The Masnavi, Book One: Bk. 1 (Oxford World's Classics)
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
JALAL AL-DIN RUMI
The Masnavi
BOOK ONE
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
JAWID MOJADDEDI
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THE MASNAVI
RUMI, known in Iran and Central Asia as Mowlana Jalaloddin Balkhi, was born in 1207 in the province of Balkh, now the border region between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. His family emigrated when he was still a child, shortly before Genghis Khan and his Mongol army arrived in Balkh. They settled permanently in Konya, central Anatolia, which was formerly part of the Eastern Roman Empire (Rum). Rumi was probably introduced to Sufism originally through his father, Baha Valad, a popular preacher who also taught Sufi piety to a group of disciples. However, the turning-point in Rumi’s life came in 1244, when he met in Konya a mysterious wandering Sufi called Shamsoddin of Tabriz. Shams, as he is most often referred to by Rumi, taught him the most profound levels of Sufism, transforming him from a pious religious scholar to an ecstatic mystic. Rumi expressed his new vision of reality in volumes of mystical poetry. His enormous collection of lyrical poetry is considered one of the best that has ever been produced, while his poem in rhyming couplets, the Masnavi, is so revered as the most consummate expression of Sufi mysticism that it is commonly referred to as ‘the Koran in Persian’.
When Rumi died, on 17 December 1273, shortly after completing his work on the Masnavi, his passing was deeply mourned by the citizens of Konya, including the Christian and Jewish communities. His disciples formed the Mevlevi Sufi order, which was named after Rumi, whom they referred to as ‘Our Lord’ (Turkish ‘Mevlana’/Persian ‘Mowlana’). They are better known in Europe and North America as the Whirling Dervishes, because of the distinctive dance that they now perform as one of their central rituals. Rumi’s death is commemorated annually in Konya, attracting pilgrims from all corners of the globe and every religion. The popularity of his poetry has risen so much in the last couple of decades that the Christian Science Monitor identified him as the most published poet in America in 1997.
JAWID MOJADDEDI, a native of Afghanistan, read Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester. He has taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Manchester and the University of Exeter, and has served as an editor of Encyclopaedia Iranica at the Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University. He is currently Assistant Professor of Religion at Rutgers University. Dr Mojaddedi’s books include The Biographical Tradition in Sufism (Richmond, 2001) and, as co-editor, Classical Islam: A Sourcebook of Religious Literature (London, 2003).
CONTENTS
Introduction
Note on the Translation
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Rumi
THE MASNAVI
BOOK ONE
Prose Introduction
The Song of the Reed
The Healing of the Sick Slave-Girl
The Bald Parrot and the Monk
The Jewish Vizier who Deceived the Christians into Following him and Destroyed them
The Description of Mohammad in the Gospels
The Jewish King who Tried to Destroy Christians with his fire
The Man who Mentioned Mohammad’s Name with a Smirk
How a Hare Killed the Lion that had been Tormenting all the other Animals
The Man who saw the Angel of Death
The Interpretation of the Fly in a Drop of Donkey’s Urine
Solomon and the Hoopoe
Adam’s Fall
The Greater Jihad
Omar and the Emissary from Byzantium
Adam’s Superiority to Satan
‘He is with You Wherever You may be’
‘Let Whoever Wants to Sit with God Sit with the Sufis’
The Escape of the Merchant’s Parrot
‘If Mystics Drink Poison it will Become an Antidote’
Moses and the Magicians
God’s Jealousy
The Harm in Being Venerated by People
‘What God Wills Happens’
The Old Harpist
‘The Special Breaths Sent by God’
Aisha and the Unseen Rain
‘Other Skies beyond These’
‘Take Advantage of the Coolness of the Spring’
The Moaning Pillar
The Gravel that Affirmed Mohammad’s Prophethood
The Prayer of the Angels in Favour of Big Spenders
The Caliph Who Was More Generous than Hatem Ta’i
The Poor Bedouin and his Wife
False Sufi Masters
Viewing from Limited Perspectives
‘Women Prevail over Intelligent Men, while Ignorant Men Prevail over them’
Phar
aoh’s Fate
‘He Has Lost this World and the Hereafter’
Saleh and his She-Camel
‘He lets the Seas meet Each Other with a Gap which They Don’t Encroach upon’
The Station of ‘That God may forgive you your past and future sins’
The Mutual Need of Beggars and Donors
False Dervishes
Lovers of the Superficial
‘If You Fornicate, Do it with a Free Woman; If You Steal, Steal a Pearl!’
