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Jamal J. Elias, "After Rumi: The Mevlevis and Their World" (Harvard UP, 2025)
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Jamal J. Elias
Network.
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Shobana Xavier
Hello and welcome to another new episode of New Books in Islamic Studies, which is part of the New Books Network. My name is Shobana Xavier and I hope you're safe and well wherever you are, and thank you so much for joining us today on on today's episode we are joined by Jamal J. Elias, who's a Walter H. Annenberg professor of the Humanities and Professor of Islamic History and Visual Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss his new book, after the Mevlavis and the World, published by Harvard University Press in 2025. As Jalaluddin Rumi's the Muslim poet and mystic who died in 1273, popularity continues to persist. Elias takes us on a historical journey to the development of the Mavlavi community after Rumi's passing. In doing so, he frames the Mevlavis as an emotional community that is anchored in affective engagements with Rumi and his Masnavi. The book is organized around three major historical moments, the first centered around Ulu Arif Chalebi, Rumi's grandson the second after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the final focuses on the career of Ismail Ankarawi. Through close readings of biographies and various manuscripts, Elias paints a rich and complex metahistory of significant intellectual, metaphysical, political, social and cultural factors that define the Mevlevi community, especially with regards to charismatic leadership and the significance of the Masnawi. Throughout the book, we learn about how notions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are consistently unstable categories, especially in relation to antinomian tendencies. We learn about the significant place of women in the Mevlevi communities and the shifting significance of Persian language and literary production. This book will be of interest to those who read and write on Sufism, Ottoman history and Turkish history. Rumi and the Mevlevis in our conversation today, Jamal and I spoke about the genesis of the book, stories of miracles associated with Ulu Araf, Rumi's grandson, the presence of women in Mevlevi biographies, the drama around a supposed book, seven of Rumi's Masnavi, and much, much more. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Jamal Elias about his new book, After Rumi, the Mevlevis and the World.
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Podcast Host
Hi Jamal, thank you so much for being on the new Bugs podcast. How are you doing?
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Jamal J. Elias
Wonderful. Hi Shalana. It's so great to see you. Hope you're doing well.
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Podcast Host
Thank you. Yes, I am. I'm very excited to have this conversation with you. I think our listeners know who you are because you're very prolific scholar in the field of Islamic studies. But I wonder if you could let us a little. Let us know a little bit about who you are and specifically how this book that we're going to talk about today, which is called after the Mevlavis and Their World, came up for you.
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Jamal J. Elias
Of course, I mean, again, I'm prolific, meaning I've been around for a while is what that actually means. But all I have so the I started out my interest in grad school, actually my interest in sort of studying the Islamic world and religion generally actually started as an undergrad when I moved from the sciences into studying medieval political philosophy, which then sort of got me into studying Islamic things. And for my dissertation, again, because very interested actually in thought, I started working on Sufi metaphysical thought in the medieval period, so like around 12, 1300. And that was also my first book. So there's a way in which this is sort of me coming back home because, you know, I've done, I mean, I've worked on that, but I've also done other things. I've worked a lot in visual and material culture in between. So this is in a way an art for me to go back to the 1300s and hopefully with a little More nuance than I did when I was in my early 20s or something like that, or mid-20s. So that's actually what got me to write this book. It's like, I mean. And then also I think the other thing, particularly why this book, it's that as you and I both know, Rumi is everywhere. Rumi is everywhere. And in terms of. I don't even know where to begin, but I mean in terms of sort of like as a global, spiritual, religious, New Agey figure in all kinds of translations, some of which you can't identify the original, he's everywhere. And then also I worked a lot in Turkey, and I don't know if you've ever been to Turkey, but the degree to which Rumi kitsch is just pervasive. It's something because it's become part of their national identity in certain. I mean, not the entire country's national identity, but there's a way in which Rumi has been actively cultivated as this kind of feel good Turkish Muslim figure, global. So there are many reasons why actually I was interested in this and it.
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Podcast Host
Is such a timely book because as I finished reading it last night, you really take us on a journey, as the title says, after Rumi. Like the different phases and the figures who are part of setting these tones, which even I was like, oh, I haven't really thought of this before, which I'm so appreciative of. And I'm really excited to get into kind of discussing with you the details. One of the pillars or the pivots, or maybe the framework of the book is located in what you frame as emotional communities and really around emotion and affect, which you spend some time in the introduction talking about. So can you help us understand what you mean by emotional communities and how maybe this may be a useful way to think about the work that you're trying to do in this book?
