As the Mongols advanced westwards, Anatolia became an increasingly attractive destination for the inhabitants of central parts of the Middle East who wished to flee. A number of important Sufis and influential scholars chose this option, including Hajji Bektash (d. c .1272), the eponym of the Bektashi order which went on to become one of the most influential Sufi orders in Anatolia in subsequent centuries, and Najmoddin Razi (d. 1256), whose teacher, Najmoddin Kobra (d. 1221), the eponym of the Kobravi order, had been killed during the Mongol invasion of Transoxiana.
Many works have been written about Rumi’s life in Konya, since shortly after his death, but contradictions in these sources, and the hagiographic nature of most of the material compiled, mean that a number of important details remain uncertain. Nonetheless, the general outline of the life of Rumi seems to be presented relatively consistently in the sources, and remains helpful for putting the Masnavi into context.
Rumi was born in September 1207 in the province of Balkh, in what is now the border region between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. His father, Baha Valad, was a preacher and religious scholar who also led a group of Sufi disciples. When Rumi was about 10 years old his family emigrated to Anatolia, having already relocated a few years earlier to Samarqand in Transoxiana. This emigration seems to have been motivated primarily by the approach of Genghis Khan’s Mongol army, although rivalries between Baha Valad and various religious scholars in the region may have also played a part. Instead of directly moving westwards, Rumi’s family first made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and it was only a few years after arriving in Anatolia that they decided to settle permanently in Konya. By this time, Rumi had already married (1224) and seen the birth of his son and eventual successor in Sufism, SoltanValad (1226).
In Konya, Baha Valad found the opportunity, under the patronage of the Seljuk ruler Alaoddin Kay Qobad I (r. 1219–36), to continue his work as a preacher and to teach students in a religious school. He had been grooming Rumi to be his successor, but died only a couple of years after settling in Konya, in 1231. Although the original reasons for his arrival remain unclear, it seems that one of Baha Valad’s students, called Borhanoddin Mohaqqeq, arrived in Konya from north-eastern Persia soon afterwards to take over the management of his school. He also took responsibility for overseeing the continuation of Rumi’s education and training. Within a few years, Borhanoddin had sent Rumi to Aleppo and Damascus to continue his education in the religious sciences. It is possible that during his stay in Damascus Rumi may have heard the lectures of Ebn ‘Arabi, who was living there at the time. Rumi returned to Konya in around 1237 as a highly accomplished young scholar, and took over leadership of Baha Valad’s school from Borhanoddin.
After his return to Konya, Rumi’s reputation as an authority on religious matters became firmly established there, and he reached the peak of his career as a scholar, achieving what his father seems to have hoped for him. In November 1244, after seven years of excelling as a religious teacher, Rumi experienced a challenging encounter that would prove to be the most significant event of his life. As one would expect, an event as important as this has generated many competing accounts. However, most versions at least share the same basic elements. According to one popular and relatively simple account, Rumi is asked about his books by an uneducated-looking stranger, and responds by snapping back dismissively, ‘They are something that you do not understand!’ The books then suddenly catch fire, so Rumi asks the stranger to explain what has happened. His reply is: ‘Something you do not understand.’
Rumi was immediately drawn to this mysterious figure, who turned out to be a wandering mystic called Shamsoddin from Tabriz (known popularly as Shams, or Shams-e Tabriz) in north-western Persia. The two began to spend endless hours together in retreat. What was shared by the pair during this time remains a mystery that can only be guessed from the volumes of poetry that it inspired.
What is reported consistently about the period of approximately a year and a half that Rumi spent with Shams is that it provoked intense jealousy and resentment among his disciples, who also feared that their highly respected master was risking his reputation by mixing with someone so unworthy in their eyes. These disciples eventually drove Shams away, but, on hearing reports of sightings of him in Syria, Rumi sent his own son, Soltan Valad, to ask him to come back. Although Shams did return a year later, in 1247, he soon disappeared forever. According to tradition, Shams was killed by Rumi’s disciples after they had seen that driving him away had failed to separate him permanently from their master.
Although he was already a respected religious authority in Konya and had trained in a tradition of Sufi piety under his father, whom he succeeded as master, Rumi frequently affirms that he was led by Shams to a far loftier level of Sufi mysticism. His poetry, for instance, emphasizes the importance of love in transcending attachments to the world, and dismisses concerns for worldly reputation, literal-mindedness, and intellectualism. From dry scholarship and popular piety, Rumi turned his attention to mystical poetry, and he became known for his propensity to fall into an ecstatic trance and whirl around himself in public. The fact that Rumi’s writings are replete with biting criticisms of religious scholars and intellectuals should be seen as a sign of his own background which he had turned away from: he draws upon their kind of scholarship subversively again and again even as he tears it apart, showing that he had already mastered it in the past. Rumi innovatively named his own collection of ghazals, or lyrical poems, as ‘the Collection of Shams’ (Divan-e Shams ) rather than as his own collection, and also included Shams’s name at the end of many of his individual ghazals, where by convention the poet would identify himself. This can be seen as Rumi’s acknowledgement of the all-important inspiration that Shams had provided for him.
After the final disappearance of Shams, Rumi remained in Konya and continued to direct his father’s school. However, he chose to appoint as deputy, with the responsibility to manage many of the affairs of the school in his place, a goldsmith called Salahoddin. Like Shams, he was disliked by many of Rumi’s disciples, who considered him uneducated. A colourful story about the first encounter between the two describes Rumi as falling into ecstasy and whirling, on hearing the rhythmic beating of Salahoddin at work in his market stall. After Salahoddin’s death in 1258, Rumi appointed Hosamoddin Chalabi in his place. When Hosamoddin became a disciple of Rumi he was already the head of a local order for the training of young men in chivalry. He brought with him his own disciples, the wealth of his order, and the expertise he had acquired in running such an institution. However, his most important contribution was serving as Rumi’s scribe and putting the Masnavi into writing as Rumi recited it aloud. Rumi praises Hosamoddin profusely in the introduction of the Masnavi , which on occasion he even calls ‘the Hosam book’, indicating the vital importance of Hosamoddin’s role in this work (see, for example, the first page of the poem in Book Four).
In addition to Rumi’s poetry, three prose works have also survived: collections of his letters, sermons, and teaching sessions. These reveal much about aspects of his life that have been neglected by most biographers. His letters testify to his influence among the local political rulers and his efforts to secure positions of importance for his disciples through letters of recommendation. This contradicts the popular image of Rumi withdrawing from public life after the disappearance of Shams. It would be more accurate to say that he entrusted everyday matters, including the training of disciples, to his deputies, but he still represented the order in external matters. His collection of seven sermons attests to the fact that he was highly esteemed by the local Muslim population. It reveals that he delivered sermons at the main congregational mosque on important occasions, and that he used such opportunities to give Sufi teachings, albeit within the rigid constraints of a formal sermon. Rumi’s most important prose work, however, is the written record of his teaching sessions, which was compiled after his death by his students as seventy-one discourses. This work, called ‘In it is wha
t is in it’—probably on account of its diverse and unclassified contents—provides intimate glimpses of Rumi as a Sufi master. The content of this work is comparable with his didactic poem the Masnavi , in that it contains many of the same teachings.
Rumi died on 17 December 1273, probably very soon after the completion of the Masnavi . Tradition tells us that physicians could not identify the illness from which he was suffering, and that his death was mourned not only by his disciples but also by the large and diverse community in Konya, including Christians and Jews, who converged as his body was carried through the city. Many of the non-Muslims had not only admired him as outsiders, but had also attended his teaching sessions. The ‘Green Dome’, where his mausoleum is found today, was constructed soon after Rumi’s death. It has become probably the most popular site of pilgrimage in the world to be visited regularly by members of every major religion.
Hosamoddin Chalabi served as the leader of Rumi’s school for the first twelve years after Rumi’s death, and was succeeded by Soltan Valad. Rumi’s disciples named their school ‘the Mevlevi order’ after him, for they used to refer to him by the title ‘Mevlana’ (in Arabic ‘Mowlana’, meaning ‘Our Lord’). It became widespread and influential especially under the Ottoman empire and remains an active Sufi order in Turkey as well as in many other countries across the world. The Mevlevis are better known in the West as ‘the Whirling Dervishes’ because of the distinctive dance that they perform to music as the central ritual of the order.
The Masnavi Form
Rumi chose a plain, descriptive name for his poem, ‘masnavi’ being the name of the rhyming couplet verse form. Each half-line, or hemistich, of a masnavi poem follows the same metre, in common with other forms of classical Persian poetry. The metre of Rumi’s Masnavi is the ramal metre in apocopated form (– ˘ – – / – ˘ – – / – ˘ –), a highly popular metre which was also used by ‘Attar for his Conference of the Birds. What distinguishes the masnavi form from other Persian verse forms is the rhyme, which changes in successive couplets according to the pattern aa bb cc dd etc. Thus, in contrast to the other verse forms, which require a restrictive monorhyme, the masnavi form enables poets to compose long works consisting of thousands of verses.
