How the 13th-Century Sufi Poet Rumi Became One of the World’s Most Popular Writers

in History, Poetry, Religion | June 12th, 2024

The Middle East is hardly the world’s most harmonious region, and it only gets more fractious if you add in South Asia and the Mediterranean. But there’s one thing on which many residents of that wide geographical span can agree: Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī. One might at first imagine that a thirteenth-century poet and mystical philosopher who wrote in Persian, with occasional forays into Turkish, Arabic, and Greek, would be a niche figure today, if known at all. In fact, Rumi, as he’s commonly known, is now one of the most popular writers in not just the Middle East but the world; English reinterpretations of his verse have even made him the best-selling poet in the United States.

“The transformative moment in Rumi’s life came in 1244, when he met a wandering mystic known as Shams of Tabriz,” writes the BBC’s Jane Ciabattari. She quotes Brad Gooch, author of Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love, describing them as having an “electric friendship for three years,” after which Shams disappeared. “Rumi coped by writing poetry,” which includes 3,000 poems written for “Shams, the prophet Muhammad and God. He wrote 2,000 rubayat, four-line quatrains. He wrote in couplets a six-volume spiritual epic, The Masnavi.” He did all this work in service of what, in the animated TED-Ed lesson above, Stephanie Honchell Smith calls his ultimate goal: “the reunification of his soul with God through the experience of divine love.”

How is such a love to be accessed? “Love resides not in learning, not in knowledge, not in pages in books,” Rumi declared. “Wherever the debates of men may lead, that is not the lover’s path.” He pursued it through devotion to Shams’ Sufism, “participating in ritualized dancing and preaching the religion of love through lectures, poetry, and prose.” Later in life, he shifted “from ecstatic expressions of divine love to verses that guide others to discover it for themselves,” incorporating “ideas, stories, and quotes from Islamic religious texts, Arabic and Persian literature and earlier Sufi writings and poetry.” Perhaps there can be no full appreciation of Rumi’s work without a scholar’s understanding of the languages and cultures he knew. But if his sales figures are anything to go by, the longing into which his complex work taps is universal.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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A 6‑Step Guide to Zen Buddhism, Presented by Psychiatrist-Zen Master Robert Waldinger

in Psychology, Religion | May 24th, 2024

Robert Waldinger works as a part-time professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, but he also describes himself as a “Zen master.” This may strike some listeners as a presumptuous claim, but he has indeed been officially accepted as a rōshi in two different Zen lineages in the West. With one foot in psychiatry and the other in Buddhism, Waldinger (previously featured here on Open Culture for his work on happiness and loneliness) is well-placed to explain the latter in terms amenable to the former. In the Big Think video above, he breaks the ancient religion — or mindset, or way of being, or whatever one prefers to call it — into six distinct concepts: impermanence, noble truths, mindfulness, attachment, loving kindness, and beginner’s mind.

If you’ve felt any curiosity about Zen Buddhism and pursued it online in recent years, the term mindfulness will be familiar to the point of cliché. Waldinger personally defines it as “paying attention in the present moment without judgment.” You can work on your mindfulness right now, he explains, “by simply paying attention to whatever stimuli are reaching you. It might be your heartbeat, it might be your breath, it might be the sound of the fan in the room — anything — and simply letting yourself be open and receive whatever is here right now.” This can help us put into perspective the next concept, attachment, or our feeling “that the world be a certain way,” which causes no amount of our dissatisfaction and even suffering.

All of these ideas are much expanded on in primary and secondary Buddhist texts, which any enthusiast can spend a lifetime reading. My own interest was first piqued by a popular 1970 volume called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a compilation of talks by a famous rōshi called Shunryū Suzuki Waldinger references Suzuki’s work in the final section of this video, and specifically his observation that “in the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.” In Waldinger’s own experience, “the older I get, and the more people call me an expert, the more aware I am of how little I know.” True mastery lies in the awareness not of the knowledge we have, but the knowledge we don’t.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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What Is Religion Actually For?: Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury Weigh In

in Literature, Religion, Sci Fi | May 6th, 2024

In the nineteen-sixties, the music media encouraged the notion that a young rock-and-roll fan had to side with either the Beatles or their rivals, the Rolling Stones. On some level, it must have made sense, given the growing aesthetic divide between the music the two world-famous groups were putting out. But, at bottom, not only was there no rivalry between the bands (it was an invention of the music papers), there was no real need, of course, to choose one or the other. In the fifties, something of the same dynamic must have obtained between Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, two popular genre writers, each with his own worldview.

