Spiritual Erasure and Cultural Translation: How Rumi Became a Western Mystic Without Islam

This preprint examines how Jalal al-Din Rumi became one of the most widely circulated poets in English while much of the Islamic, Persian, Qur’anic, and Sufi context of his work became reduced, displaced, or made optional in popular reception. It does not argue that every English reader receives a false Rumi, nor that every adaptive rendering is illegitimate. It argues that the Anglophone Rumi market often separates poetic force from the religious and linguistic world that gives that force its grammar. The result is not simple mistranslation but a cultural translation system in which Persian verse becomes inspirational English, Muslim theological vocabulary becomes general spirituality, Sufi discipline becomes private feeling, and a thirteenth-century scholar-poet becomes a placeless Western mystic.