“Dance in Your Blood”: From the Anthropocentric to Organic in Rumi’s Poems

Almost about two centuries prior to the European Renaissance and preceding the Euro-centric assertion of an anthropocentric world-order, illustrated in the ideas of Humanism and the ‘homo universalis’, the view of a diversified earth where each sentient creature exists on the same plane and status as that of the human species was adopted by the falasifas (philosophers) of the Near East. In order to assess this prior emphasis on each living being and not only on the Anthropocene ? the ‘paragon of all animals’ and the supreme being created by the Almighty ? it is relevant that we re-read the works of Jelaluddin Rumi, [(1207 – 1273) original name: JalaluddinWalad], Sufi saint, thinker, poet and founder of the Mevlevi sect, who was born in Balkh (modern Afghanistan) and who spent most of his life in Anatolia and Konya (modern Turkey). As reading entails a kind of travelling too, through cultures, places, world-views, times, spaces, identities, subjectivities, and trajectories of knowledge-systems which have either formed discourses[i] or have been absented and silenced by such discourses, the need now arises for critical theorists so influenced by the West-constructed ‘omnipotent definitions’[ii]to travel through Rumi’s texts, namely Mathnawi and Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi.