Thread: Tonight is the longest and darkest night of the year. Iranic peoples and neighboring groups call it 'Shab-e Yaldā' and spend the night in celebration, but why is the winter solstice important to them? (1/7)
Shab-e Yaldā or Shab-e Chelleh is the twentieth/twenty-first of December, or the end of the ninth month (Azar) in the Iranian calendar. Iranic peoples stay up eating pomegranates, watermelons, nuts, sitting under a heated table called a 'korsī.' (2/7)
Persian speakers also do bibliomancy with Hafez's dīvān (book of poems). Readers randomly pick a poem from his dīvān for each person present to predict what their life has in store. The practice is called 'fāl-e hāfez.' (3/7)
Yaldā marks the beginning of the first forty nights of winter, hence its first name Shab-e Chelleh (Fortieth Night). Intervals of forty-days are significant in Iranic culture: Sufis go into forty-day seclusions, and relatives visit the deceased forty days after burial. (4/7)
Chelleh began as a Zoroastrian practice. Zoroastrians believed that the Ahriman (evil spirit) was most active during the night, so they would stay awake with company during the longest night to stay safe, eating what remained of that year's harvest. (5/7)
Chelleh took its second name 'Yaldā' in the first century when Christians settled in Persia to avoid religious persecution. The Christians celebrated Christmas, which they called 'Yaldā,' meaning birth in Syriac (cognate to the Arabic w-l-d). (6/7)
Do you celebrate Shab-e Yaldā? If you do, let us know what city and ethnic group you hail from, and what you do to celebrate. (7/7)

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More from @PersianPoetics

18 Dec
This quote isn't by Rumi, it's from Hans J. Hillerbrand's 'Encyclopedia of Protestantism,' Volume II, page 403. Image
Many Muslims innocently seek out Sufism (Islamic mysticism) and end up dangerously misguided by these quotes. There's nothing wrong with getting wisdom from a follower of any faith, but we must also be careful that it doesn't contradict our Islamic teachings.
Although some Muslims are lead away from Islam by these quotes, many others have incorrectly dismissed (or even excommunicated) Rumi because of them. So many could benefit from Rumi's vast ocean of knowledge, but they have sadly been misled by fake quotes.
Read 5 tweets
15 Sep
Did Rumi really write, “Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion or cultural system.”? A thread on the whitewashing and secularizing of Sufi poetry. (1/17)
One of the most common quotes used to claim that Rumi wasn’t a Muslim comes from page 32 of Coleman Bark’s ‘The Essential Rumi’: (2/17)
Where is this quote from? Barks - who never studied Persian - seems to have re-worded it from Reynold Nicholson’s translation: “What is to be done, O Moslems? for I do not recognize myself. I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Gabr (Zoroastrian), nor Moslem.” (3/17)
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23 May
Thread: Rumi Vodka, an offensive commercialization:
Occasionally, I see Moulana Rumi's name plastered somewhere it doesn't belong, like this rosewater brand, or my local kebab place. I don't like it, but it also doesn't bug me as much as the many renderings masquerading as translations.
Then, once in a blue moon, I run into something so appalling, that it is worse than a new agey secularized translation of Rumi. I present to you: Rumi's Vodka.
Read 14 tweets
16 May
Thread: The Orientalizing of Moulana Rumi

Many of you may be familiar with the 'Rumi quotes' that circulate the internet. What if I told you the vast majority of them are fake and they are part of a project to secularize Rumi? This isn't a whatsapp conspiracy. Image
Take this quote, commonly attributed to Moulana Rumi: Image
Brad Pitt even got it tattooed, right by his pit: Image
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