TEHRAN – Iranology Foundation director Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Khamenei said on Monday that the Persian poet Molana Jala ad-Din Rumi is only perceivable through his masterpiece Masnavi-ye Manavi not by sama, a Sufi ecstatic dance.

Speaking during a ceremony organized at the foundation to commemorate Rumi, Khamenei said that it doesn’t need to hold a dance ceremony to introduce a poet like Rumi and added, “The true Molavi is in Masnavi, not in sama.”

“Due to their mysterious aspects, many of the teachings are not comprehensible to the public, and those people who can express these teachings in verse and prose are very important. Few people have this ability, but Molavi was one of those few people,” he said.  

“Nowadays, there are people in the world who intend to appropriate our luminaries, and unfortunately, we are only mere spectators. Today, there are nations, which have never had a rich cultural and historical background like Iran, that want to steal Iranian luminaries like Avicenna and Farabi to present them as Turkish personalities or to refer to Molavi as ‘Rumi’,” he stated.

“Actually, we should call Molavi ‘Khorasani’ rather than call him Rumi because of a few years of his residing in the Eastern Roman Empire,” he noted.

However, he said that Molavi is an Iranian personality who does not belong to a specific society, but instead he belongs to all humanity.

Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, the director of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, also attended the ceremony.

In his brief speech, he lamented that political stories and gossip about singers and dancers are the top five most viewed issues published by the Western media on Google, and said, “Molana’s world is against what we see in the Western civilization.”

“We see a world in the West that lacks any meaning, while what Molana wants to say is that man has great meaning, and the world is full of meaning,” he noted. 

Photo: Iranology Foundation director Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Khamenei. (Mehr/Maryam Kamyab)

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