The Complaint of Rumi’s Reed: It’s Significance as the Identity of Man in the Concept of Existence

Abstract

The Quran opens with “In the Name of God the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate”. Muslims read this verse in their daily life, in prayer, before eat and even before driving. For the Muslims this verse is not only a way of life that is rooted in tradition, but also it signifies a cosmological and ontological statement of existence. In the Unity of Existences school of thought, the world is created as a manifestation of God’s All-Merciful name which itself is a manifestation of His own creative will. Rumi, the mystical Sufi poet expressed this idea in the opening couplet of his magnum opus, the Mathnawi: “listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations”. In this paper I will explain how to relate the couplet to the given verse of the Quran and from it we will understand its conception of ethics. Later on, with the given structure, we shall apply it as a response to some philosophical questions such as the problem of evil and design argument; and also scientific challenges to theism such as the big bang theory and the evolution theory as well as the formulated ethic will be compared to moral relativism, consequentialism, and utilitarianism.



Author Information
Mohamed Eusuff Amin, Selcuk University, Turkey

Paper Information
Conference: ECERP2017
Stream: Philosophy - Philosophy and Religion

This paper is part of the ECERP2017 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon