The Masnavi (Masnavi-yi Ma‘navi)

Overview

Poet

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273), called Mawlana, 'our master' (Turkish Mevlana); born in the region of Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and active for most of his life in Konya, in Anatolia

Full title

Masnavi-yi Ma‘navi, 'Rhyming Couplets of Inner Meaning', often translated 'The Spiritual Couplets'

Composed

Over the last fifteen years or so of Rumi's life, from about 1258–1262 until his death in December 1273; the prologue to Book II dates the resumption of work after a pause to 662 AH (1263–64)

Dedicatee and scribe

Husam al-Din Chalabi, Rumi's disciple and deputy, who asked for the poem, wrote it down from Rumi's dictation and read it back for correction

Language and form

Persian, in rhyming couplets (masnavi form) in the ramal metre; each Book has a short prose preface, and each after the first opens with an address to Husam al-Din

Length

Six Books, about 25,600 couplets in R. A. Nicholson's critical text; Book VI breaks off unfinished

Method

Stories nested inside stories, interrupted by commentary, prayer, Qur'anic and hadith quotation and passages of direct teaching

Models

The didactic masnavis of Sana'i (the Hadiqat al-haqiqa) and Farid al-Din 'Attar (the Ilahi-nama and Mantiq al-tayr)

Afterlife

Recited and expounded in the Mevlevi order founded around Rumi's tomb in Konya; a line often attributed to Jami calls it 'the Qur'an in the Persian tongue'

Translations on this site

E. H. Whinfield's abridged version of all six Books (1887; 2nd ed. 1898), and J. W. Redhouse's version of Book I (1881)

Context

Jalal al-Din Muhammad was born in 1207 in the eastern Persian world, in or near Balkh (Franklin Lewis argues for the small town of Vakhsh, where his father then taught). His father, Baha al-Din Walad, was a preacher and jurist with mystical leanings. In the years before the Mongol invasions the family travelled west, by way of Mecca and Syria, and settled around 1229 in Konya, the capital of the Seljuk sultans of Rum, that is of the former Byzantine lands of Anatolia; the name 'Rumi', 'the man from Rum', comes from this. After his father's death in 1231 Jalal al-Din succeeded him as a teacher of religious law, was trained in the Sufi path by his father's disciple Burhan al-Din Muhaqqiq, and studied in Aleppo and Damascus. By his mid-thirties he was a respected scholar and preacher with a circle of students (Lewis 2000) (Schimmel 1993).

In November 1244 a wandering dervish, Shams al-Din of Tabriz, arrived in Konya, and the encounter transformed Rumi's life. The two became inseparable; Rumi neglected his students, who resented the stranger, and Shams left for Syria. Rumi sent his son Sultan Walad to bring him back, but around 1247 Shams vanished for good. Later hagiographers say he was murdered with the connivance of Rumi's family, but the story cannot be proved, and Lewis treats it with caution. Shams's own recorded sayings, the Maqalat, show a sharp, demanding and learned teacher, not merely the 'wild' figure of legend. From this friendship came the outpouring of lyric poetry known as the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi, in which Rumi often signs his poems with his friend's name (Lewis 2000) (Chittick 2004) (Aflaki 2002).

The Masnavi belongs to the last part of Rumi's life. After Shams and then the goldsmith Salah al-Din Zarkub, the companion of his middle years (d. 1258), Rumi's closest disciple was Husam al-Din Chalabi. According to the hagiographer Aflaki, Husam asked Rumi for a book of teaching in the manner of Sana'i and 'Attar, and Rumi drew from his turban the eighteen opening couplets on the reed-flute. The rest of the poem was dictated, often in sessions of music and recitation, written down by Husam and read back to the poet. A pause followed Book I, which Aflaki connects with the death of Husam's wife; the prologue to Book II gives the date of the resumption as 662 AH (1263–64). Rumi died in Konya on 17 December 1273, with Book VI unfinished (Lewis 2000) (Aflaki 2002) (Nicholson 1940).

