Who Says Words with My Mouth?

About Who Says Words with My Mouth?

Who Says Words with My Mouth is a ghazal from the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, Rumi's collection of some 40,000 lines of lyric poetry written largely in the aftermath of his encounter with Shams al-Din of Tabriz. The ghazal is among the most widely read Rumi poems in English, particularly in Coleman Barks's popular rendering. The Persian original is shorter than many of the English versions suggest, and the full teaching is carried by a handful of couplets arranged around a single question: who is speaking?

The poem opens with a disorientation. The speaker cannot locate himself. He does not know whose body this is, whose soul, whose voice. He cannot name what he is or where he is from. The usual self-identification has broken down. The normal response to this kind of disorientation — fear, grasping, reassertion of identity — is absent. In its place is a quiet inquiry, turned upward: who is making this speech? Who is behind these words?

The ghazal's theological frame is fana — annihilation of the self in God, a central concept in Sufi metaphysics. In fana, the ordinary ego consciousness has dissolved enough that the divine presence is felt directly, not as an object known by a separate knower, but as the source of whatever is now happening. The poem reports this state from inside it. Rumi is not describing fana from a distance; he is writing as a man in whom something of it has occurred, and who is trying to render the disorientation in verse.

Nicholson's 1898 collection, Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz, contains versions of several of the ghazals that carry this theme. The particular poem called 'Who Says Words' in modern English anthologies is a compilation assembled from verses in several of Rumi's ghazals on the annihilation theme; the compilation was popularized by Coleman Barks. The version below includes material from Nicholson's renderings and from Arberry's Mystical Poems of Rumi, with the Barks rendering flagged separately as a popular American version.

The ghazal sits in a phase of Rumi's work that follows his second loss of Shams — when Shams disappeared for the last time, presumed murdered by jealous disciples. Rumi's grief in this period produced some of the most radical annihilation poetry in world literature. The question 'who says words with my mouth' is not purely theological speculation; it is a man who has lost the human beloved through whom he knew the divine, and who finds that the distinction between himself and the divine has been cauterized by the loss.

The poem is widely quoted in the English-speaking world. Its appeal is partly the strangeness of the question and partly the calmness with which the question is asked. The speaker is not alarmed. He is curious. This is the signature of fana as Rumi understood it: the dissolution of self does not produce panic; it produces a quiet inquiry, because what is doing the inquiring is no longer the self that would have panicked.

Original Text

Translation

What counsel, O Muslims? for I do not know myself:
I am neither Christian nor Jew, nor Gabr, nor Muslim.

I am not of the East, nor of the West, nor of the land, nor of the sea;
I am not of Nature's quarry, nor of the circling heavens.

I am not of earth, nor of water, nor of air, nor of fire;
I am not of the empyrean, nor of the dust, nor of existence, nor of entity.

My place is the placeless, my trace is the traceless;
'tis neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.

I have cast duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one;
One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.

He is the first, He is the last, He is the outward, He is the inward;
I know none but Him, I call on none but Him.

Commentary

The ghazal begins by ruling out every category the speaker might belong to. Not Christian, not Jew, not Zoroastrian, not Muslim. The last exclusion is the most striking. Rumi, a Muslim scholar and teacher of Islamic law, calls himself not Muslim. The line has been frequently misread as a statement of generic religious pluralism — as though Rumi were abandoning Islam for a vague spirituality. This is not what the poem says. Rumi is speaking from a state in which all self-categorization, including his own confessional identity, has been emptied of independent reality. The speaker is not abandoning Islam; he is reporting that, in this state, there is no one left to be a Muslim, because there is no one left as a separate 'I' to hold a religious label.

This is fana. The Sufi tradition distinguishes careful grades: fana fi'l-sheikh (annihilation in the master), fana fi'l-rasul (in the Prophet), and fana fi'llah (in God). The final stage is fana al-fana — the annihilation of the annihilation itself. In fana al-fana, even the consciousness of having been annihilated has dissolved, and what remains is simply what has always been: the divine reality, now unobstructed by the ego's pretense of separate existence. The ghazal reports from somewhere in this territory. The speaker cannot even hold the identity 'Muslim' because the self that would hold it is no longer intact enough to carry a label.