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Jamal J. Elias
Absolutely. I mean, again, I didn't spend a lot of time talking about theoretical stuff because I didn't want it to be a book about theory. But at the end of the day, I think it's an attempt to push back against a lot of ideas about the nature of Sufism and just religious communities generally in the Islamic world, which can be pervasive. One thing that I actually, I'm deeply troubled by is when Sufi communities are referred to as Sufi orders, because it misses a lot of what the nuances of actually being affiliated with the Sufi identity community are, but also at some level misses what religion is in many, many contexts, as I'm sure You well know, and this is not specific to Rumi or his community. People are frequently religious for emotional reasons. What I mean to say, it's like they get fulfillment out of it. They're not getting money, they're not getting a job, they're not getting, you know, all these sorts of things. No one's holding a gun to their head in most circumstances. So that they do it because it makes them feel something. And I think that's something that I think it's important to understand as a scholar. I also think as a human being, it's a very beautiful thing. So in that sense, when you see Sufi communities, and this is very true, I think in most places, certainly in the places that I study, there's that word. And again, I come back to the problem with seeing it as an order. I'm juxtaposing it as part of the problem is that an order is really a regimented thing. And I think it's an idea that's based around Catholic monastic orders primarily. So that, you know, you join, you have to give up all sorts of stuff, you have to become part of this thing. You live with these other people, you give up certain kinds of family connections. And none of that is expected of you. In the vast majority of Sufi things, that's one thing. And then also in a order, you could make the argument that there's a merit based in some level, merit based structure of leadership. But in Sufi communities like the Mevlavis, there isn't. There is a hereditary leadership which is just assumed to be charismatic. So which is the case of Hinaun Rumi, this is very true. And you see the history of the Mevlabis, you see the history of pretty much every Sufi order. There's one person, normally a man, who was charismatic in some way, shape or form, people gathered around him. But the spiritual leadership of the community, not the secretarial, administrative, bureaucratic leadership, but the spiritual leader of the community after him would continue to be normally a male descendant of that farm. That is how it legitimizes them. So that it's a charismatic thing. And charisma is actually related to emotion. We trust that they're special as human beings because of that, not because they have great learning, not because some other merit based system. So that's why I just like refiguring how we think about Sudipi communities, their relations with each other, the relationship with society, the relationship with the state. This whole questions, which I deal with quite a bit like antinomian versus we don't use the word Normian, Orthodox, these sorts of things are all related to that.
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Podcast Host
I do think it's a helpful way that you frame that helps us get into some of the questions you're asking in the text. Can you maybe. So the first kind of section of the book or the first three chapters deal really with the immediate aftermath. And so you're kind of locating us in the 13th century Anatolian context. Can you say a little bit about that context before we get into kind of issues of succession, which really comes up with Rumi, said Dean Benson. Yeah.
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Jamal J. Elias
Yes. I mean, just before I say that, just to preface, what I did is I didn't want to do a history of the Mevlabis for 700 years. So I focused on three pivotal moments and did a kind of micro historical focus on pivotal moments with pivotal people. And the first one, as you mentioned, is the 14th century, ultimately, because Rumi dies in 1273, and it's that last quarter of that century and then the first half of the next century. And why did I start over there? Because it's like it's. That's literally after Rumi. It's like I start when Rumi dies. I mean, he's alive for some of it, but only to tell the story of his son and grandson and the women and his wives, his daughters, all these sorts of things. So that's where I start. And it's just. It's a fascinating time. And this is all in, you know, it's modern Turkey and Anatolia and to some degree in the Caucasus and also their connection to Syria, there's quite a bit of a connection of that time to Syria. And it's a fascinating time because Anatolia is largely principalities that are almost all vassals of the Mongols who are ruling Iran at this time and actually ruling eastern Anatolia as well and Iraq. So it's a very mixed environment. When you think about where Rumi lived and his family lived, which is where the Mevlevis, as they called his followers, that Rumi's official Falaan community, this area would have been at that time still very much a predominantly Christian community, or if not entirely predominantly Christian, it would have been roughly half Christian and Christians of various kinds, various ethnic groups. For the Muslims, they would have been kind of a Turkic ruling class, a Turkic pastoral class, because Terps had been moving in for quite a while, but they hadn't developed strong scholarly networks yet. So all the scholarly class, which means all the secretaries and tutors and administers and everything in these principalities, would have been virgin Speakers. And Rumi's family is part of that emigrant population. There's a fairly large immigrant population. I mean, it happened. The same thing sort of happened going towards South Asia, that right before the Mongol conquest, which probably enabled the Mongol conquest, Central Asia, which was very Persian speaking, had become quite weak and unstable. So there were no jobs. And so there was a mass exodus of people with skills to places that needed people with these secretarial, scholarly credentials. So that's the world it was. It's a pretty dynamic world. And that's why it was fun to start with, or essential to start with to lay out kind of this weird multiculturalism of the time.
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Podcast Host
And you do it so well. I think it's so needed to say how context and, as you say, dynamic these places are, because we have this imagination that it was so easy or perhaps linear, but you're actually saying there's such levels of diversity that we need to pay attention to how it's informing. People are really into the Mevlevis or ideas of Rumi after his death. Essentially. Now that you've given us some context of the time period and the space, I guess the big question people often have is what happens after Rumi dies? So is it like, how is succession kind of decided? I know in Sufism, historically, we have a tendency to think of, oh, the best disciple, the student gets kind of the pig, or the son, usually, who's kind of inherited this stuff. But some interesting things are happening after Rumi's passing, especially with kind of his son and then a grandchild too, right?