The poem's form is the masnavi, the Persian genre of long narrative or didactic poetry in rhyming couplets, and its models are the mystical masnavis of Sana'i of Ghazna and 'Attar of Nishapur, from whom Rumi borrows several stories. It is not organised as a treatise or a single narrative. Rumi tells animal fables (some from the Indian Kalila wa Dimna tradition), anecdotes of prophets, caliphs and saints, comic and sometimes obscene tales of townsmen and peasants, and parables from the Qur'an, and he breaks into them constantly to explain, digress and pray. The poem is saturated with the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet, and its Arabic preface to Book I presents it as the 'roots of the roots of the roots of religion' and the unveiling of the mysteries of union and certainty (Nicholson 1940) (de Bruijn 1997) (Rypka 1968) (Browne 1906).

Rumi's son Sultan Walad (d. 1312) and grandson Ulu 'Arif Chalabi organised his followers into the Mevlevi order, whose lodges spread across the Seljuk and then Ottoman lands, with the mother lodge at the poet's tomb in Konya. The Masnavi was read aloud and expounded in these lodges, and commentaries on it were written in Persian, Turkish and Urdu; its ritual of music and turning, the sama', gave the dervishes their Western name of 'whirling dervishes'. The Turkish Republic closed the Sufi lodges in 1925, and the tomb has since been a museum, but the poem has never lost its readers, from the Persian, Ottoman and Indian worlds to the many modern versions in English. This site's text is E. H. Whinfield's translation, which is an abridgement: it renders only a selection of passages in verse and gives the rest in prose summary, and the site prints only the verse. Readers should not take its eighty sections for the whole poem (Whinfield 1887) (Halman 1983) (Lewis 2000).

Plot overview

The Masnavi has no single plot. It opens with the lament of a reed-flute, cut from its reed-bed, that complains of separation and longs to return to its source; this image of the soul exiled from God governs the whole poem. Rumi then tells a story, and within it other stories, each of which raises questions that lead him to further tales or to teaching addressed to the reader. A story may be suspended for hundreds of couplets and taken up again much later, and the 'moral' of one tale often turns into the beginning of the next. This frame-tale method, in which stories open into each other like rooms, is the poem's way of thinking (Safavi 2009) (Nicholson 1940).

Book I begins with the king who falls in love with a handmaid and the divine physician who cures her by uncovering her secret love, and goes on through tales of a parrot, a vizier who destroys a Christian community by deceit, the hare who tricks the lion, the merchant whose parrot escapes its cage by feigning death, the old harper whom the caliph 'Umar honours, and the quarrel of a poor Arab and his wife. Book II, begun after a pause, includes Moses and the shepherd, the man who befriends a bear, and the Sufi whose donkey is starved by a servant. Book III contains the elephant in the dark, the visions of the saint Daquqi, the people of Saba, and the agent who returns to the city that has condemned him because his master's love draws him back.

Book IV contains the lover who escapes the night-watch into a garden and finds his beloved there, Solomon's building of the Farthest Mosque at Jerusalem, Bayazid's ecstatic sayings, and the three fishes of the pond. Book V contains the Prophet's gluttonous unbelieving guest, the peacock who tears out his own feathers, the creation of Adam from earth, and the long story of Sultan Mahmud and his slave Ayaz, who keeps his old shepherd's shoes and sheepskin as a reminder of what he was. Book VI includes the tale of three travellers, a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew, the debtor who comes to Tabriz to find his benefactor dead, and the story of the king's three sons who fall in love with a portrait of a Chinese princess.

That last story breaks off unfinished, and the poem ends there. In a sense this is fitting, for the Masnavi has always insisted that what it points to cannot be put into words. Rumi presents his work as a 'polisher of spirits' and an ocean whose letters and words must in the end fall away. The poem's movement is not towards a conclusion but towards a change in the reader, who is asked to pass from the outward form of the stories to their inner meaning (Schimmel 1993) (Chittick 1983).

