Irreverent Reviews
The Essential Rumi
Rumi · 13th century
Coleman Barks turned a 13th-century Islamic scholar into America's best-selling poet by sanding off the Quran and adding line breaks.
Buy on Amazon →Jalal al-Din Rumi was a thirteenth-century Islamic jurist in Konya—a respectable professor of religious law with students and a pulpit—until a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz walked into his life in 1244 and detonated it. The two locked themselves away in conversation for months while Rumi's scandalized students seethed. Then Shams vanished, and rumors of murder have circled Rumi's own household for centuries. Grief turned the professor into a fountain: tens of thousands of ecstatic verses, including the Masnavi, so saturated in scripture that admirers called it the Quran in Persian. Seven hundred years later, a Tennessee poet named Coleman Barks—who reads no Persian—reworked Victorian translations into loose American free verse, and Rumi became the best-selling poet in the United States.
The Professor Who Caught Fire
The poems run on longing. The reed flute weeps because it was cut from the reed bed; the lover is drunk on a wine no vineyard produced; the Beloved being courted in all that swooning is God. This is devotional technology, engineered inside Islam by a man who prayed and taught and meant it, and the whirling practice his followers formalized into the Mevlevi order is not a dance craze—it is prayer with the body set spinning. Rumi without that engine is a sports car with the transmission removed: gorgeous, stationary.
The Tennessee Remix
The American chapter starts in 1976, when Robert Bly handed Barks a stack of scholarly translations and told him to free the poems from their academic cages. Barks freed them, all right—from the scholarship, from the ghazal's formal machinery, and, critics charge, from the religion itself. The case was made most famously in a 2017 New Yorker essay on the erasure of Islam from Rumi's poetry: the Quranic allusions blur, the theology evaporates, and what remains is a frictionless ecstatic who could be from anywhere. Somewhere between Konya and Tennessee, the Quran fell out of the suitcase. In 2026, Rumi is a wellness brand—candles, captions, zero Quran—and the algorithm loves him exactly as much as it misunderstands him.
“Somewhere between Konya and Tennessee, the Quran fell out of the suitcase.”
Verdict
Here is the honest accounting: Barks writes beautiful American poems, and millions of people met Rumi through them who would never have opened a critical edition. The gateway is real. Just know that the man on the other side of it prayed five times a day, taught law, and burned for a friend who may have been murdered downstairs. Read Barks for the high, then go find the fire that caused it. To Shams—may every professor meet the stranger who ruins him beautifully.