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Jamal J. Elias
Yeah, I mean, it's actually. It's fascinating. And this is not really after Rumi. This is during Rumi's life. I mean, it's very clear. One thing which is sort of glossed over in the tradition is that. So Rumi had probably had two sons. And again, we know this from a biography. There's a massive biography named by a person named Aflaqi. It's one of the most amazing biographical works dealing with Sufism, but also with Anatolia in the medieval period. But I mean, again, we know these things by biographers who are actually interested in casting everyone in the best light and the smoothest narrative. But Rumi appears to have had two sons and his other son, who was named Ala Ad Din, or that was his title. So his elder son is called Sultan Balad and his younger son is called Alauddin. In all likelihood, Alauddin and his associates were responsible for the murder of Lumin's companion and friend, Shams. Right. This is something that is totally glossed over. But it comes through in terms of they were banished, they were erased from the history of the Nevillevis, this family. And probably they moved eastward to this town called Kirshehir, which is two major towns east from Konya where Rumi lived. So it's Rumi didn't like his elder son all that much, Sultan Balat. And when you reading the narrative and you know, it's like Rumi loved his grandson Arif. And I can't help but feel bad for Sultan Balad in so many different ways. And it's Sultan Balad. So basically Rumi designated his one secretary as his successor, and then that guy died and then he designated the second secretary as his successor. And he was very, very public about how Ulu Arif, his grandson, was just the bomb and particularly relative to his father. And then the narrative also, you keep seeing this tension between the father and the son because everyone recognizes that Arif is much more like his grandfather, meaning he's a charismatic, powerful, spiritual figure, whereas his father is not so much. I mean, again, you feedback for Sultan Galad because again, Sultan Ghalad also wrote poetry. But you know, it's unfair when your father is Rumi and you have to like pretend you're a good poet. So, yeah, so that's how this time period functions. So it's. But Uluarif who is the center of this thing. And really one of my favorite religious figures of all time is he's called Ulu, which is because he was called, you know, Ulu means great. It's an honorific in Turkish. So he's called Ulu Arif. He used to be called Amir Arif and they went from the Persian titles to the Turkish titles and he became Ulurif. So Ulu Arif was. I mean, he's also really responsible for spreading the order. He's the person, the first person. He traveled a great deal. He set up sort of magnitude communities for whatever it meant at that moment all the way into Azerbaijan and Georgia. So he really was responsible for this whole notion that they would spread.
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Podcast Host
And I loved the stories in Aflaqi's Manaqib where there's these stories of UDU Arif and the miracles. Some are just of. I remembering when Rumi spits in his mouth. And so there's this tradition of like kind of a transmission and all of these other miraculous things. I think it was him when he died. His. His body was too long for the. For the coffin.
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Jamal J. Elias
Yeah, yeah. So he tucked in his knees so dead He, Yeah, he tucked in the knee, his knees. So yeah, it's. He. He has a lot of. Yeah, there's a lot of miracles. And again, some of them are just about, I think, I mean again, some, some are about him, you know, just being enigmatic, getting drunk, et cetera, things which he did a lot. My personal fav. Just for. Because of my own preferences in life or about his dog. And I have to, you know, I had more anecdotes about his dog, but the editor said, you know, enough about the dog already. But the. But, but there's also, I mean, there's also, as I try and make a point, quite a few of his miracles really evoke Jesus. So there's a particular way of miracle working which is he's. Yeah, working miracles are associated with Jesus or versions of them or one things that are reminiscent of them. And one wonders why that's the case. Obviously Muslims would have been familiar with stories about Jesus's life. So that's not in itself. But could it be that it was also for impressing Christians and bringing them into the community and that. We never know because it's not specifically mentioned. There are many stories of people being Christians, being converts to him, to, to Islam through him. There are many stories of aristocratic Christian women being his devotees. So certainly he impressed Christians. So maybe it was, you know, that was part of it.
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Podcast Host
And also in this text, when you're talking about him, you highlight the role of women. It's, it's really important, I think, in the place of women. And we often don't talk about these or kind of erased when we talk about historical Sufism and the emergence of it. And so really appreciated the way in which you were trying to tease out how women are being represented in some of these biographical texts. So can you say a little bit more about what you noticed in these texts about women?
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Jamal J. Elias
Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I mean, as you just said, we don't normally, normally women are sort of hidden. So they're these kind of, you know, the nameless holy mother and things like that. Sisters are not mentioned, wives are definitely not mentioned. So in this. What's unique here, I think is that in again, Aflaqi's biography of Rumi's family, there's a lot of detail about the women, some of them meaning Rumi's wives, Rumi's daughters, you know, Sultan Balad's wife. So basically Rumi's daughters, Rumi's daughter in law, who was Shams. So Sultan Balad, Rumi's son's Wife was Shams daughter. No, sorry, not Shams daughter. Usamaddin Shalabi, his first successor's daughter and she so. And apparently Sultan Valad and his wife had a rocky relationship at times. This is uluarist's mother and there's like letters that Rumi wrote to her that Rumi very much sided with his daughter in law against his son in their conflict and was very like he said, you know, basically if he doesn't reconcile with you, I'm going to disown him. So I mean, and you can say, I mean again part of it is yes, obviously these are women of a family but normally they aren't mentioned this way. A lot of it. Again, as a scholar one can see that there are certain things that happen in domestic space that if you want to use it in a narrative. So things about for example Ulu Arif's birth or Ulu Arif being special or Ulu Arif being better in certain ways than his father or in competition with his father, it's his mother or his sister come into play as kind of voices to give that information. But they're frequently actors. So it's sort of, you see in this early community that these women are being treated as actors in certain kinds of ways. Again, it's not equal to the way the men are obviously and they're not the center of the narrative that way. But this notion that Uru Arav has a miracle, it involves a bunch of roses. He gives the roses to his mom and then his mom for the rest of her life keeps giving a petal now and again to some special lady and it remains fresh and fragrant with her for all her life, these sorts of things. So it's like his mother is doing it. And then there's also the other part in which female disciples get mentioned a lot in positive and negative light. So for positive, because a lot of it is like he's a great guy and a great teacher and he has a lot of, you know, prominent ladies who are his disciples and keep gifting stuff. And then also because he's. No, he's a second Joseph, he is a really good looking man. And then there is. So then there are these women who are inappropriately enamored of him. But that also brings up the thing that there's again, these women are named, right? So it's like they're not anonymous women. And I would contrast that with. Because I also start when I'm talking about emotion in the beginning I talk about this story from Attar's Conference of the Birds in which the sheikhsan aun falls in love with this Christian woman and then debases himself for a very complex set of reasons. And shame plays primal to that. That woman is not really named. She's like one of the protagonists of the story and she's not named. So it's like, in this case, there's an entire cast of female characters in that early period who are being named.