Book by book

Characters

Frame of the poem

Jalal al-Din Rumi (the speaker)

The poet speaks in his own voice throughout: as storyteller, teacher, commentator and lover. He interrupts his tales to explain them, prays, reproaches his listeners and himself, and often tells himself to be silent. The Masnavi is less a narrative than the record of this voice teaching.

Husam al-Din Chalabi

Rumi's disciple and successor, at whose request the poem was composed and who wrote it down from dictation. He is addressed at the opening of every Book after the first, called the 'light of God' and the 'life of the heart', and Rumi makes him the condition of the poem's existence. He led Rumi's circle after the poet's death until his own in 1284.

Shams al-Din of Tabriz

The wandering dervish whose friendship transformed Rumi's life in 1244–1247. In the Masnavi he appears seldom but decisively, as in Book I where Rumi names him and then refuses to reveal his 'secret'. His name, 'Sun of Religion', allows Rumi to merge him with the sun of God.

Prophets and saints

Moses

The prophet who appears most often in the poem: rebuked by God for silencing the shepherd, confronting Pharaoh in Books III and IV, and teaching the man who wants to learn the language of animals. He stands for prophetic authority and law, which Rumi respects even when he shows its limits.

Bayazid of Bistam

The ninth-century Persian Sufi famous for his ecstatic sayings. He appears in Book II, where a saint tells him to circle around him rather than the Ka'ba, and in Book IV, where his disciples attack him for claiming divinity and wound only themselves.

Daquqi

A wandering saint of Book III who sees visions of seven candles, seven trees and seven men becoming one. His compassionate prayer for a sinking ship ends his companionship with the hidden saints, a paradox about intercession and the divine will.

Noah and Canaan

Noah's son, who refuses to enter the ark because he can swim and will climb a mountain, illustrates in Book III the self-reliant intellect that rejects the guide; the flood takes him.

Luqman

The sage of the Qur'an, in Persian tradition a slave of great wisdom. In Book II his master tests him, and his cleverness shows that wisdom is independent of station.

Figures of the tales

The shepherd

A simple man who prays in homely, anthropomorphic language and is reproved by Moses. God's defence of him makes him the poem's model of sincere, unlearned love.

Pharaoh

The tyrant who claims to be God, the poem's emblem of the carnal soul and of pride. Rumi gives him moments of hesitation and even sympathy, making him a figure of what resists the divine call within each person.

The hare and the lion

In the fable of Book I, the beasts agree to send the lion a daily victim; the hare whose turn it is leads the lion to a well, where the lion attacks his own reflection and drowns. The fable becomes a lesson on the 'lion' of the self, whose real enemy is within.

The old harper

An aged musician, too old to earn his living, who plays for God alone in a graveyard. The caliph 'Umar is sent by a divine voice to provide for him, and the harper repents of his life, but 'Umar teaches him that even his repentance is a kind of self-regard.

Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna

The historical ruler (r. 998–1030), in Persian tradition the type of the powerful king who loves his slave. In Book V he stands for the divine beloved who knows the true worth of his servant.

Ayaz

Mahmud's favourite, a former shepherd who keeps his old shoes and sheepskin as reminders of his origin. He is the model of humility, loyalty and self-knowledge, and the courtiers' suspicion of him is the poem's study of envy.

The agent (vakil) of Bukhara

A servant who flees his master after a fault and returns of his own will to the city where he is condemned, because love draws him back. His return to likely death becomes an image of the lover's journey towards annihilation.

Themes

Love

Love ('ishq) is the poem's first and last subject. The reed's song is the 'fire of love'; Love is invoked as 'our Plato and our Galen', the physician of pride; and the lover, not the scholar or ascetic, is the poem's ideal. Love in the Masnavi is both a cosmic force that moves all things back towards their source and the particular passion of one person for another, and Rumi uses human love stories, even comic or carnal ones, as ladders towards divine love (Chittick 1983) (Schimmel 1993) (Nicholson 1950).