Bradbury and Asimov had much in common: both were (probably) born in 1920, both attended the very first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939, both began publishing in pulp magazines in the forties, and both had an aversion to airplanes. That Bradbury spent most of his life in California and Asimov in New York made for a potentially interesting cultural contrast, though it never seems to have been played up. Still, it may explain something of the basic difference between the two writers as it comes through in the video above, a compilation of talk-show clips in which Bradbury and Asimov respond to questions about their religious beliefs, or lack thereof.

Asimov may have written a guide to the Bible, but he was hardly a literalist, calling the first chapters of Genesis “the sixth-century BC version of how the world might have started. We’ve improved on that since. I don’t believe that those are God’s words. Those are the words of men, trying to make the most sense that they could out of the information they had at the time.” In a later clip, Bradbury, for his part, confesses to a belief in not just Genesis, but also Darwin and even Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who theorized that characteristics acquired in an organism’s lifetime could be passed down to the next generation. “Nothing is proven,” he declares, “so there’s room for a religious delicatessen.”

One senses that Asimov wouldn’t have agreed, and indeed, would have been perfectly satisfied with a regular delicatessen. Though both he and Bradbury became famous as science-fiction writers around the same time — to say nothing of their copious writing in other genres — they possessed highly distinct imaginations. That works like Fahrenheit 451 and the Foundation trilogy attracted such different readerships is explicable in part through Bradbury’s insistence that “there’s room to believe it all” and Asimov’s dismissal of what he saw as every “get-rich quick scheme of the mind” peddled by “con men of the spirit”: each point of view as thoroughly American, in its way, as the Beatles and the Stones were thoroughly English.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Discover the Singing Nuns Who Have Turned Medieval Latin Hymns into Modern Hits

in Music, Religion | April 19th, 2024

We now live, as one often hears, in an age of few musical superstars, but towering ones. The popular culture of the twenty-twenties can, at times, seem to be contained entirely within the person of Taylor Swift — at least when the media magnet that is Beyoncé takes a breather. But look past them, if you can, and you’ll find formidable musical phenomena in the unlikeliest of places. Take the Poor Clares of Arundel, a group of singing nuns from Sussex who, during the COVID-19 pandemic, “smashed all chart records to become not only the highest-charting nuns in history, but also the UK’s best-selling classical artist debut,” reports Classic FM’s Maddy Shaw Roberts.

“Music is at the heart of the nuns’ worship,” writes the Guardian’s Joanna Moorhead, but the idea of putting out an album “came about initially as a bit of a joke.” Not long after receiving a visit from a curious music producer, the singing Poor Clares — skilled and unskilled alike — found themselves in a proper recording studio, laying down tracks.

Roberts describes the resulting debut Light for the World as “a collection of Latin hymns produced for a twenty-first century audience, bringing calm and beauty during a time when so many were separated from their loved ones.” Just a few weeks ago, they released its follow-up May Peace I Give You, the video for whose title track appears at the top of the post.

May Peace I Give You comes from Decca Records, a label famous in part for their rejection, in 1962, of a scruffy rock-and-roll band called the Beatles. Presumably determined not to make the same mistake twice, they’ve since taken chances on all manner of acts, starting with the Rolling Stones; over the decades, they’ve reached beyond the well-trodden spaces in popular and classical music. The success of the Poor Clares goes to show that this practice continues to pay off, and that — like the popular Gregorian chant and gospel booms of decades past — venerable holy music retains its resonance even in our trend-driven, not-especially-religious age. And as the promotion of their new Abbey Road-recorded album proves, even for the monastically disciplined, some temptations are irresistible.

via Classic FM

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

180,000 Years of Religion Charted on a “Histomap” in 1943

in Design, History, Religion | March 20th, 2024

For many, even most of us moderns, the central religious choice is a simple one: adhere to the belief system in which you grew up, or stop adhering to it. But if you survey the variety of religions in the world, the situation no longer seems quite so binary; if you then add the variety of religions that have existed throughout human history, it starts looking downright kaleidoscopic. Or rather, it looks something like the faintly psychedelic but also information-rich Histomap of Religion above, created in 1943 by chemist John B. Sparks, whom we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for his original Histomap depicting 4,000 Years of World History and his subsequent Histomap of Evolution.