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Podcast Host
Right? Yeah. And it's just like normalized. It's not like being explained anyway, beyond that, they're just.
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Jamal J. Elias
Absolutely, absolutely.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. It was really interesting to learn. I mean, the other thing you also bring up with Ulu Arif is this question of antinomianism and how perhaps there's a tendency to, and you try to debunk or kind of intervene in this conversation to say that he had the tendencies of maybe Shams and also the tendency of Rumi. And so he's like trying to bring the heterodoxy of Sufism with the orthodoxy together. And you kind of critique this and say, well, you know, yeah, he's a complex figure, but there's something about antinomianism that we need to think differently about in this historical moment. So can you walk us through that argument a bit?
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Jamal J. Elias
Oh, absolutely. And it's not just that historical moment. I mean, I'm hopeful that the book is actually a bit of an intervention in our notion of these categories of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, slash non normativity, because these things are moving targets. These notions are moving targets and they're highly judgmental in which people center themselves as being the right kind of person and other people are wrong. So it's, you know, if you just look at, I mean, we're talking about Islamic figures, so we're going to focus on Islam. But this holds true in other religions. The same way people are convinced that they're right and the other people are not so right. And so if you think about, you know, it's like there's a particular way in which, for all sorts of historical reasons, certain notions of Sunniness become normative, and relative to that, everyone is heterodox. So all 12 Hrishiyas are heterodox on that basis of normativity. So that, you know, the clerical gentlemen who rule Iran are heterodox. Obviously, in their own mind, they're not. So. So it's that kind of a thing in which. So that these identities are fluid at any given moment. And I think, and again, it comes back to. We recognize in specific contexts which Is like local contexts, specific periods of time, what is orthodox and what is non orthodox. But even that's always being debated so that there' again, frequently with the most, and again I mentioned this in several instances with figures inside in this book that there are people who are doing the most. Their behaviors are what are considered very unorthodox. It's like, you know, they don't dress properly, they don't behave properly, but they are extremely respected as trained degree holding scholars. So they are Sunni ulama in a certain way who are at the same time have long dirty hair and cover themselves with ashes and sit on a street corner.
- [28:21]
Podcast Host
We kind of also get to the latter half of the book, which is shifting to, I want to say, the Ottoman Empire, 16, 17th century. So I wonder, we could talk about how some of these conversations are happening in this period, but mainly what shifts when, let's say we move to Istanbul. How are the Mevlevis kind of transitioning from this like early period where you're Talking about the 14th century to maybe the 16th and 17th century where you have an empire growing and there's a particular relationship with the Ottoman Empire that privileges Mevlavis, but also other Sufi groups that are in existence too, right?
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Jamal J. Elias
Oh, absolutely. I think that's a very important question. It's in the book and it's also just generally, I think it's a very important question. But actually in a certain sense, the Meblavi moved to Istanbul way before then. I mean, one of the things we notice with a lot of successful Sufi communities is that they're politically remarkably savvy. And as I bring up in this book, again with the orthodox heterodox kind of in part of that also is, is that there's these, what are called, you know, chivalric communities of fatua, as it's called in Arabic, which are these kind of masculinist fraternities which are kind of social, religious and mercantile. And there's always this interplay between the Sufi communities and the communities, meaning brother communities and fraternal communities. And that in these, there's there they cooperate and they're normally kind of intertwined. And certainly in this, in, in the context of this book, you see how intertwined these communities actually are. But so the Meblibis and these other sorts of communities there, you sometimes you can't tell them apart and they can't tell each other apart either. And they write each other's kind of work and those often then end up being frequently kind of Shia affiliated groups. So like the bektashis and things like this. But there's a way in which there's a competition for resources and groups. The chivalry groups, which are normally trade guilds, they are very urban, very good at having financial networks and long distance networks because they're financial communities ultimately. But Sufi communities tend to rely on the largesse of the ruling class, on land grants, on tax farming, on stuff like this. So they're very, very adept at cultivating people in political power. So the Mevlevis, the moment they start noticing, so they've always had connections with, you know, like in, before the rise of the Ottomans, it's all these principalities which in the case of Turkish history is normally referred to as the beylik period, because an emirate is a beylik in Turkish. So it's a misleading term, but it's okay. So they would always be going after the strong rulers in these principalities. And then when the Ottomans started emerging as a stronger group, they had, you know, and the Ottomans were based in Bursa at this time, which is a port city south of Istanbul. They had big ties with Bursa. And then as soon as the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and Istanbul was established, they moved a lot of stuff there. So the, the shrine of Rumi, which is the, you know, the home of the Mevlevis, this is in Kania. But the number of Med levy centers, lodges that they open, it's a massive number. It's like eight at any given time. You know, so they did this before the 