Rumi is careful to distinguish true love from love of 'forms'. The king's love for the handmaid, the handmaid's love for the goldsmith and the princes' love for a portrait are all stages that must be passed through. But love is never simply condemned: even 'metaphorical' love can become a bridge to the real.

Separation and return

The Song of the Reed describes a being cut off from its origin, and the longing that this separation produces. The theme draws on the Qur'anic verse 'to Him we shall return' (2:156), which the Masnavi quotes at the climax of the passage on dying from mineral to man. Exile, longing and return form the deep structure of the poem: the ducklings return to the water, the agent returns to Bukhara, and the soul is called back to God (Schimmel 1993).

Annihilation (fana) and subsistence

The Sufi doctrine of fana, the 'passing away' of the self in God, runs through the poem, together with its complement baqa, 'subsistence' in God after the self has vanished. Rumi speaks of 'not-being' as the workshop of God, of the annihilated saint as a mirror, and of ascension as 'annihilation of self'. Fana is not extinction in a Buddhist sense, nor a claim that the human becomes God; it is the disappearance of the ego, so that only the divine attributes are reflected (Chittick 1983) (Schimmel 1975).

The poem gives this doctrine its most famous image in the ladder of deaths: the soul has died as mineral, plant and animal, and gained at each death; why then should it fear dying to itself? Annihilation becomes the condition of growth.

Form and meaning

The contrast between form (surat) and meaning (ma'na) is the key to the Masnavi's method. Stories, words and rituals are forms; their value lies in the meaning they carry. The title itself calls the poem a 'masnavi of meaning'. Rumi warns readers not to stop at the husk of the stories, compares words to foam on the sea, and tells God's reproof of Moses, who looked at the shepherd's words instead of his heart (Chittick 1983) (Keshavarz 1998).

Yet Rumi does not despise form: it is the necessary vehicle of meaning, as the body is of the soul. The poem's comic and earthy stories are themselves forms through which the reader must pass, and Rumi's insistence on the law in the preface to Book V shows that outward observance remains the beginning of the way.

The guide and the saint

Many stories turn on the need for a spiritual guide: the divine physician of Book I, the shaikh whom the disciple must follow, the saint who reflects God. Rumi's teaching on the 'friends of God' (awliya') places the living saint at the centre of religious life, as the one in whom the hidden meaning becomes visible. This teaching connects the Masnavi with the history of Sufi orders and with Rumi's own relationship with Shams and Husam (Mojaddedi 2012).

Motifs

Stories within stories

Tales are nested inside each other, suspended and resumed, sometimes after many pages. The method imitates the movement of thought and conversation, and it forces the reader to look for connections of meaning rather than of plot.

Qur'an and hadith

The poem quotes and paraphrases the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet on almost every page. Whinfield marks many of these quotations with inverted commas; they are the hidden scaffolding of Rumi's arguments.

Animal fables

Lions, hares, foxes, parrots, peacocks, camels and fish carry much of the teaching, as they do in the Kalila wa Dimna tradition. Rumi uses them both for practical wisdom and for allegories of the soul.

Silence

The narrator repeatedly tells himself to stop speaking, and the poem ends in silence. Rumi's lyrics often close with the word khamush, 'silent', and the Masnavi shares this sense that the highest truths cannot be spoken.

Symbols

The reed-flute

The soul cut off from its origin and singing of its longing; also the poet, the poem, and the perfected human being, empty of self so that God's breath can sound through him. The ney became the emblem of the Mevlevi order.

The mirror

The heart, which must be polished of rust to reflect God; the annihilated saint, who reflects whoever looks at him; and 'not-being', in which Being shows itself. The Chinese and Greek painters of Book I make the image into a parable.

The sun

God, the source of all light, and Shams of Tabriz, whose name means 'sun'. Rumi exploits the pun to merge his friend with the divine light he revealed.

Sea and foam

The ocean of divine reality and the surface of appearances. The image recurs from Book III's comment on the elephant to Book VI's vision of the Masnavi as the 'sea of Unity'.

