Anecodotes from the life of Mawlana Rumi...

There is a beautiful story about the Sufi mystic, Master Jalaluddin Rumi. He was standing on the bank of a river one day. Suddenly he spotted a fur coat floating downstream in the middle of the current. He hollered over to a scholar who was standing there on the bank too. “Hey man, there is a fur coat in the middle of the river. See it? Grab it man!” The scholar jumped in the river out of his greed, and swam out. Rumi was a little nearsighted; all he could see was a lot of commotion and flubbing around out there. “For Christ’s sake, what are you doing out there! Bring it on in!”

Finally the scholar heard his hulabaloo, and shouted back between gasps: “You cockeyed fool! This ain’t a fur coat out here; it’s a bear. And the more I struggle with him, the deeper his claws go. And he won’t let go!” “Friend,” said Jalaluddin Rumi, “that bear is reason.” If you ask the question ‘why’, you are caught… you are caught by the bear of reason. And the more you ask questions, the more you will get entangled — and the claws will go deeper into your body, into your being. Don’t ask any question. If you want to be aware, just be aware.

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Have you heard the famous anecdote about Jalaluddin Rumi, a Sufi mystic? A woman came with a child, and the woman said, “Maulana, Master, I have tried every way and this child won’t listen. He eats too much sugar. And I know now only one way is possible: if you say something to him, he will listen, because he respects you. He does not understand what you are and who you are, but he respects you. And when I told him, ‘Come with me to Maulana,’ he said, ‘Okay, if he says, I will stop.’”

Maulana looked at the child, at his trust. He said, “Wait, come after three weeks.” The woman was puzzled. Such a simple thing. And Maulana is known all over the world. People come from faraway countries to ask him great problems, and he solves them immediately — and such a silly thing. He could have said, “Yes, don’t eat,” and the thing would have been closed. Three weeks? After three weeks the mother came with the child, and Maulana said, “Wait three weeks more.”

The mother said, “What is the matter?” He said, “Wait, come after three weeks.”

When they came back, he said to the child, “Okay, listen. Stop eating sugar.” The child said, “Okay, I will stop.”

The mother said, “Now one question arises in my heart — and I will not be at rest. Why did you take six weeks for this?”

Maulana said, “I like sugar myself. So how can I advise this child? That would have been untrue. So for three weeks I tried — and I failed! Then for three weeks I tried again, and now I have succeeded. Now I can say, ‘Please, you can also stop. Look, I am an old man — even I can stop. You are a child, a young child; you can do anything.’”

“Now I can say….” This is the way of the mystics; this has always been their way. They believe in experience. 

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All night, a man called “Allah”
Until his lips were bleeding.
Then the Devil said, “Hey! Mr Gullible!
How comes you’ve been calling all night
And never once heard Allah say, “Here, I am”?
You call out so earnestly and, in reply, what?
I’ll tell you what. Nothing!”

The man suddenly felt empty and abandoned.
Depressed, he threw himself on the ground
And fell into a deep sleep.
In a dream, he met Abraham, who asked,“Why are you regretting praising Allah?”

The man said, “ I called and called
But Allah never replied, “Here I am.”
Abraham explained, “Allah has said,
“Your calling my name is My reply.
Your longing for Me is My message to you.
All your attempts to reach Me
Are in reality My attempts to reach you.
Your fear and love are a noose to catch Me.
In the silence surrounding every call of “Allah”
Waits a thousand replies of “Here I am.”


This is said even more poetically as:

Each moment

contains a hundred messages from God:

To every cry of “Oh God”

He answers a hundred times, “I am here.”

~ Mevlana Rumi

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There is a story which Sayyidina Jalaluddin Rumi tells of an ant that’s creeping across the carpet in a mosque, and the ant complains to God saying: “what is this, these bumps, and strange colours, and patterns, this must have been created just as a meaningless obstacle course, what a futile thing to have made.” But of course the carpet maker, looking at it from above can see the patterns and the purpose of it, and can see that the whole thing is perfect and is good. And Allah is often like that. We often can’t make sense of the misfortunes because we are two dimensional, we are at ground level, we can’t see what it all means, but the khalifa of Allah subhanahu wa’tala knows even if he can’t always see that this is a manifestation of Allah’s will which is always good and always perfect and always beautiful. ~ Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad