Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī died in Konya, in what is now Turkey, in 1273. He is now, by most accounts, the bestselling poet in the United States — a remarkable fact that requires some explaining, because a significant portion of what circulates under his name in English is not translation so much as creative reinterpretation, and some of it is simply made up.
The story of how this happened illuminates something important about how spiritual literature travels — and what gets lost in transit.
The Coleman Barks Problem
The dominant English voice for Rumi is Coleman Barks, an American poet from Georgia whose versions of Rumi’s work — The Essential Rumi (HarperOne, 1995) and its sequels — have sold millions of copies. Barks is a gifted poet. But he does not read Persian. His versions are based on earlier, more literal English translations — primarily those of John Moyne and A.J. Arberry — which he then freely reworks for rhythm, image, and accessibility.
The result is beautiful English poetry. Whether it is Rumi is a more complicated question.
Scholar Jawid Mojaddedi, who has produced a scholarly verse translation of the Masnavi (Oxford World’s Classics, 2004–), has noted that Barks’s versions systematically remove the Islamic theological framework that structures Rumi’s work. The Prophet Muhammad appears in the Barks versions rarely; the specific Quranic allusions that run through the Masnavi like a nervous system are largely absent. What remains is a decontextualized mysticism — universal, accessible, suitable for secular American readers — that Rumi himself would probably not recognize.
The Most Circulated Non-Rumi Quote
The line that appears most frequently attributed to Rumi on social media — “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” — is a Barks version of a genuine poem. The Farsi original (from the Dīvān-i Kabīr) is considerably more religiously specific. Mojaddedi’s more literal version renders the sentiment as being about how transcending the categories of “infidel” and “Muslim” opens toward a different kind of meeting. The agricultural metaphor of the field appears in Barks’s version but not in the original.
This is not a trivial distortion. The poem’s context is intra-religious transcendence within Islamic mysticism, not a general invitation to secular open-mindedness. The reframing flattens precisely what is most specific and most interesting.
Similarly, the often-circulated “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it” is frequently attributed to Rumi but appears to originate with A Course in Miracles (Helen Schucman, 1976) or a later paraphrase, not any Persian source scholars can identify.
What Rumi Actually Did
Rumi’s major works are the Masnavi — a six-volume poem of approximately 25,000 couplets, sometimes called the “Persian Quran” — and the Dīvān-i Kabīr, a vast collection of lyric poetry attributed to and written in the name of his teacher and beloved, Shams-i Tabrīzī.
Both works are deeply, specifically Sufi. The Masnavi opens: “Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale, complaining of separations.” The reed cut from the reed-bed is a figure for the soul separated from its divine origin — and the entire six books elaborate this separation and longing within the specific theological frame of Islamic mysticism, particularly the tradition of fana (annihilation of the ego in God) and baqa (subsistence in the divine).
Franklin Lewis, whose biography Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oneworld, 2000) is the most comprehensive scholarly treatment in English, writes that Rumi’s mystical poetry is inseparable from his legal training, his Islamic practice, and the specific lineage of Sufi teaching through which he understood experience. To read it as a free-floating spirituality — relevant regardless of context — is to read something other than Rumi.
Why It Matters
There are two possible responses to all of this. One is simple: if Barks’s versions are beautiful and useful, does the distortion matter?
It matters because serious engagement requires knowing what you’re engaging with. A Rumi read as a universal mystic affirms what you already believe. A Rumi read in context — as a 13th-century Islamic scholar whose encounter with Shams-i Tabrīzī undid his previous certainties — confronts you with something you might not have expected. The specific details are where the encounter actually happens.
The other reason is scholarly honesty. When a poet’s work is attributed claims it cannot support, something is lost about the nature of that work, the tradition it came from, and the real conditions under which spiritual transformation occurs. Rumi’s theology of love was not abstract. It was embodied in a particular friendship, within a particular faith, in a particular historical moment. That specificity is not a limitation to be translated away. It is the content.
Go deeper: Jawid Mojaddedi’s ongoing translation of the Masnavi (Oxford World’s Classics) is the scholarly English standard. For biography and context, Franklin Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oneworld, 2000, revised 2014).