The UsefulCharts video below explains Sparks’ Histomap of Religion in detail, but it also cites his Histomap of Evolution, an example of how his worldview fails to align with current perceptions of these subjects. Even the newer Histomap of Religion is by now more than 80 years old, during which time scholarship in religion and related fields has made certain discoveries and clarifications that necessarily go unreflected in Sparks’ work. But if you bear this in mind while looking at the Histomap of Religion, you can still gain a new and useful perspective on how the beliefs that mankind has held highest have changed and intermingled over the millennia.

The chart begins in prehistory, dividing the then-extant faiths into the categories “magic and fetishism,” “tabu and totemism,” “ancestor worship,” “tribal gods and divine kings,” “propitiation of nature spirits,” and “fertility cults.” Though Sparks’ information may on the whole be “based on theories about the origins of religion which have now been either rejected or at least seriously revised,” explains UsefulCharts creator Matt Baker, “the general ideas expressed by these six types are still somewhat valid.” The expansion and contraction of adherence to these types of early religion through time are reflected by changes in the width of the colored columns that represent them. Follow these columns downward through history, and new, more familiar religions emerge: Taoism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity both Catholic and Protestant.

Thereafter come other movements and figures perhaps not immediately recognizable as religious in nature: “humanism,” for example, whose representatives include Shakespeare and Rousseau. Later, the ideas of Russian intellectuals Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen branch off to become, after about a century, the “corrupt philosophy” of communism, with its “God-less propaganda” supporting a “police state aimed at world domination.” Baker objects that, if Sparks counts communism as a religion, then surely he should count capitalism as a religion as well. This is a fair-enough point, though behold this dense chart of “cults, faiths, and ethical philosophies” long enough, and you’ll start to wonder if everything humanity has ever done isn’t, in some sense, ultimately religious in nature.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

An Architectural Tour of Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Audacious Church That’s Been Under Construction for 142 Years

in Architecture, History, Religion | March 18th, 2024

In less than a year and a half, the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death will be here. Faced with this fact, especially dedicated enthusiasts of Catalan architecture may already be planning their festivities. But we can be sure where the real pressure is felt: the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s most famous building, which — as of tomorrow — has been under construction for 142 years. When it first broke ground in 1882, Gaudí wasn’t involved at all, but when he took over the project the following year, he re-envisioned it in a distinctive combination of the Gothic and Art Nouveau styles. The rest, as they say, is history: a troubled, unpredictable history continuing to this day, explained by architecture-and-history Youtuber Manuel Bravo in the video above.

Though it isn’t yet complete, you can visit Sagrada Família; indeed, it’s long been the most popular tourist attraction in Barcelona. The experience of marveling at the basilica’s astonishing degree of detail and not-quite-of-this-Earth structure is worth the price of admission, which has helped to fund its ongoing construction. But you’ll appreciate it on a higher level if you go with someone who can explain its many unusual features, both architectural and religious — someone with as much knowledge ad enthusiasm as Bravo, whom we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on Pompeii, Venice, the Great Pyramids of Giza, and the Duomo di Firenze.

With Sagrada Família’s pyramidal shape, Bravo explains, Gaudí “hoped to suggest a connection between the human and the divine.” Its three façades are dedicated to the birth, death, and eternal life of Jesus Christ, to whom the central and tallest of its planned eighteen towers will be dedicated. The cathedral’s exterior alone constitutes an “authentic Bible of stone,” but it can hardly prepare you to step into the interior, with its “beautiful play of space, light, and color.” As Bravo puts it, “the protagonist here is the space itself,” envisioned by Gaudí as “a huge forest” involving no un-nature-like straight lines. All of it showcases “the combination of aesthetics and efficiency” that defines the architect’s work.

