Rumi: The Poetic Art of Speaking with the Divine

This essay explores the ways in which Rumi creates poetic spaces for speaking with the Divine in the Masnavi as well as in the Divan. Keshavarz views Rumi as a poet who turned his poetic art into a conduit for connection with the Divine, a process she calls the unsilencing of the sacred self. Conceptualizing the munajats, the lyrical conversations with God, in the Masnavi as a set of pedagogical tools, she argues that they should be seen as poetic goal-oriented teaching devices, in fact lyrically sharpened precision tools Rumi uses to cut through layers of silence to reactivate a dormant human ability: speaking with God’s voice. For the Divan, she focuses on one major thematic node that is central to Rumi’s vision and poetry, namely silence. Her goal in this section is to display the dynamism that Rumi brings to the theme of silence permeating his mystical discourse by exploring his investigative and functional use of this poetic tool.