I am a thief. Decades ago, I entered into Jalaluddin Rumi’s (1207-1273) domain hoping to steal some of his wisdom and sublimity. I did not leave. I stayed and continue to stay ever since.  I first encountered Rumi in a book published in the 1970s. That was in 1974 at a small Penang bookshop next to the then ‘Craven A’ restaurant at Simpang Enam. The shop, located at Dato’ Keramat Road, not far from Komtar at Penang Road, sells mainly Islamic religious books published in places like Kota Baru, Kelantan or Singapore. 

Ever since, I had hoarded Rumi. I was and still am a hoarder. In my student days, I would continuously extend borrowings over the three years I was at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, making the Wilson Library my second home. And much of my writings, perhaps, echo the scent, sound and sight of Rumi.  My 30 year-old son’s name is after the sage.     

At the recent Rumi Seminar: Bridging Cultures between Iran and Malaysia on November 10 recently at the Academy of Malay Studies, Universiti Malaya, I spoke on the title “Rumi and the Tanah Air: Lost in Translation.”  I explored the oceanic metaphor in the writings of Rumi and its resonance in Malay Sufi thought, centering on the concept of Tanah Air – the geographical, metaphysical, and expression of the rantau where land and sea interact and overlap.  Rumi’s thoughts transcend time and place.  Rumi creates a cosmology of belonging, exile and return. In the context of the Malay World, the notion of Tanah Air embodies a similar meaning.

That meaning expresses both geographical rootedness and spiritual origin.  Juxtaposing Rumi to the Tanah Air is therefore to explore the metaphysics of homecoming with the Malay cosmology of space, place and being. The notion of rantau and merantau is hence taken to another level.  Rumi’s Tanah Air is not necessarily bounded by territory but a symbolic geography of both settling, unsettling and return. It is the inner homeland.

One can begin with the exile and origin of the ney – the reed flute, from where the Malay word serunai comes from. Rumi opens the Mathnawi with the plaintive cry of the reed flute, whose music laments its separation from the reed bed: “Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale, complaining of separations.” (Mathnawi 1:1-2). This is the foundational image of Rumi. It is about the human condition, of separation from its source, of merantau away from one’s place.  The image is about separation and disconnection.

The sounds of Rumi echo in the Persian-origin Malay classic hikayat of the 14^th century as in the Hikayat Amir Hamzah and Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain. Crossing the seas of the Indian Ocean, the message of Rumi heavily resonates in Hamzah Fansuri and Shamsuddin al-Sumatrani.  In the latter, we find Rumi, the Tanah Air and the Syair Perahu into one coherent framework. Rumi’s ocean metaphor constantly uses images of the sea, the ship, the shore and the journey. In Hamzah Fansuri’s Syair, the perahu (boat) represents the self and the soul; the laut (sea), the temptations and chaos of worldly life; the angin/gelombang (wind/waves) the trials of the nafs, the pelabuhan (port) as God as in the final destination, and the Tanah Air as homeland. In Rumi, we find the spiritual map of the Tanah Air.

Rumi yearns for transcendence, to the homeland of the spirit. In this sense, Tanah Air resonates profoundly Rumi’s cosmology.  It evokes the dialectic of origin and return. It is the Tanah Air in both Rumi and the Malay imagination, to recall where we come from and where we must return.  Rumi’s ontology transforms the world into a cosmic homeland.  All creations participate in the remembrance of God. The land and sea sing the song of unity. This implies that loving one’s Tanah Air is to love the homeland.  The Tanah Air then is not only national, but at the same time transnational space – a site of sacred manifestation.

Modern conceptions of nationalism disrupts the Tanah Air, reducing it to territorial boundaries of statehood. In Rumi’s discourses, homeland (watan) cannot be conquered or claimed.  It is the soul’s intimacy with Being. Belonging is not a political condition. It is a spiritual disposition – a recognition that “wherever you stand, that is the place of the Beloved” (Fihi ma Fihi, 29). These resonate the Malay proverb “Di mana bumi dipijak, di situ langit dijunjung.”  Hence in the Malay worldview, Tanah Air encompasses both physical and metaphysical meanings. It signifies unity of place and people, the ancestral bonds and the collective memory. The Tanah Air is a balanced continuity, a continuum of the sacred. Hence the cyclical nature of Malay cosmology where life emerges from the soil and returns to it – “dari tanah kita datang, kepada tanah kita kembali” – innalilahiwainaiillahijoriun.  When Rumi speaks of the reed’s longing for its reed bed, the Malay imagination might hear the same lament – the yearning of the soil for its asal usul.

