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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A History of Muslim Philosophy Volume 2, Book 4 Chapter 42: Jalal al-Din Rumi A. Life Jalal al-Din Rumi is the greatest mystical poet of Islam. It can be said without fear of contradiction that in the entire range of mystical literature of the whole world there is none to equal him either in depth or in comprehensiveness and extent.

There have been mystics both in the East and in the West whose experiences in the realm of the spirit may have equalled the spiritual perceptions of Rumi, but their emotional or intuitional side was not matched by an equally clear and powerful intellect. Rumi’s uniqueness lies in the fact that in him reason is wedded to a wide and deep religious experience.

The Muslim world has honoured him with the title of Maulawi’i Ma‘nawi (the Doctor of Meaning), a religious scholar who is capable of philosophizing, of penetrating into the meaning of physical and spiritual phenomena, and lifting the veil of appearance to peep into the reality behind them. When he argues he is a match for a superb dialectician of the stature of a Socrates or a Plato, but ever conscious of the fact that logic is a poor substitute for life.

He inherited vast and rationalistic outlook of Hellenism sifting the grain from the chaff, separating the kernel from the husk. As a Muslim he has an heir to the spiritual wealth bequeathed to humanity by the glorious line of great prophets from Abraham to Mohammad. We find in him the sturdy ethics of the Israelite prophets, the dynamic view of life of Islam and the all-pervading love of Jesus.

He calls his magnum opus the Mathnawi , the “Shop of Unity,” wherein the diversities of life are harmonized and apparent contradictions transcended by creative unities. Nothing that is human or divine is alien to him. He expands with great force and conviction the original thesis of Islam, of the fundamental unity of all spiritual religions despite the contradictory dogmas that narrow theologies have formulated. The windows of his soul are wide open in all directions.

Although a believing and practising Muslim, he is temperamentally a non-conformist for he realizes the secondary nature of the form in comparison with the spirit. He is a Protestant of Protestants, never tiring in the exposition of his thesis that in the realm of the spirit mere authority without personal realization is of no avail.