Peace Partners | Writings For Peace

Writings for Peace

Bringing you poetry and prose from around the world to reflect the broader humanitarian mission of Peace Partners. It is our hope to provide a safe space for compassion, empathy, and insight into our shared want for a more peaceful society. Here we showcase work from familiar names and those too-long overlooked by history, as well as the new and emerging voices of today.

PEACE DAY 2023 - ONLY BREATH - RUMI

30/8/2023

1 Comment

Only Breath

a poem by the celebrated 13 century Sufi poet, Rumi
- translation C Barks

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is place-less, a trace
of the trace-less. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

1 Comment

Pavel

17/6/2025 00:51:39

It is often said that the words of Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī transcend religious boundaries—and indeed they do. But many English translations of his poetry have been filtered through a secular Western lens, stripping away the spiritual context that gave his verses their very soul. In doing so, translators have not only altered the meaning of his poems, but at times have reshaped them to reflect a modern, secular ideal of universalism, detached from the religious foundation that animated his thought.

This is a profound distortion. Rūmī was not a secular mystic preaching vague humanism. He was a devout Muslim, deeply rooted in the Qur’anic worldview and the Sufi tradition of Islam. His entire corpus reflects this devotion—not in a narrow, exclusivist sense, but in a way that radiates with divine love, spiritual discipline, and the unifying truths shared by all Abrahamic faiths. His message was one of tawḥīd (oneness), not of relativism.

It is crucial to understand that Rūmī did not call for the erasure of religion in pursuit of peace. He called for a deeper understanding of religion, for recognizing the divine light within the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qur’an. His poetry is filled with references to prophets, Islamic metaphors, Qur’anic stories, and the path of spiritual purification through the remembrance of God (dhikr), devotion (‘ibāda), and love (maḥabba).

The true unity Rūmī envisioned was not beyond religion, but through it. His longing for God was expressed through the language of Islam, and he saw other revealed traditions not as obstacles, but as tributaries flowing into the same ocean of Divine Truth. For him, Islam was not a boundary but a gateway to universal love and mystical union.

In this light, the widespread editing or omitting of Rūmī’s religious vocabulary in English translations—especially those by authors with little or no connection to Islamic spirituality—is not a neutral act of cultural adaptation. It is a form of soft cultural appropriation, reducing a saintly figure of Islamic tradition to a generic philosopher of love. Such translations may appeal to secular audiences, but they do so at the cost of historical and spiritual integrity.

To truly appreciate Rūmī is to engage with him not as a disembodied mystic, but as the Muslim jurist, Sufi guide, and lover of God that he was. Only then can we begin to understand the fullness of his message: that the path to divine unity is not through abandoning religion, but by transcending the ego through it.

There is not a line about religion in original Persian version of the poem.

Writings for Peace

PEACE DAY 2023 - ONLY BREATH - RUMI

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PEACE DAY 2023 - ONLY BREATH - RUMI

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