Wine and cup

The meaning and the form; the divine gift and the vessel that holds it. Rumi warns against being intoxicated with 'goblets of forms' instead of the wine they contain.

Critical debates

Is the Masnavi designed or spontaneous?

The poem was dictated over many years, and its digressions and suspended stories have often been taken as a sign that it is spontaneous and associative, the record of a teacher speaking to his circle. Many readers have treated it as a collection of tales and teachings to be read in excerpts, as Whinfield's and Arberry's selections encourage (Whinfield 1887) (Arberry 1961).

Seyed Ghahreman Safavi and Simon Weightman argued, on the contrary, that Book I has a deliberate design: its stories are arranged in parallel and ring patterns around a centre, so that the order of the tales is itself part of the meaning. Their reading has prompted debate about whether every Book is structured in this way and how far such patterns would have been perceived by Rumi's audience (Safavi 2009).

Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi

Rumi's contemporary in Konya, Sadr al-Din Qunawi, was the chief disciple of the great Andalusian mystic Ibn 'Arabi, and later commentators, especially in the Ottoman world, read the Masnavi through Ibn 'Arabi's metaphysics of the 'oneness of being' (wahdat al-wujud). William Chittick argued that this reading distorts Rumi, whose teaching is practical and centred on love rather than on systematic metaphysics, though the two share many ideas. The relationship between the two traditions remains a central question in the study of Persian Sufism (Chittick 1983) (Lewis 2000).

Who was Shams, and what happened to him?

Most of what was said about Shams for centuries came from hagiographies written after Rumi's death, especially Aflaki's Manaqib al-'arifin, which tells of his murder. Modern scholars treat these sources critically. Lewis points out that the murder story appears late and is unproven, and Chittick's translation of Shams's own Maqalat reveals a figure quite different from the legend: a learned, sharp-tongued teacher with firm views on the Prophet and the law (Lewis 2000) (Chittick 2004) (Aflaki 2002).

Islam and the Western Rumi

In the late twentieth century Rumi became one of the best-selling poets in the United States, largely through free versions such as Coleman Barks's, which present him as a poet of universal spirituality. Scholars have pointed out that such versions often detach the poems from the Qur'anic and Islamic context that saturates the Masnavi, and that they rarely draw on the Masnavi's narratives at all (Barks 1995) (Lewis 2000).

The question is not only one of accuracy. Rumi's openness to other faiths, visible in stories like that of the three travellers, is real, but it is expressed within an Islamic understanding of revelation. Readers must hold together the poem's universality and its specific religious frame (Lewis 2000) (Schimmel 1975).

Sainthood and authority

Jawid Mojaddedi reads the Masnavi against earlier Sufi theories of sainthood (walaya) and argues that the 'friend of God', the living saint, is the centre of its teaching, more important than formal learning or doctrine. On this reading the poem's frequent criticism of scholars and literalists is not anti-intellectual, but a claim about where religious authority lies; it also helps explain the poem's role in founding an order (Mojaddedi 2012).

Law and ecstasy

Stories like Moses and the shepherd, and Rumi's defence of Bayazid's ecstatic sayings, have led some readers to see Rumi as indifferent to religious law. The preface to Book V, which presents the Law as the candle that lights the Path, and Rumi's own life as a jurist and preacher, point the other way. Most scholars now see him as holding the two together: law as the necessary form, love as its meaning (Chittick 1983) (Schimmel 1993).

Translating and abridging the Masnavi

English readers first met the Masnavi through the Victorian versions of James Redhouse, who translated Book I, and E. H. Whinfield, who abridged all six Books into a selection of passages. Nicholson's complete literal translation with commentary (1925–1940) remains the scholarly standard, and Mojaddedi's verse translation for Oxford World's Classics has made the complete text readable again. Abridgements shape what readers think the poem is: by keeping the tales and cutting much of the teaching, they make the Masnavi look like a book of fables (Redhouse 1881) (Whinfield 1887) (Nicholson 1940) (Mojaddedi 2004).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. How does the Song of the Reed prepare the reader for the rest of the Masnavi?