1670s, before the Ottomans became the Ottomans. Right. So it's like. But yes, and it continued. And again there's, I mean, again, I think your question about, you know, that whole heterodoxy, orthodoxy or normativity, et cetera, really became a big deal in the Ottoman Empire, Empire in the early 17th century. So the 1600s. And actually you can see this elsewhere, I think this is just intellectual, religious phenomenon, the formation of scholarly classes, et cetera. So you don't just see this in the Ottoman Empire, you see it in other parts of the Islamic world that you start having a rise of a particular scholarly class, an Alim Ulama class. And everyone's obviously interested in maximizing their own stature, prestige, influence, things like this. So there's a natural competition that emerges between the. And that's where orthodoxy, it's really this modern concept of a scholarly class that claims to be the right one and has certain kinds of social backing that makes it then be able to say this. But otherwise it's just saying that Guy's wrong and the other guy points it here. There's no, you're wrong. And, you know, it's like it's. That's the way it works. So it's in this time period when there's a lot more writing, there's a lot more Sunni madrasas being endowed by wealthy people that they start becoming and assuming that they are right and pointing to other influential groups, which are normally Sufi groups, and saying they're wrong because they do this. They're wrong because they do that, which normally involves their zikr, their meditational practices and their use of music or what they'll say. They dance around all the time and things like this. And in that time, it's a very important time for the Medlaris because they have to assert their legitimacy, which they do in various ways. But we always get kind of overstayed. This kind of the scholar alim class being one way and the Sufis the other way is sometimes overstated because a lot of. Of the ruling class is very close to Sufi communities as well. So they're patronizing them and balancing them against the orthodox scholarly class because they have to rule.
- [34:31]
Podcast Host
It's so fascinating. And so who are the figures, I guess, in this moment? I know some of the people who are you reading essentially, to kind of situate this context and these figures in the Mevlevy. And I also want to get to this really huge thing that came up in. In the latter chapters, which I wasn't really thinking about, which is the role of Persian in all of this and the debate. So let's talk about the texts that you're dealing with to kind of help us understand what's happening within the Mevlevis, who are some of the figures who are writing these texts, and then we'll kind of go from there.
- [35:04]
Jamal J. Elias
Okay. Well, I mean, I think the middle period is really important too. And that's where. Because the middle period is where the Meblovis actually become a scholarly community focused on poetry and because of roomy focused around poetry. And they've always valued poetry. And therefore there are a lot of poets who are in their community and in the. There's a. So actually, no, you're right. It's the last period when they become really scholarly I'm thinking about, because I focus on my middle period. But the biographies there first. To answer your question about what am I reading, one thing is there are a lot of biographies. Obviously, they have the issues that sacred biographies have about how they cast individuals. But there's A person who's really for the later period is incredibly influential. When I say for the later period, that this person's writings influence people's ideas of what happened in the past. And this person's name, Saqib Zedeh, who. He died in 1735. And Saqib Dade wrote a three volume biographical dictionary of Mevlevis figures through history. An important part of this is that one of those volumes, the third volume actually has a very substantial section on prominent female Mevlevs. So it's not just in the beginning, but there's someone sitting around in the 18th century who thinks that this deserves a section. And then there's later period. There are other biographers. Some of them are. It's like that, sort of like the whole issue of how biography is written and who reads what and all that is interesting. But I didn't go into the weeds of that particular topic in this book. But the. So I'm reading that and I'm reading everyone, every memory. I mean, this book has been a lot of years of reading manuscripts. But the most prominent person, the most famous person in that last period. Why focus on. Is this person? His name is Ismail Ankarabi. Ismail from Ankara. He's normally in Turkish, he's referred to affectionately. Asuhidaded Rusuhi was his title. And he is called Ismail Ankalari, who was already an educated scholar. And there are many cases, particularly later from like the 1500s on, in which these very well established Sufis from other Sufi commun communities who kind of drift into the Mevlevy orbit and then become prominent Mevillavi scholars. So that in some ways one can read it as a shift of loyalties and the proof that the Mevlevis are superior to their peers. But it's also a sign that these are fluid communities. It's not, again, it's not an order structure that I'm a Jesuit and I can't be a Dominican. You know, they're fluid communities and they respect each other. So Ismail Ankari, and this is another part of the book actually is this whole notion of charisma and how it works. And I use this model of dyads of sort of like the charismatic figure partnered with the scholar as how progress and authority kind of function. So again, Ismail Ankarily is a scholarly guy and he apparently is very good as a scholarly guy. And he, when he's young, he's got this eye problem and he's worried he's going blind. And he meets the head of the Medley community at the time Bostan Chaledi and Bostan Chalebi does something and cures his eyes. And so he becomes a total devotee and he decides that he's going to his life's work is going to be translating. Not translating, commenting in Turkish upon the Masnavi. That being said, he wrote a great deal in addition to that. And he was an excellent scholar. He wrote somewhat in Arabic. I mean, he wrote so much that it's like most people be proud. I haven't that many books in Arabic, but he actually wrote a lot in Persian.
