The popularity in the US of Rumi, a 13th-century Turkish poet, is a tragic irony, as the order of Sufi dervishes he founded is banned at home, writes William Dalrymple (Guardian)
[photograph: http://www.korfez.net/mevlana]
The essence of what Dalrymple writes is perhaps best surmised in this photograph of rumi's mystism turned into a circus act:
