Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: what is islam the importance of being islamic by — January 27, 2026 · o22zjpn | Ali Shukri Amin

Yes, if at some point Rumi or Hafez were incorporated widely into traditional madrasah studies. Not in a sense of supplementary material that requires a great deal of work to bring it into the fold of orthodoxy but as a staple part of the curriculum, it would cross over into being a product into something mainstream with a capital "I".

The closest analogue is probably al-Busayri. While far less prolific than either Rumi or Hafez, his Burda has become a part of the institution of orthodoxy. This is despite extremely vehement debates about whether it crosses the line. But for whatever reason, the Burda is recited, studied, analyzed, and written about extensively in traditional scholarship across languages.

If you go to an Islamic seminary anywhere, except perhaps Farsi speaking Shi'i ones & some Hanafi or Hanafi-sympathetic neotraditonalists, and quote Rumi or Hafez to prove a point - you'll raise an eyebrow. There's certainly no Salafi madrasah or community that would accept it, you'd be hard pressed to find Maliki or Shafi'is that did. Even among Hanafis, Deobandis would be hit-or-miss.

Certainly in the past with Rumi & Hafez specifically, they were more widely acclaimed and valued, but still on the periphery of mainstream Sunni intellectual thought. It is extremely common to find Islamic texts in Arabic & Urdu quoting poetry, but rare to ever find them quoting Rumi or Hafez.

Perhaps they were even closer in the past to being enshrined or canonized so to speak. But the Sufi tariqas have fallen out of favor internationally, which would have been a primary way especially for Rumi.

That's not to say that they didn't have a huge outsized impact on the scholarly class & laymen, but they were consciously excluded by the scholarly class from "orthodoxy" for the most part. Which means lay people rarely hear their verses on the pulpit or in the mosque.

Ghazali was himself quite contentious after his life, with Hanbalites rejecting him outright & his books being burned in Andalus. But he was ultimately incorporated into the orthodoxy, serving as the basis for Avicennan Asharism, Shafi'i usul with al-Mustasfa, & reformulated Sunni tasawuf.