I found this article by Ibrahim Gamard on Maulana Rumi, and on the “Sufis” very relevant and important given the popularity of something called “sufism” in the “west.”

There is the usual anti-Muslim, anti-Islam sentiments most Muslims are familiar with. Then there are some “Sufi types” who (in my experience) also attack the more “traditional Muslims” (especially if they happen to be immigrant) as being “backwards” - and that their view of “Sufism” is the way that “transcends religion.”

This is nothing more than an expression of colonialism, where the colonizer takes a tradition, molds it in its image, and then pronounces it as superior.

Much is being made of Rumi these days. Unfortunately a lot of the activity surrounding Mevlana is far from what the Master would have imagined or condoned. While new age spiritualists have contributed to make Jalal al-Din Rumi the number one selling poet in America, they seem to have ignored much of what makes him a sage to the rest of the world. His teachings are often distorted to fit the DIY philosophy of the New Age movement, are unintentionally abridged and changed due to reliance upon translations of translations, or deliberately misrepresented as heterodox correctives to orthodoxy. In this essay, the author focuses upon a number of Rumi texts in the original Persian which illustrate without a doubt, the Masters orthodox and reverent embrace of Islam

In my own case, I was fortunate to be one of the first Americans to be trained in the Whirling Prayer of the Mevlevi dervish tradition, beginning in 1975 in Los Angeles. The next year, Sheikh Sulayman Dede Efendi, the Mevlevi Sheikh of Konya, Turkey (where Rumi is buried) came to America for the first time and lead us in the famous Whirling Prayer Ceremony. The following year, in 1977, my wife and I traveled to Konya for two weeks, went daily to Rumis tomb (a place filled with the perfume of Gods Love), and visited Sulayman Dede Efendi in his home. Dede was a saintly and very pious Muslim, and his American disciples whom we met there were all converts to Islam. They very graciously invited us to stay among them in Konya, but I declined. I felt disappointed that Dede seemed primarily to want them to learn to become Muslims, go to mosques, and learn to read the Quran in Arabic. I wanted to learn about Rumis most mystical teachings and practices instead, and I was not attracted to becoming a Muslim. At the time, I believed that Sufism was a universal and esoteric form of mysticism that transcended Islam, which I looked down upon as merely an exoteric shell. We travelled on to Iran, Afghanistan and India, and all the Sufis I met were devout Muslims.

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The charity best loved by Allah is to bring about reconciliation among people when they are divided by friction, and to bring them closer to each other when they have moved apart (Imam Ja’far Sadiq)