Highlighting that spiritual ideas and teachings appropriated from the Far East and India have been adapted by the Western world into a secular framework and turned into commercial commodities, Dr. Arzu Eylül Yalçınkaya notes that trends such as “Rumi and mindfulness”, now quite popular in the United States, are presented through a reductionist lens.
Yalçınkaya states, “To understand Rumi, one must explain the kind of understanding of being he proposes—that is, tawhid (divine unity). Without grasping Rumi’s universe, I believe that the tolerance he proposes and the love he proposes will also be reduced to today’s common notion of love.”
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