Being (with) Shams: Rūmī’s Ethical Poetics of Desire
Easa Saad
Sophia August 5, 2026 DOI: 10.1007/s11841-026-01163-4 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that Rumi's eroticized depictions of Shams reconfigure the Persian ghazal's love poetics into ethical and theological reflection, positioning desire as the medium through which transcendence and immanence are negotiated, with eros serving as both affective and pedagogical force. |
Abstract
Abstract This paper examines the texture of desire in Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s ghazals and asks what it means for the object of this desire to not be an abstract ideal but a concrete spiritual exemplar, Shams al-Tabrīzī (d.1248CE). By exploring Rūmī’s eroticized depictions of Shams, the paper argues that Rūmī reconfigures the Persian ghazal’s conventional poetics of love into a mode of ethical and theological reflection. Desire here is not effaced by transcendence but the very medium through which transcendence and immanence are negotiated. In presenting Shams simultaneously as intimate companion and perfected saint ( insān-i kāmil ), Rūmī positions eros as both affective and pedagogical, a force that binds bodily longing to divine love and grounds mystical union in the embodied presence of the spiritual guide. The ghazals thus dramatize a poetics in which the contradictions of presence and absence, form and meaning, pain and joy, are not resolved but held together as constitutive of the ethical life.