The Boatman and the Grammarian
The Sufi Guide
The Softie from Qazvin who Wanted a Tattoo
The Lion, the Wolf, and the Fox
The Man who Learned to Knock on his Beloved’s Door and Say ‘It is You!’
Sufis Serve as Mirrors of the Soul
The Gift Brought by Joseph’s Visitor
The Prophet’s Scribe who Became an Apostate
Bal’am and the Damned
The Temptation of Harut and Marut
The Deaf Man who Visited his Sick Neighbour
Satan was the First to Rely on Reasoning
The Importance of Hiding your Mystical Station
The Painting Competition between the Greeks and the Chinese
The Prophet Mohammad and Zayd
Loqman’s Test to Discover who had Eaten the Fruit
Extinguishing Fire in Medina under Omar
Why Ali Dropped his Sword in Battle
The Man who was Told that he would One Day Kill Ali
Adam’s Conceit
Why the Prophet Conquered Mecca Yet Said, ‘The World is a Carcass’
Explanatory Notes
Glossary of Proper Names
This translation is dedicated to the memory of
MR NIKTAB
(d. 12 May 2003)
and
JERRY CLINTON
(d. 7 November 2003)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I SHOULD like to express my gratitude to all those who have helped to make it possible for me to produce this translation of Rumi’s Masnavi. The teachings of Dr Javad Nurbakhsh have given me the essential background knowledge to understand and appreciate the message of this Persian Sufi masterpiece. Edmund Herzig, Paul Luft, and Colin Turner taught me Persian language and literature at the University of Manchester. The late Norman Calder taught me to appreciate traditional verse forms and convinced me that the Masnavi should be translated into iambic pentameters. With remarkable sensitivity and patience, the late Jerry Clinton taught me how to translate into verse. I received invaluable encouragement from J. Christoph Bürgel, Dick Davis, Simin Nabavi, Alireza Nurbakhsh, and Michael Sivori. Julie Scott Meisami offered many insightful criticisms and suggestions that have helped to improve this work significantly, as well as to increase my own understanding of the poetry. Andrew Rippin generously took on the lion’s share of the responsibility for a project in which I collaborated at the same time as producing this translation and working as a full-time editor of Encyclopaedia Iranica. My colleagues at the Center for Iranian Studies of Columbia University helped make that experience rewarding. After I discovered Rumi when I was a teenager, it was my mother who first nurtured my enthusiasm and interest in his poetry and the Sufi tradition which he represents. I would also like to thank my brother Anis, who has been a major source of inspiration over the past year, and Negin for her loving support and companionship.
INTRODUCTION
Rumi and Sufism
Rumi has long been recognized within the Sufi tradition as one of the most important Sufis in history. He not only produced the finest Sufi poetry in Persian, but was the master of disciples who later named their order after him. Moreover, by virtue of the intense devotion he expressed towards his own master, Rumi has become the archetypal Sufi disciple. From that perspective, the unprecedented level of interest in Rumi’s poetry over the last couple of decades in North America and Europe does not come as a total surprise. Once his poetry finally began to be rendered into English in an attractive form, which coincided with an increased interest in mysticism among readers, this Sufi saint who expressed his mystical teachings in a more memorable and universally accessible form than any other started to become a household name.