   Consider separation and return, the listener who hears only his own feelings, the fire of love and the mirror at the end of the prologue.

2. Why does Rumi tell stories within stories instead of setting out his teaching directly?

   Think about form and meaning, the reader's active role, and the suspended stories of Book I.

3. What is the role of Husam al-Din in the poem, and why does Rumi address him at the start of the Books?

   Look at the prologues to Books II and VI and the poem's origin in a master–disciple relationship.

4. How does Rumi treat Shams of Tabriz in the Masnavi compared with the lyric poetry of the Divan?

   Look at the interruption in the story of the king and the handmaid and the pun on 'sun'.

5. What does the story of Moses and the shepherd teach about the relationship between religious law and love?

   Consider God's reproof of Moses, and then the preface to Book V on Law, Path and Truth.

6. Explain the doctrine of fana as the Masnavi presents it. Is it a doctrine of extinction?

   Use the passage on dying from mineral to man, the saint as mirror, and 'ascension' as annihilation of self.

7. What does the parable of the elephant in the dark say about knowledge, and what does it not say?

   Distinguish partial perception from relativism; note the candle and the sea and foam.

8. How do animal fables function in the Masnavi? Choose two examples.

   The lion and the hare, the three fishes, the peacock, the mule and the camel.

9. What does the story of Ayaz's old shoes and sheepskin reveal about humility and envy?

   Consider what the courtiers expect to find and what Ayaz keeps.

10. How does reading Whinfield's abridgement shape our impression of the poem? What is lost?

    Compare the number of sections here with the length of the full poem, and consider what an abridger keeps.

Further reading

• Aflaki, Shams al-Din Ahmad. The Feats of the Knowers of God (Manaqeb al-'arefin). Trans. John O'Kane. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
• Arberry, A. J., trans. Tales from the Masnavi. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961.
• Barks, Coleman, with John Moyne, A. J. Arberry and Reynold Nicholson, trans. The Essential Rumi. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995.
• Browne, Edward G. A Literary History of Persia. Vol. 2: From Firdawsi to Sa'di. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906.
• Chittick, William C. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983.
• Chittick, William C., trans. Me and Rumi: The Autobiography of Shams-i Tabrizi. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2004.
• de Bruijn, J. T. P. Persian Sufi Poetry: An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Persian Poems. Richmond: Curzon, 1997.
• Halman, Talât Sait, and Metin And. Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi and the Whirling Dervishes. Istanbul: Dost Yayınları, 1983.
• Keshavarz, Fatemeh. Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.
• Lewis, Franklin D. Rumi: Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rumi. Oxford: Oneworld, 2000.
• Mojaddedi, Jawid, trans. Rumi: The Masnavi, Book One. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Mojaddedi, Jawid. Beyond Dogma: Rumi's Teachings on Friendship with God and Early Sufi Theories. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Nicholson, Reynold A. Rumi: Poet and Mystic. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950.
• Nicholson, Reynold A., ed. and trans. The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí. 8 vols. E. J. W. Gibb Memorial New Series 4. London: Luzac, 1925–1940.
• Redhouse, James W., trans. The Mesnevī of Mevlānā Jelālu-'d-Dīn Muhammed er-Rūmī. Book the First. Trübner's Oriental Series. London: Trübner, 1881.
• Rypka, Jan, et al. History of Iranian Literature. Ed. Karl Jahn. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968.
• Safavi, Seyed Ghahreman, and Simon Weightman. Rumi's Mystical Design: Reading the Mathnawi, Book One. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.
• Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.
• Schimmel, Annemarie. The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi. London: Fine Books / East-West Publications, 1978. Rev. ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
• Whinfield, E. H., trans. Masnavi i Ma'navi: The Spiritual Couplets of Maulana Jalalu-'d-Din Muhammad Rumi, Translated and Abridged. 2nd ed. Trübner's Oriental Series. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1898. First published 1887.