Celebrating Rumi, Islam's poet of peace

The day Tuten and his friends arrive at Rumi's ornate mausoleum, it is packed with people despite the heavy gray skies and a persistent drizzle. Perhaps they have all come seeking respite from the tumult of recent months.

Stalemated presidential elections this past srping led to massive protests and notched up tensions between the country's old secular elite and its new, rising religious majority.

Attacks by the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the country's southern region, brought Turkey and neighboring Iraq, where PKK activists take refuge, to the brink of war. And Iraq's present turmoil threatens to spill over into Turkey.

The monument to Rumi is a strange mixture of museum and shrine. Under the green dome itself, there is Rumi's tomb and that of his father, spectacularly ornamented in gold script and topped with a conical hat. In the surrounding rooms, constructed after Rumi's death to house the religious order he founded, glass cases display the valuable gifts his followers have brought here through the centuries: silk rugs, prayer beads, hand-illustrated Korans, and even a box containing a relic from the Prophet Muhammad.

One room is filled with aging human-sized dolls that represent Mevlevi Sufis working, studying, cooking, and dancing.

For Rumi's followers, the whirling dance was a way of connecting with God. Performed by men dressed in long white skirts and conical hats, the dance represents man's spiritual journey to enlightenment.

When I ask one man, who was lurking around Rumi's tomb with a nametag on his coat, to explain the philosophy, he pulls out a grubby slip of paper from his wallet. On it are three simple lines, Rumi's own explanation of his life's journey:

I was raw

I cooked

I burned

But Rumi's fire was of love, not hate, Tuten and his friends say. They are all young men, clean-shaven and modestly dressed, not so different in age from others of their faith who have chosen to die – or kill – in the name of Islam. The difference, say Tuten and his friends, is that Rumi and the contemporary thinkers who continue to preach his ideas have set them on a different path.

Outside the tomb, Tuten and his friends are crowding around, spouting quotes from their favorite Rumi writings. "We want peace, we don't want more wars," says Selcuk Nohutcu, a colleague of Tuten, as we stand in the tomb's doorway, not far from where other visitors are examining the relic of Muhammad. "Those people who are terrorists, they are not true Muslims."

"Some people look at Islam as a religion of terror," adds Tuten earnestly. "Rumi has shown to the whole world that this is not true. That Islam is a religion of compassion. He opened his arms to the whole world."

•••

While we're talking, the lurking man – who I finally realize is an official tour guide hustling for work – keeps trying to sabotage our discussion. He keeps interrupting, telling us to move.

Earlier, I'd sent him away with a handful of small notes when I discovered that his English was incomprehensible and that he expected to be paid for just talking to me. It's more evidence of the odd way in which Rumi's tomb mixes the sacred and the secular.

The tour guide is now trying to drive us into the rain, saying we're not allowed to talk inside. My young interviewees get angry and a heated argument ensues in rapid-fire Turkish.

Finally, we move outside and stand, sheltered, under a sliver of roof. The tour guide follows. He's not giving up.

"He's still raw," says one of the men, annoyed, but half laughing. "He's not cooked."

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