Spiritual Erasure and Cultural Translation: How Rumi Became a Western Mystic Without Islam

This preprint argues that the English-market “Rumi” familiar to many Western readers was not produced by translation alone. It was produced through a layered transformation in which Persian language, Islamic vocabu- lary, Qur’anic resonance, Sufi practice, scholarly apparatus, market framing, short-form quotation, image-meme circulation, and now AI/search repetition each removed or softened part of the historical poet’s world. The arti- cle names this process the translation layer stack: a sequence of interpretive and material filters through which a thirteenth-century Persian Muslim jurist, preacher, Sufi teacher, and poet became a widely consumable figure of universal spirituality. Coleman Barks remains a central case because his versions became exceptionally influential in the United States and often detach Rumi from Persian and Islamic textual density. But Barks is not treated as the whole story. Earlier Orientalist scholarship, literalist academic translation, twentieth-century spiritual seek- ing, American publishing, post-1960s religious individualism, the gift-book economy, internet quotation culture, and algorithmic summarization all contribute to the modern reception problem. The article distinguishes trans- lation, version, adaptation, paraphrase, misquotation, and false attribution, because the moral problem is not beauty alone. It is authority, labeling, and cultural memory. Popular adaptation may have helped keep Rumi vis- ible for readers who would never begin with Nicholson, Arberry, Mojaddedi, Chittick, Schimmel, or Lewis. Yet visibility gained through removal can become a second erasure when readers inherit a Rumi without Islam and then mistake that product for the original. The article concludes by proposing recovery without gatekeeping: a model that honors poetic access while requiring clearer labels, better metadata, source-aware quotation, and an honest return to Persian, Islamicate, and Sufi contexts.