The ocean mitigates.  In Rumi’s Mathnawi, the ocean is a central metaphor for the infinite reality (al-Haqq). Rumi writes: “You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the entire ocean in a drop.” (Mathnawi 1:2860-2865). The sea (bahr and the Malay bahari) represents the One, while the waves represent the many. There is the unity of immanence and transcendence.  “The wave is the sea, though in form it appears distinct” (Mathnawi II: 1208-1210). The Malay Archipelago, straddling between two oceans in the vast maritime realm, naturally resonates the oceanic  rhythm, symbolism and mysticism.  The concept of the Tanah Air embodies this inseparability, translating Rumi’s metaphysics into a lived geography. Here we see life as a voyage across the sea of Being.  The soul’s journey begins with the divine realm and ends in the return.  “We are all waves of that Sea; we belong to it, and we return to it.” (Mathnawi 1:2630-2635).

Rumi writes of drowning (Mathnawi II:1208-1211). The image of drowning, echoed by Hamzah Fansuri’s Syair Perahu, signifies fana – annihilation of self in the Divine.  Within the Tanah Air, the sea and land together reflect the voyage of the soul between the visible and the unseen. In Mathnawi IV: 1400-1403, Rumi conjures the foam: “The knowledge of the world is like the foam on the sea; but the sea itself is a Divine mystery.”  We hear the phrase, “laut ilmu tiada bertepi” (the sea of knowledge has no shore) echoing the similar tradition. The environment of the Tanah Air is pregnant with divine signs, with each horizon fluid, each boundary boundless.

Existence is rhythmic. Beings arise and return to the ocean of the Real. This is reflected in the Malay cosmology where tanah symbolises form and air symbolises spirit. Together, they express a unity, obscured when Tanah and Air was divorced and reduced to nationalist territory.  The Tanah Air is a sacred, moral and civilizational, geography, and a consciousness of place and space. 

The message of Rumi has somehow been obliterated under coloniality and nationalistic conditions. Rediscovering Rumi is returning to the ontological essence  of the Tanah Air. The Tanah Air signifies not political belonging but spiritual homecoming – the interweaving of tanah and air, self and soul.  This is nationhood long before 1957. The Tanah Air is the infinite geography of being.

It is a shared grammar of belonging between Rumi’s metaphysical homeland with the Tanah Air. The Tanah Air is a trust, and a remembrance. To many, the Tanah Air is a fuzzy notion of nationalistic propaganda. On the other hand, evokes the visible form of the invisible, the intersection of the temporal and the eternal. Modernity and the modern man of the Tanah Air has narrowed this meaning.  The discourse of nationhood, and territory is confined to political identity, a bangsa politik as in bangsa Malaysia. In national terms, it is a nation to be defended lest it becomes a lost nation. Reclaiming a sacred meaning of the tanah air, we must re-read Rumi’s reed flute, its cry is not a nostalgia for a place, but a metaphysical homeland.

The love for the Tanah Air is a movement toward the homeland, transcending form to see its essence. It is unveiling the divine pattern. The Tanah Air is hence a geography of being and belonging, of poetry, of place and movement. It is the nahdah – the (continuous) awakening. And the journey home begins to unfold within. That devolution is the batin – the inner homeland of the tanah air, transcending geography but sanctifying it. 

Hence Rumi and the Tanah Air converge in their vision of the homeland. It manifests both centrifugal and centripetal forces – in that existence is a movement from unity to multiplicity and back again. The exile of the soul and the rootedness of the earth are not contradictions but mirrors of one another.  What has been “lost in translation” is not merely in linguistic meaning but an entirely metaphysical worldview.  The vision of the homeland as both land and water, soil and spirit, geography and history. Rumi’s Tanah Air is not a forgotten wisdom. It is beyond territory.  It is the remembrance of the serunai singing of the return to the thief who continues to stay.

About the writer: Ahmad Murad Merican is Professor of Social and Intellectual History and Director of the Centre for Malay-Islamic Civilisational Studies,  International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation, International Islamic University Malaysia