The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-erasure-of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumi
...Omid Safi, a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at Duke University, says that it was in the Victorian period that readers in the West began to uncouple mystical poetry from its Islamic roots. Translators and theologians of the time could not reconcile their ideas about a desert religion, with its unusual moral and legal codes, and the work of poets like Rumi and Hafez. The explanation they settled on, Safi told me, was that these people are mystical not because of Islam but in spite of it.
...In the twentieth century, a succession of prominent translatorsamong them R. A. Nicholson, A. J. Arberry, and Annemarie Schimmelstrengthened Rumis presence in the English-language canon. But its Barks who vastly expanded Rumis readership. He is not a translator so much as an interpreter: he does not read or write Persian. Instead, he transforms nineteenth-century translations into American verse.
...Discussing these New Age translations, Safi said, I see a type of spiritual colonialism at work here: bypassing, erasing, and occupying a spiritual landscape that has been lived and breathed and internalized by Muslims from Bosnia and Istanbul to Konya and Iran to Central and South Asia. Extracting the spiritual from the religious context has deep reverberations. Islam is regularly diagnosed as a cancer, including by General Michael Flynn, President-elect Donald Trumps pick for national-security adviser, and, even today, policymakers suggest that non-Western and nonwhite groups have not contributed to civilization.
I guess actual Muslims get rather upset at people fawning over such westernized "reinterpretations" of Rumi's work.