The lines that follow extend the emptying to every cosmic level. Not East, not West. Not land, not sea. Not earth, air, fire, water. Not the empyrean, not the dust. The list is deliberately exhaustive. Rumi is cataloguing the entire ontological furniture of the medieval Islamic cosmos — the four elements, the heavenly spheres, the geographical compass — and saying: none of these contain me. The speaker is claiming no location in the cosmos. Then comes the key line: my place is the placeless. The Sufi term is la-makan — the no-place, the state above all places, the station of the divine. The speaker has been emptied so completely that only la-makan can receive him.

The poem turns at the line I have cast duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one. Duality — thawniyya, later systematized by Ibn Arabi and his school as the primary illusion — is the experience of being a separate self in a world of other things. When duality is cast off, the two worlds (dunya and akhira, this-world and the hereafter; or seer and seen, lover and beloved) collapse into a single undivided reality. This collapse is tawhid in its experiential form. Not the doctrine of one God, which can be held intellectually. The living realization that only the One is, and that everything the self had taken to be other is, in its deepest being, not other.

The closing line in Nicholson's translation — He is the first, He is the last, He is the outward, He is the inward; I know none but Him, I call on none but Him — is a direct echo of Qur'an 57:3: huwa al-awwalu wa'l-akhiru wa'l-zahiru wa'l-batinu. He is the First and the Last, the Outward and the Inward. Rumi is closing the ghazal by grounding the experience of fana in the scriptural formulation that made fana intelligible to Islamic understanding. The poem is not leaving the tradition. It is arriving at the place the tradition has always pointed toward.

The question that gives the poem its popular English title — who says words with my mouth? — does not appear in Nicholson's translation in those exact words. The phrasing is Coleman Barks's, and it captures, freely, the spirit of the original's disorientation. The literal Persian in the ghazal is I do not know myself. Barks's rendering makes the self-unknowing concrete: if I do not know who I am, then whose words are these? The rendering has entered the English-language reception of Rumi and is now widely associated with the poem. For accuracy, readers should hold Nicholson's version alongside it.

What does the poem teach a practitioner? Not a technique — the ghazal is a report, not a manual. But it teaches what the endpoint of a certain path looks like. The self is not improved in fana; it is emptied. The emptying is not traumatic because what is doing the registering is no longer the self that would have been wounded by its own disappearance. A self that has resisted fana imagines it as extinction. A consciousness that has passed into fana reports it as the return of room in the room.

Rumi is clear in other places that fana is not the final station. After fana comes baqa — abiding. The emptied self is reconstituted, now as a functional but non-obstructing vehicle of the divine. The ghazal is a snapshot from the fana phase, and a practitioner should not mistake it for a description of the final condition. The final condition, for Rumi, is the baqa in which one continues to teach, to love, to grieve, to act — but without the old self's claim to be the source of teaching, loving, grieving, acting.

There is a line of Rumi commentary that treats the ghazal as devotional rather than doctrinal. On this reading, the question who says words with my mouth is not a claim to have arrived at fana; it is the cry of a lover who has loved enough to recognize that the Beloved is the only real speaker in every speech. This softer reading is useful for practitioners who are nowhere near the experience of fana. The poem, read devotionally, becomes a prayer: I hope my words are not mine, I hope Yours come through me. The hope is as Sufi as the arrival.

The reception history of the poem is instructive. In modern English anthologies, it is often presented as a piece of universalist mysticism — as if Rumi were saying that religious labels do not matter. Taken as a standalone wisdom quote, the opening lines can support this reading. Taken in their full Persian context, and with the Qur'anic closing preserved, the poem says something different: religious labels are temporarily emptied in fana, and what replaces them is not the absence of religion but the direct presence of the reality that all religions have pointed toward. The speaker is not post-religious. He is so deep inside his own religion that the word for it has momentarily fallen out of his mouth.

For the Satyori reader, the ghazal is a picture of the far horizon of the path — not a starting practice, but the kind of report that comes from a consciousness in which the work has gone very far. It is useful to read occasionally as a memory of where the road leads. It is a mistake to try to produce its state by artificial means. Rumi did not write his way into fana; fana happened to him, through grief and through the cauterizing presence of Shams. The poem is a horizon, not a technique.

