the idea of tolerance, forbearance and patience. (ghodratallah taheri Rumi's principles of Religious Tolerance, Mysticism in Persian Literature, Volume 1, Issue 1, June 2022, abstract)

 

Muslim, Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian:
All are welcome here

(Everyone is welcome to This school, Divan Shams-Tabrizi, 23, The Forbidden Rumi, Will Johnson & Nevit Ergin, p. 157)

 

Islam and other faiths
have all come around so recently
yet Love has no beginning or end.
You can't call the unbeliever an infidel
if he's been the latest victim of love

(A stranger to myself, Divan Shams-Tabrizi, 23, The Forbidden Rumi, Will Johnson & Nevit Ergin, p. 159)

The man of God is not learned from book.
The man of God is beyond infidelity and religion,
The man of God right and wrong are alike.

The man of God has ridden away from Not-being,
The man of God is gloriously attended.

The man of God is concealed, Shamsi Din;

(RA Nicholson “Selected poems from “Divan e Shams e Tabrizi”, poem 8, pp. 29-31)

In regard to another he may be wrath and a foe; in regard to another he may be graciousness and a friend. (He has) hundreds of thousands of names, (but) he is one man: the owner of every quality belonging to him is blind to (incapable of) giving any (true) description (of him). 

Whoever seeks the (mere) name, if he is entrusted (with a confidential mission) he is hopeless and in distraction, even as you art. Why do you stick to the name ‘tree,’ so that you art left bitterly disappointed and ill-fortuned? Pass on from the name and look at the attributes, in order that the attributes may show you the way to the essence.

The disagreement of mankind is caused by names: peace ensues when they advance to the reality (denoted by the name).

(The search for the Tree of Life, Masnavi, Book 2, 62, 3675-3680, RA Nicholson)

 

I speak of plural souls in name alone –
One soul becomes one hundred in their frames;
Just as God's single sun in heaven
Shines on earth and lights a hundred walls
But all these beams of light return to one
If you remove the walls that block the sun
The walls of houses do not stand forever
And believers then will be as but one soul
(Masnavi 4: 415-18, Franklin Lewis, transl.)

 

The journey of the soul involves not time and place.

And my body learnt from the soul its mode of journeying,
Now my body has renounced the bodily mode of journeying;
It journeys secretly and without form, though under a form."
He added, "One day I was thus filled with longing
To behold in human form the splendours of 'The Friend,'
To witness the Ocean gathered up into a drop,
The Sun compressed into a single atom;
And when I drew near to the shore of the sea
The day was drawing to a close."

All religions are in substance one and the same.
In the adorations and benedictions of righteous men
The praises of all the prophets are kneaded together.
All their praises are mingled into one stream,
All the vessels are emptied into one ewer.
Because He that is praised is, in fact, only One,
In this respect all religions are only one religion.
Because all praises are directed towards God's light,
Their various forms and figures are borrowed from it.
Men never address praises but to One deemed worthy,
They err only through mistaken opinions of Him. 

So, when a light falls upon a wall,
That wall is a connecting-link between all its beams;
Yet when it casts that reflection back to its source,
It wrongly shows great as small, and halts in its praises.
Or if the moon be reflected in a well,
And one looks down the well, and mistakenly praises it,
In reality he is intending to praise the moon,
Although, through ignorance, he is looking down the well.
The object of his praises is the moon, not its reflection;
His infidelity arises from mistake of the circumstances.
That well-meaning man goes wrong through his mistake;
The moon is in heaven, and he fancies it in the well.
By these false idols mankind are perplexed,
And driven by vain lusts to their sorrow.
The Man in the time of the Prophet David who prayed
to be fed without having to work for his food.
(The Masnavi, tr. by E.H. Whinfield, 1898, 3, Story XII)