The Sufi is “not Christian or Jew or Muslim,” Rumi wrote. He is not of “any religion or cultural system … not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all … not an entity of this world or the next.” He is, in Ishan Kaiser’s description, “the actual temple of the fire

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A Garden Beyond Paradise

by Rumi

Everything you see has its roots

in the unseen world.

The forms may change,

yet the essence remains the same.

Every wondrous sight will vanish,

every sweet word will fade.

But do not be disheartened,

The Source they come from is eternal--

growing, branching out,

giving new life and new joy.

Why do you weep?--

That Source is... See more

The inner Iran, which I'd excavated through poems, had given me some of the most intimate depictions I'd encountered of how to make contact with the divine; poets really could be the unacknowledged legislators of the world in a culture where taxi drivers recite mystical verses and ayatollahs speak in double-edged stanzas.

But poetry is the form that

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