Rumi lived some 300 years after the first writings of Muslim mystics were produced. A distinct mystical path called ‘Sufism’ became clearly identifiable in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries with the compilation of the manuals and collections of biographies of past Sufi saints. The authors of these works, who were mostly from north-eastern Persia, traced the origins of the Sufi tradition back to the Prophet Mohammad, while at the same time acknowledging the existence of comparable forms of mysticism before his mission. They mapped out a mystical path by which the Sufi ascends towards the ultimate goal of union with God and knowledge of reality. More than two centuries before the time of the eminent Sufi theosopher Ebn Arabi (d. 1240), Sufis began to describe their experience of annihilation in God and the realization that only God truly exists. The illusion of one’s own independent existence began to be regarded as the main obstacle to achieving this realization, so that early Sufis like Abu Yazid Bestami (d. 874) are frequently quoted as belittling the value of the asceticism of some of his contemporaries when it merely increased attention to themselves. An increasing number of Sufis began to regard love of God as the means of overcoming the root problem of one’s own sense of being, rather than piety and asceticism.1
The Sufi practice that is discussed the most in the early manuals of Sufism is listening to music, commonly referred to as ‘musical audition’ (sama‘). Listening to music, which often accompanied the love poetry and mystical poetry that Sufis themselves had begun to write, while immersed in the remembrance of God and unaware of oneself induced ecstasy in worshippers. The discussions in Sufi manuals of spontaneous movements by Sufis in ecstasy while listening to music and the efforts made to distinguish this from ordinary dance, suggest that already this practice had started to cause a great deal of controversy. Most of the Sufi orders that were eventually formed developed the practice of making such spontaneous movements while listening to music, but the whirling ceremony of the followers of Rumi is a unique phenomenon.2 Although it is traditionally traced back to Rumi’s own propensity for spinning round in ecstasy, the elaborate ceremony in the form in which it has become famous today was established only in the seventeenth century.3
The characteristics of the Sufi mystic who has completed the path to enlightenment is one of the recurrent topics in Sufi writings of the tenth and eleventh centuries, but students of Sufism at the time would tend to associate with several such individuals rather than form an exclusive bond with one master. By the twelfth century, however, the master–disciple relationship became increasingly emphasized, as the first Sufi orders began to be formed. It was also during this century that the relationship between love of God and His manifestation in creation became a focus of interest, especially among Sufis of Persian origin, such as Ahmad Ghazali (d. 1126) and Ruzbehan Baqli (d. 1209).4 The former’s more famous brother was responsible for integrating Sufism with mainstream Sunni Islam, as a practical form of Muslim piety that can provide irrefutable knowledge of religious truths through direct mystical experience.5
In this way, by the thirteenth century diverse forms of Sufism had developed and become increasingly popular. Rumi was introduced to Sufism through his father, Baha Valad, who followed a more conservative tradition of Muslim piety, but his life was transformed when he encountered the profound mystic Shams-e Tabriz. Although many of the followers of the tradition of his father considered Shams to be totally unworthy of Rumi’s time and attention, he considered him to be the most complete manifestation of God. Rumi expressed his love and utter devotion for his master Shams, with whom he spent little more than two years in total, through thousands of ecstatic lyrical poems. Towards the end of his life he presented the fruit of his experience of Sufism in the form of the Masnavi, which has been judged by many commentators, bo
th within the Sufi tradition and outside it, to be the greatest mystical poem ever written.
Rumi and his Times
The century in which Rumi lived was one of the most tumultuous in the history of the Middle East and Central Asia. When he was about ten years old the region was invaded by the Mongols, who, under the leadership of Genghis Khan, left death and destruction in their wake. Arriving through Central Asia and north-eastern Persia, the Mongols soon took over almost the entire region, conquering Baghdad in 1258. The collapse at the hands of an infidel army of the once glorious Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, the symbolic capital of the entire Muslim world, was felt throughout the region as a tremendous shock. Soon afterwards, there was a sign that the map of the region would continue to change, when the Mongols suffered a major defeat in Syria, at Ayn Jalut in 1260. Rumi’s life was directly affected by the military and political developments of the time, beginning with his family’s emigration from north-eastern Persia just two years before the Mongols arrived to conquer that region. Although the family eventually relocated to Konya (ancient Iconium) in central Anatolia, Rumi witnessed the spread of Mongol authority across that region too when he was still a young man.
In spite of the upheaval and destruction across the region during this century, there were many outstanding Sufi authors among Rumi’s contemporaries. The most important Sufi theosopher ever, Ebn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), produced his highly influential works during the first half of the century. His student and foremost interpreter, Sadroddin Qunyavi (d. 1273), settled in Konya some fifteen years after his master’s death and became associated with Rumi. This could have been one channel through which Rumi might have gained familiarity with Ebn ‘Arabi’s theosophical system, although his poetry does not suggest the direct influence of the latter’s works.6
The lives of two of the most revered Sufi poets also overlapped with Rumi’s life: the most celebrated Arab Sufi poet, Ebn al-Farez (d. 1235), whose poetry holds a position of supreme importance comparable with that of Rumi in the Persian canon;7 and Faridoddin ‘Attar (d. 1220), who was Rumi’s direct predecessor in the composition of Persian mystical masnavis (see below), including the highly popular work which has been translated as The Conference of the Birds (tr. A. Darbandi and D. Davis, Harmondsworth, 1983). It is perhaps not surprising that the Sufi poet Jami (d. 1492) should want to link Rumi with Attar directly by claiming that they met when Rumi’s family migrated from Balkh; Attar is said to have recognized his future successor in the composition of works in the mystical masnavi genre although Rumi was then still a young boy. Soon afterwards Attar was killed by the Mongols during their conquest of Nishapur.