The role of Shams in this ghazal requires a note. Shams al-Din of Tabriz arrived in Rumi's life in 1244 and overturned the older scholar's settled identity. For roughly three years Shams was Rumi's constant companion, at the cost of Rumi's neglect of his students, his teaching, and his public role. When Shams disappeared for the second and final time — almost certainly killed by Rumi's jealous disciples, though this has been debated — Rumi's grief produced the Divan. The ghazals are composed in Shams's name; many are signed with Shams's takhallus, the poet's closing signature, even though Rumi is the author. The gesture is theological. Rumi is saying that Shams was the Beloved's face for him, that the voice in the ghazals is no longer simply Rumi's own, and that the ordinary author function has been dissolved alongside the ordinary self. The ghazal on not-knowing-the-self is in this sense a document of what the Shams-encounter did to Rumi.

A further dimension of the poem is its relation to music. The Divan was not composed at a desk. Rumi is reported to have spoken many of the ghazals aloud during the sama — the musical and whirling practice — in states of heightened presence. The ghazals were recorded by scribes as he moved. This means the poem is, in its origin, not primarily a literary artifact but a recorded utterance from a body in motion in a field of music. Something of its rhythm, its breathless piling of exclusions, and its sudden arrival at the Qur'anic closing comes from this oral, embodied origin. Readers who recite the poem aloud — especially in Persian — feel the motion in it. The ghazal is a dance that has been stopped on the page; when read aloud it begins to turn again.

Themes

Fana (annihilation of the self). The central Sufi state the ghazal reports from. Not the death of the person but the dissolution of the ego's claim to be a separate center of agency. In fana, religious, cosmic, and bodily self-identifications all fall away temporarily, and what remains is the unobstructed divine presence.

La-makan (the placeless). The station of the divine, above all locations. The ghazal's line 'my place is the placeless' identifies the speaker's position as no-position in the cosmic geography. A core Sufi concept, closely related to the theology of the absolute.

Tawhid as experience. The doctrine of God's oneness, rendered as the direct experience that only the One is. The line 'I have cast duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one' is tawhid in its lived form — not the intellectual affirmation, but the consciousness in which duality has ceased to produce a separate self.

The Qur'anic grounding. The closing line He is the first, He is the last, He is the outward, He is the inward directly echoes Qur'an 57:3. Rumi's fana is not a departure from Islamic revelation; it is an arrival at the experiential pole of the revelation's own language.

The emptied identity. Not Christian, not Jew, not Zoroastrian, not Muslim. The ghazal reports a state in which the capacity to carry a confessional label has been momentarily suspended. This is not religious pluralism; it is the emptying that precedes the return to one's own tradition in a new way.

The reconstituted self (baqa). Implicit in the poem's place in Rumi's corpus. Fana is not the final station. After the emptying comes the abiding — the person reconstituted as a functional vehicle of the divine reality. The ghazal is a report from fana, not from baqa; both are phases of the path. See Sufism.

Significance

This ghazal is widely known in the English-speaking world, and it is frequently misread. Its popularity owes much to Coleman Barks's rendering, which foregrounded the opening disorientation and made the poem accessible to readers unfamiliar with Sufi doctrine. Nicholson's 1898 scholarly translation preserves the Qur'anic closing that the popular renderings often soften or drop.

The poem's fame in the West has not always served accurate understanding. Read as a piece of generic universalism, it loses its technical specificity and becomes a quotable wisdom soundbite. Read in its Sufi context — as a ghazal from a man writing in the aftermath of the final loss of Shams, from a state of fana, within a tradition that has elaborated fana with great precision — the poem carries substantial theological weight. Annemarie Schimmel's commentary on this ghazal in her Triumphal Sun and William Chittick's discussion in Sufi Path of Love are the two best English entry points.

In the Persian and Turkish tradition, the poem has been quoted for centuries as one of the clearest lyrical expressions of fana. It has been set to music in the Qawwali tradition of South Asia, recited in Mevlevi ceremonies, and cited across the Islamic world as a canonical statement of mystical realization. The line my place is the placeless has entered Persian proverbial use.

