Emma Mason, ed. Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature. Bloomsbury, 2014.
Rethinking religion and literature in a series of chapters by leading international scholars, Reading the Abrahamic Faiths opens up a dialogue between Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Post-Secular literary cultures. Literary studies has absorbed religion as another interdisciplinary mode of inquiry without always attending to its multifacted potential to question ideologically neutral readings of culture, belief, emotion, politics and inequality. In response, Reading the Abrahamic Faiths contributes to a reevaluation of the nexus between religion and literature that is socially, affectively and materially determined in its sensitivity to the expression of belief.
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I have written a chapter for this book, briefly discussing the topic of Islamic literature of pain and joy in dialogue with Christian understanding of these emotional conceptions. In the course of composing the text, I travelled to Turkey and Iran, revisiting what was missing in my reading of Islamic mystical verse, mainly the sight and sense of finding oneself in its original homeland. I have been more expansively reading about the poetry of Muslim writers whose works are considered as both classic and canonical in Oriental literature. My focus in this book is primarily on Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī who, to this date, is the best-selling poet in the US, despite being an 808 years old Persian mystic and writer.
Rūmī’s poetry is well received around the globe, connecting the East and the West in its wealth of communicative and universal aspects. I have different collections of Rūmī and I mostly enjoy reading the poems during weekends. I have also collected various translations of Rūmī in different languages. The most outstanding collections of poems are successfully translated by Coleman Barks, whose reading and interpretations of Rūmī are technically and literally detailed and comprehensive. To those in the English-speaking world, who are willing to explore the idea of spirituality and literature of Rūmī, I would recommend a reading of Coleman Barks and his literary stand: http://www.colemanbarks.com/ and then exploring his translations and commentaries on Rūmī.
To those teaching World Literature and Comparative Literary Studies, I recommend a comprehensive review of Emma Mason’s edited volume Reading the Abrahamic Faiths. There are many instances in the book where the gap between contextual-aesthetic reading of religious literature and its assumed meanings are closed. The book offers a crucial reading of canonical text as well as comparative criticism of literary and religious genres in its linguistic, cultural, geographical, and phenomenological varieties. The concept of religion and consciousness, together with the psychology of religious writing has been brought together in this volume, examining a wide range of topics including what Mason discusses as “Forms of Life”. What makes the book more interesting is its underlying engagement with the topic of intellectuality and love. My own reading of each chapter and reflection on the book enlivens one of Rūmī’s poems, entitled “The Intellectual is Always Showing Off”:
The intellectual is always showing off,
the lover is always getting lost.
The intellectual runs away.
afraid of drowning;
the whole business of love
is to drown in the sea.
Intellectuals plan their repose;
lovers are ashamed to rest.
The lover is always alone.
even surrounded by people;
like water and oil, he remains apart.
The man who goes to the trouble
of giving advice to a lover
gets nothing. He’s mocked by passion.
Love is like musk. It attracts attention.
Love is a tree, and the lovers are its shade.