- [39:20]
Podcast Host
I am so fascinated by Ismail and Karawi because there's just so many things especially one of the things that I didn't know about was this book seven drama. And especially because I think it really. It does so many things. But one of the things it also does is kind of get into Sufi metaphysics and like brings in the world of Ibn Al Arabi, who's kind of flowing throughout the book. But it's just. It's really fascinating that in this attempt to one, people are like, we can't understand Rumi. Can you write commentaries for us so we could try to. So this is how kind of the context and some at which commentary is emerging is of accessibility. But also in the midst of like making these texts or Rumi's Masnawi accessible to people, there's also kind of, you know, injection of metaphysical ideas which really like comes with book seven. So can you tell us a little bit about this book seven drama and what perhaps we should take away from it?
- [40:18]
Jamal J. Elias
Yeah. So the book seven drama is. I mean, there are two parts to it and there's one is simply that he became convinced that there was a seventh volume of the Mas Nevi and it arrived somehow. And again, as I bring up in the book, it's not entirely clear if it means that it was discovered lying in someone's attic or whether it actually was revealed to the earthly plane at this point in time. And I think he plays on that. I think he's actually believe it's the second that he's trying to bush. And so it was an important and bossant Chalebi, who was the head of the Mevlevis, who was the hereditary descendant who had charismatic knowledge, he ratified the fact that this was authentic. And so it was such a big deal that Ismail Ankari, who has had all he was Working There were two Turkish commentaries on the Masnavi written in the early 17th century. They're the first time that the entire Masnavi was commented upon. In Turkish. And as I say in the book, in a sense that you can argue that commentary is a form of translation because it's like you take the Persian thing and says it means X. So there's like, these are not literary translations. These are instead scholarly translations. And this is the first time. So you know, Rumi dies 1273 Masnavi was not translated into, in its entirety into Turkish until the early 17th century. And even then, not as a standalone book because it would just not do it. They only did it in this commentary. So he was working on the six volume commentary because the Masnavi as we know it has six books. And when he found this, it was so important that he actually reworked his entire commentary to incorporate the insight he had gained from that seventh volume. Now as I try and bring up in the book, it's very important to actually understand because what that seventh volume represents tells us a lot about how the Masnavi is viewed. But before I go into that, I just want to mention when I first started working on that section of this book, it wasn't a book back then. I was just working on this and I didn't know much about it. I online at an auction house in Turkey found a seven volume lithograph. I didn't know that there were seven. There's several of these published. Let's not the seventh volume just split book six of them up into two volumes. So I paid some astronomical sum of money for this seven volume lithograph edition from the early 19th century only to realize that no, it was just the, the Cairo edition of, of this thing. And for binding reasons I spit book six into two. So. But it's a very beautiful thing and I love the fact that I own it, but I could have better. Yeah, I could have bought a car. But that being said, what it really. So what's the significance? The significance of this book 7 is that, and this is a, this is, I take, this is a topic I've discussed at length in, in, in, in the book which is the Masnavi is, you know, when we've heard it many times, the Quran in Persian. But what does that mean? Obviously it's structurally not at all like the Quran, but there are these claims that are actually being made and I think they're, they're interesting in certain ways that basically it contains all the knowledge of the Quran rendered into the Persian language. And there's that, you know, like in terms of most doctrines regarding the Quran, there's the finite knowledge of the Quran that's contained in like grammar and letters and there's the infinite knowledge that is contained but in some other way within the Quran. Right. So it's that, that it's in the sense that if it is the Quran, it can't just be like the, the outward dimension. It has to actually have the inner dimension of the Quran. And this whole concept that there's a Book seven, Book seven is not that enlightening in and of itself. It's just. It's more or less of the same. It's not very well written, but it kind of reinforces that idea that there's, that there was the, the overt text that everyone had had for all these centuries, but there was this other part to it that was that infinite dimension. So that symbolically, not in terms of the literality of the text, symbolically, that's what that, that Book seven idea kind of reinforces. But it is actually the fact that this was a doctrine that was so strong and so well established that allowed for the possibility of saying this. And so to accept it, and a lot of people did, a lot of very prominent people did, is to actually see that. Yes, in fact, the Masnavi was thought of as in some way the Quran.
- [45:54]
Podcast Host
Yeah, it's so fascinating. And then also how the Masnavi becomes the central kind of, you know, it's like the affect or the emotional connection to the Mevlavis is, you know, this text, you know, in experiencing.
- [46:10]
Jamal J. Elias
Yes, and absolutely. And it, it's that. And it's also that, you know, it's. And that's why, in a sense that, I mean, as I mentioned in the book, one thing is, is that the, there is, you know, the Quran has a doctrine of untranslatability. Right. So it takes a very long time for there. So you have a lot of commentaries with a lot of tafsirs throughout history, but there's a resistance to a standalone translation. This is a very modern phenomenon. So. And so there's. It, it's. It's so again, because you can't translate it and the Masnavi is treated the same way then the Masnavi, the professional reciter, is the second highest office in the. In. In a Mevlevy lodge. And they were in high demand. I mean, as I mentioned, this is again, there were 1500s already. There were very few people knew per. Well, I mean, a lot of people weren't literate, so there's also that. But there weren't too many people knew Persian. So this was a very important thing. They also developed a doctrine about how you to recite the Masnavi, you have to perform ritual ablutions also. They basically. They started treating it very much the same way as you would, you know, I mean, modeled on how we treat.