Bravo’s video runs a bit over twenty minutes, but you could spend much, much longer appreciating every aspect of Sagrada Família, those completed in Gaudí’s lifetime as well as those completed by the many devoted artisans who have continued his work for almost 100 years now. The architect “knew quite well that he would not live to see the temple completed,” says Bravo, hence his having “left behind so many models and drawings” for his successors to go on. They’re working on a 2026 deadline, but as Bravo notes, given the interruptions inflicted by COVID-19, “that date seems unlikely.” But then, has there ever been as unlikely a building as Sagrada Família?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

The Founder of the Red Cross Creates a Diagram of the Apocalypse (1887)

in Art, History, Religion | March 14th, 2024

History remembers Henry Dunant (1828–1910) for two things–being the co-founder of the Red Cross movement and winning the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.

Less well known is his diagram of the Apocalypse. Between 1877 and 1890, notes the Red Cross Museum website, Henry Dunant “produced a series of diagrams reflecting his distinctive understanding of humanity’s past and future. Inspired by Christian revivalism, the drawings depict a timeline from the Flood of Noah to what Dunant believed was an impending Apocalypse. The diagrams fuse mystical references with biblical, historic and scientific events, while also setting up a clear opposition between Geneva, as the centre of the Reformation, and the Catholic Church.”

The image above is the first drawing out of a series of four, made with colored pencils, ink, India ink, wax crayons, and watercolors. Writes Messy Nessy, Dunant “spent considerable time on the drawings, organising the symbolic elements according to a strict logic, making preparatory sketches and painstakingly incorporating drawings and colourings into his chronology.” All along, he was driven by the belief that the Apocalypse was in the offing, just a short time way.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Discover the World’s Oldest University, Which Opened in 427 CE, Housed 9 Million Manuscripts, and Then Educated Students for 800 Years

in Education, History, Religion | February 22nd, 2024

In the Buddhist Asia of a dozen centuries ago, the equivalent of going off to study at an Ivy League school was going off to study at Nalanda. It was founded in the year 427 in what’s now the Indian state of Bihar, making it “the world’s first residential university,” as Sugato Mukherjee writes at BBC travel. As it developed, Nalanda became a “home to nine million books that attracted 10,000 students from across Eastern and Central Asia. They gathered here to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and – above all – Buddhist principles from some of the era’s most revered scholars.”

Alas, despite being much older than the famously venerable universities of Bologna, Oxford, or Cambridge, Nalanda can’t claim to have been in continuous operation since the fifth century. Destroyed by marauders during Turko-Afghan general Bakhtiyar Khilji’s conquest of northern and eastern India in the 1190s, its vast campus lay in obscure ruins until Scottish surveyor Francis Buchanan-Hamilton and British Army engineer Sir Alexander Cunningham rediscovered and identified it, respectively, in the nineteenth century.

In its nearly eight centuries of initial activity, writes Mukherjee, Nalanda attracted proto-international students from all over Asia, and “regularly sent some of its best scholars and professors to places like China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Sri Lanka to propagate Buddhist teachings and philosophy.” Its notable faculty members included Aryabhata, “the father of Indian mathematics,” who may have been its head in the sixth century, and Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who returned to his homeland in 645 with “a wagonload of 657 Buddhist scriptures from Nalanda.” Later “he would translate a portion of these volumes into Chinese to create his life’s treatise.”

Image by Sumitsurai, via Wikimedia Commons

Of the nine million handwritten Buddhist manuscripts in Nalanda’s library at the time of its destruction, “only a handful” survived. Some of them eventually made their way to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a fitting enough tribute to the world-spanning outlook of the institution. Not far from its original location, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, Nalanda is making a comeback as an international place of learning for the twenty-first century. You can get a sense of how that project is shaping up from the BBC Reel video above. “I think we are already a university of the future,” says its Vice Chancellor Sunaina Singh, and indeed, a promising vision of the future needs nothing quite so much as a sufficiently deep past.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

How the 13th-Century Sufi Poet Rumi Became One of the World’s Most Popular Writers

A 6‑Step Guide to Zen Buddhism, Presented by Psychiatrist-Zen Master Robert Waldinger

What Is Religion Actually For?: Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury Weigh In

Discover the Singing Nuns Who Have Turned Medieval Latin Hymns into Modern Hits

180,000 Years of Religion Charted on a “Histomap” in 1943

An Architectural Tour of Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Audacious Church That’s Been Under Construction for 142 Years

The Founder of the Red Cross Creates a Diagram of the Apocalypse (1887)

Discover the World’s Oldest University, Which Opened in 427 CE, Housed 9 Million Manuscripts, and Then Educated Students for 800 Years

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