The ghazal's reach into Christian contemplative literature and into comparative mysticism has been significant. Thomas Merton referenced similar material on the emptied self. Henri Corbin used Rumi's fana poetry to illuminate the Suhrawardi school of Islamic philosophy. Contemporary nondual teachers from both Eastern and Western traditions have cited this ghazal as one of the clearest available descriptions of the self-dissolution stage of the path.

Connections

Kenosis (Christian). The Pauline term kenosis (Philippians 2:7), the self-emptying of Christ, has been taken by Christian mystics as a model for the disciple's own self-emptying before God. John of the Cross's dark night of the soul, Meister Eckhart's Abgeschiedenheit (detachment), and the Russian kenotic tradition all bear structural similarity to Rumi's fana. The ghazal's emptying and the kenotic tradition are not identical, but they belong to the same family.

Atman-Brahman Identity (Advaita). In Advaita Vedanta, the culminating realization is that the individual self (atman) and the universal self (Brahman) are not two — ayam atma brahma. The ghazal's line 'I have cast duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one' is the Sufi version of this recognition, in devotional form. Yoga and Vedanta have parallel realization traditions.

Sunyata and Anatta (Buddhism). The Buddhist doctrines of emptiness (sunyata) and non-self (anatta) name the same discovery from a different metaphysical direction: the absence of a separate, permanent self. A Buddhist would not phrase the realization in theistic terms as Rumi does, but the structural observation — that the self as ordinarily conceived is not found upon close inspection — is the same.

The Guest House and Fana. Rumi's own Guest House parable treats the self as a house that hosts all visitors — joys and sorrows alike — without identifying with any of them. This teaching is a preparation for the fana reported in this ghazal. The Guest House is the practice; this ghazal is one form of the result.

Ibn Arabi and the Wahdat al-Wujud. The thirteenth-century Sufi metaphysician Ibn Arabi developed the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud — the oneness of being — which holds that all existence is, in its deepest reality, the one existence of God. Rumi and Ibn Arabi are contemporaries, and while they do not appear to have met, their teachings overlap substantially. The ghazal is a lyric statement of wahdat al-wujud.

The Self-Inquiry of Ramana Maharshi. Ramana's practice of atma vichara — asking 'who am I?' until the questioner dissolves — is a methodical, inquiry-based path to the realization the ghazal reports from a devotional direction. The two approaches meet at the same territory. Rumi arrives through love and loss; Ramana through persistent question.

RELEASE and the Dissolving Self. In the Satyori 9 Levels, RELEASE is the level at which attachments and identifications dissolve. The ghazal reports from a far reach of RELEASE, where even the confessional identity has momentarily emptied. Satyori's teaching on RELEASE is in direct lineage with the Sufi teaching on fana.

Baqa and the Post-Fana Life. Rumi's teaching on baqa — abiding in the divine after fana — is crucial context for reading this ghazal. The poem is not a picture of the final state. It is a report from a phase. The final state, in Rumi's theology, is the reconstituted person who now teaches, loves, and acts without the old self's claim to be the source. Most of the later Rumi poems come from baqa.

Further Reading

Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz by Reynold A. Nicholson (Cambridge, 1898) — The scholarly English translation with facing Persian text. Public domain. Essential for this and other Divan ghazals.

Mystical Poems of Rumi by A.J. Arberry (University of Chicago Press, 1968) — The second essential English scholarly translation of the Divan. Arberry's rendering is close to the Persian and preserves the Qur'anic context.

The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi by William C. Chittick (SUNY Press, 1983) — Chittick's treatment of fana and baqa in Rumi's work. Essential doctrinal companion.

The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi by Annemarie Schimmel (SUNY Press, 1993) — Schimmel on the annihilation poetry of the Divan.

The Sufi Path of Knowledge by William C. Chittick (SUNY Press, 1989) — Chittick's major study of Ibn Arabi; background on wahdat al-wujud, which contextualizes Rumi's fana poetry.

Rumi: Past and Present, East and West by Franklin D. Lewis (Oneworld, 2000) — Authoritative biography; traces the impact of Shams's disappearance on Rumi's poetry.