- [47:16]
Podcast Host
The Quran and this. You also used to get into kind of the significance of Persian itself and the kind of from the Persian to the Turkish, which you spent kind of chapter six, but also the conclusion, helping us really understand why this is so important. Right. And what's happening linguistically and in terms of language and again, the significance of the Masnavi. So can you say a little bit more about this Persian to Turkish kind of this. I don't want to call it transition, but there's obviously something that the languages are also signaling to us in terms of.
- [47:50]
Jamal J. Elias
Absolutely. Well, I mean, it is. It's socially, it is a transition. And, you know, like at the time of Rumi was alive and pretty much for two generations after him, all Islamic scholarship that wasn't in Arabic would have been done in Persian. And so, you know, and. And there was a division of labor more or less between Arabic and Persian. So Arabic was for, you know, like technical, scholarly stuff, law and sciences primarily as well. And then history, writing, literature, these things tended to be in Persian. There was almost no Turkish. And a lot of people, some people like to think that Rumius knew Turkish because he has a few words here and there that are Turkish. And as I bring up in this book, in fact, he might have known a little Turkish, but he very pointedly showed off that it wasn't important. And the same holds true of Sultanwala. They'll have occasionally these, particularly his panegyrics or whatever for prominent political figures. He'd say, oh, Lord, don't forget us. Things like that. And he'd use that. So he's talking to a Turkish general and he writes that one line in Turkish. But over time, it's very clear. I mean, again, we have to remember that early on there would have been very little literacy. So as you're developing this culture of literacy around the Masnavi, it wasn't Persian in as much as it was, but it's very clear as we keep going and keep going that there's no. That Persian facility in Persian is diminishing quite fast in the Ottoman Empire. And in the Ottoman Empire, it's not comparable to, for example, south, the Mughal Empire, you know, because as you well know in Macha, particularly the kind of like the Indo Gangetic Plain, what's now Pakistan, Afghanistan, in these areas, Persians survived actually way into British Rule, you know, and so. And Urdu only supplanted it because of modernist movements in certain places and Bangla in other places and things like this. But the. So, but this is. But Persian had already been pretty much erased or diminished in the Ottoman Empire because the Ottomans were very keen to develop a high language of their own. So Ottoman Turkish was consciously developed as a high culture language, not sort of like a bastardized version of Persian or like borrowing Persian, but they were really making it as a language. And so people Persian, and you were rewarded for that more than you were rewarded for your Persian. So it started going away. So that by the time you get to sort of like again, the 19th century, there are very, very, very, very few people, educated people, who know Persian. And then later on, it's also. It started happening. Is that. And it's so bad that as I mentioned in the book, there are people worried about it. So you have these. There's this one guy, a Sufi figure, who's really worried that people can't read Persian and they can't read the Masnavi. So he starts, like a Masnavi society to make people actually learn Persian. And simultaneously, I mean, there are many aspects to this. It's like, there's also this culture, the sort of Ottoman gentlemen, some of them used to, you know, it's like knowing Persian used to be a sign of sophistication. So you can just imagine. I mean, I think of it almost as a comedy way. Like, you know, it's like, you know, in some Little Britain or Benny Hill version of actually, like, you know, like these people pretending to know French. So it's, It's. They're sitting in salons and being very sophisticated and throwing around really bad Persian. So. And you couldn't really. I mean, and the jokes aside, you couldn't get a Persian education unless you could afford a tutor. I mean, a native speaker tutor. So it was dying out.
- [52:03]
Podcast Host
One of the things I appreciate about all of the historical contexts and places and spaces you've given us to is now some of them really parallel some of the things we're seeing with Rumi in a contemporary moment, especially from these ideas of translation issues, accessibility issues, the pseudo Rumi, or like people making up things as Rumi when we're not actually sure that it is Rumi. And in some ways I find some comfort knowing that there's been historical. Yeah, you know, that we're not supposed to be using it in the contemporary moment, but we are in some ways, I think, of course, it's totally Heightened. And capitalism and neoliberalism has done wild things. But it is fascinating to know that there is these historical instances debating boundaries and access and like, who gets to claim what right. And it's.
- [52:53]
Jamal J. Elias
It's absolutely, absolutely. And I mean, you know, like, again, I don't want to. I don't want to sort of make it seem like these people were stupid or stuff like that, but sort of the decline of Persian is also. It's really important for the Mevlavis and for Rumi because it kind of again, preserves in society this super status for Rumi and his Masnavi and his divan, his collection of poetry. It's because at a certain level, it's done in a way because people can't read it. And because they can't read it becomes kind of like symbolically very important. Right, But I mean, as you were just saying, there are all these things that Rumi never said. And again, I hate to. I mean, if there are some people who listen to this and they didn't know this, I'm sorry. But you know, there's this really come whoever you are kind of statement that people make about Remy. Was it come, come, whoever you are, you know, whether you're a disbeliever or this or that, just come, you know, here. He never said anything like that. But it's extremely popular in Turkish. It's an extremely popular thing. And I mean, it's existing. There's several poets from like the Rumi's time through about the 1600s were credited with having those lines that are similar to those. And most likely it's this Azerbaijani poet named Fuzuli who was the one who actually wrote back. But the closest version to this one, but in Turkey, and this is also a sign of how Rumi and his times and all that. But, you know, like the Turkish version of, you know, which gets translated into English, just come whoever you are, which is, you know, gelgel neulusan ol yine ger, which means exactly the same thing, Come, come, whoever you are. Come again. And that one, it's extremely popular in Turkey, but it's extremely popular in Turkey. And someone who's written about this, like a scholar of Persian, Turkish scholar, Persian, retired quite a few years ago, that it became very popular during the Republican period when they were trying to promote this kind of ecumenical national religion as opposed to the ulama based kind of religion. And so, yeah, this kind of come whoever you are was like, great. And so it just became repeated everywhere.
- [55:15]
Podcast Host
It's so fascinating. I have so Many questions to ask, but I think hopefully listeners will pick up the book. I do have a different type of question to ask you because I'm always interested in scholars methods and I'm so amazed by just the range of text and the reading that you do. And so I wonder if you have. Do you have advice for scholars or young scholars who are interested in manuscripts and want to engage in these kind of things, historical texts, what are some important things they should keep in mind? What were some challenges for you in accessing these texts and engaging these texts? I'm sure as people texts are probably also not easy things to deal with. Right. And so a lot of us do different methods.
- [55:53]
Jamal J. Elias
Yeah, yeah, so. So, yeah, I mean, you know, again, what's happened? I mean there are several parts to that question. I mean one is just like, you know, if you're enthusiastic about it, something just go with your enthusiasms and it's like. And worry less about up other things about it. Just go with your enthusiasms and don't worry about getting it right the first time. That's I think very important. But generally, yeah, like accessing text, it's gotten easier in certain ways, in certain places, we're very fluid. Politics has a lot to do with these things. But digitization has made access so much easier recently. But really there are many people and it's only this is digitization particularly for like, you know, Turkey has just a phenomenon, phenomenal number of manuscripts, just amazing. Largely because they were never columnized. And so those manuscripts did not end up in London or Paris or Berlin or wherever. Right. So they have a lot of manuscripts and everyone, I mean, and that's just not me. It's like people are quite a bit younger than me. For us, like we have war stories, we share about being in the manuscript lotteries together and all of us used to eat the same beans and rice at the same restaurant in Istanbul. So. And people still do, although it's not as good as it used to be 10 years ago. But so there are how this sort of work. But again, as I said in recent years, and I bring this up kind of in the acknowledgments because again, I stand, I put it as the shoulders but ultimately in the shadow of the greatest modern scholar of Rumi and the Mevlabis, Abzou Ibaki Gulpanaly but so much that gets published. So many things are available in digital. There's so many articles. Some of them are good, some of them are not bad. Turks do a lot of scholarship on this but just generally, I think the question was not about working on. Your question was not about working on Rumi. So the. I mean, I think, you know, if you're enthusiastic about something, do it.
- [58:02]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. No, I just. I think it's. I mean, I generally value methods, and it's. It's interesting always when I have grad students to teach them how to do a thing, and you're like, wait, how do I do a thing? Because we don't talk about it, because we kind of just get into the motion of doing things. So I tend to be an ethnographer, so then I'm like, oh, how do I do this thing of collecting that? And I think it's. For me, when I meet other people who deal with text or, you know, translation and all the stuff, I'm just amazed. Like, I think we should acknowledge that this is, like, such an interesting and important skill that we have that we in the academy often don't talk about.
- [58:36]
Jamal J. Elias
How.
- [58:36]
Podcast Host
Well, how do we do the thing? How did we get to this before.
- [58:39]
Jamal J. Elias
We wrote the book? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love doing it. Sounds pathetic and nerdy, but I really. I love reading manuscripts and things that are hard to read, partly because I can make up whatever I want if no one else has read it.
- [58:59]
Podcast Host
Well, I believed everything you wrote in the book, so it's working. That's amazing. I love it. Yeah. So I guess the next question, and our final question on the podcast is, well, what are you working on now? Is there any new book project on the horizon? Are you just taking it easy and celebrating the one that you just came out? Very.
- [59:19]
Jamal J. Elias
I'm partly celebrating the one that just came out because it was a lot. It was a lot of work, and I was happy with it, but I'm just. And I'm cleaning, you know, that there's stuff that didn't make it in. So there might be little articles here and there. And I have ideas for another book, but not work. I've got the articles to finish. Yeah. So that's what I'm doing right now. But, yeah, there's some. Again, I always want I. Several ideas for trying to kind of bring together what the two things I work on, which is sort of visual studies and textual studies, trying to somehow bring them together in a something interesting. And I haven't found the idea that might work yet or I haven't found the project that might work. I found the idea.
- [60:00]
Podcast Host
I'm sure whatever. It will be, It'll be amazing. I've always been a huge fan of all your scholarship.
- [60:04]
Jamal J. Elias
Thank you so much. Thank you much, so, so much.
- [60:06]
Podcast Host
It was such a pleasure to talk to you about your new books. And huge congratulations on it. I'm sure it'll be.
- [60:11]
Jamal J. Elias
Thank you so much. Thank you.
- [60:14]
Shobana Xavier
And that was my conversation with Professor Jamal J. Elias about his new book, after the Mevlevis and the World. I hope you enjoyed our conversation, and I hope you'll join us again. Until then, take good care.
- [60:33]
Jamal J. Elias
Sa.