The masnavi form satisfied the need felt by Persians to compose narrative and didactic poems, of which there was already before the Islamic period a long and rich tradition. By Rumi’s time a number of Sufis had already made use of the masnavi form to compose mystical poems, the most celebrated among which are Sana’i’s (d. 1138) Hadiqato’l-haqiqat , or Garden of Truth , and ‘Attar’s Manteqo’t-tayr , or Conference of the Birds . According to tradition, it was the popularity of these works amongst Rumi’s disciples that prompted Hosamoddin, Rumi’s deputy, to ask him to compose his own mystical masnavi for their benefit.
Hosamoddin served as Rumi’s scribe in a process of text production that is traditionally described as being similar to the way in which the Qur’an was produced. However, while tradition tells us that the Sufi poet Rumi recited the Masnavi orally when he felt inspired to do so, with Hosamoddin always ready to record those recitations in writing for him as well as to assist him in revising and editing the final poem, the illiterate Prophet Mohammad is said to have recited aloud divine revelation in piecemeal fashion, in exactly the form that God’s words were revealed to him through the Angel Gabriel. Those companions of the Prophet who were present on such occasions would write down the revelations and memorize them, and these written and mental records eventually formed the basis of the compilation of the Qur’an many years after the Prophet’s death.
The process of producing the Masnavi was probably started in around 1262, although tradition relates that Rumi had already composed the first eighteen couplets by the time Hosamoddin made his request; we are told that Rumi responded by pulling a sheet of paper out of his turban with the first part of the prologue of Book One, ‘The Song of the Reed’, already written on it. References to their system of production can be found in the text of the Masnavi itself (e.g. I, v. 2947). They seem to have worked on the Masnavi during the evenings in particular, and in one instance Rumi begs forgiveness for having kept Hosamoddin up for an entire night with it (I, v. 1817). After Hosamoddin had written down Rumi’s recitations, they were read back to him to be checked and corrected.
Rumi’s Masnavi belongs to the group of works written in this verse form that do not have a frame narrative. In this way, it contrasts with the more cohesively structured Conference of the Birds , which is already well known in translation. It is also much longer; the Conference is roughly the same length as just one of the six component books of the Masnavi. Each of the six books consists of about 4,000 verses and has its own prose introduction and prologue. There are no epilogues.
The component narratives, homilies, commentaries on citations, prayers, and lyrical flights which make up the body of each book of the Masnavi are often demarcated by their own headings. The text of longer narratives tends to be broken up into sections by further such headings. Sometimes these headings are positioned inappropriately, such as in the middle of continuous speech, which might be interpreted as a sign that they may have been inserted only after the text had been prepared (e.g. vv. 1528 and 1642 in this volume). Occasionally the headings are actually longer than the passage that they represent, and serve to explain and contextualize what follows. It is as if, on rereading the text, further explanation was felt necessary in the form of an expanded heading.
The frequency of breaks in the flow of narratives, which is a distinctive characteristic of the Masnavi , reveals that Rumi has earned a reputation as an excellent storyteller despite being primarily concerned with conveying his teachings in homily form as frequently as possible to his Sufi disciples. The Masnavi leaves the impression that he was brimming with ideas, images, and intense feelings which would overflow when prompted by the subtlest of associations. In this way, free from the constraints of a frame narrative, Rumi has been able to produce a work that is far richer in content and more multi-vocal than any other example of the mystical masnavi genre. That this has been achieved often at the expense of preserving continuity in the narratives seems to corroborate Rumi’s opinion on the relative importance of the teachings in his poetry over its aesthetic value, as reported in his discourses. 5 If it were not for the fact that his digressive ‘overflowings’ are expressed in simple language and with imagery that was immediately accessible to his contemporary readers, all the time held together by the consistent metre and rhyme of the masnavi form, they would have constituted an undesirable impediment to understanding the poem. Where this leads Rumi to interweave narratives and to alternate between different speakers and his own commentaries, the text can still be difficult to follow, and, for most contemporary readers, the relevance of citations and allusions to the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet will not be immediately obvious without reference to the explanatory notes that have been provided in this edition. None the less, it should be evident, not least from the lengthy sequences of metaphors that Rumi often provides to reinforce a single point, that he has striven to communicate his message as effectively as possible rather than to write obscurely and force the reader to struggle to understand him.
Rumi made painstaking efforts to convey his teachings as clearly and effectively as possible, using simple language, the masnavi verse form, entertaining stories, and the most vivid and accessible imagery possible. The aim of the present translation is to render Rumi’s Masnavi into a relatively simple and attractive form which, with the benefit of metre and rhyme, may enable as many readers as possible to read the whole book with pleasure and to find it rewarding.
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5 Rumi expresses his frustration about having to return to the narrative after a break also towards the start of Book Two (Rumi, The Masnavi: Book Two , tr. J. Mojaddedi (Oxford, 2007), vv. 194–202).
Book Four of the Masnavi
The current volume is a translation of the fourth
book of the Masnavi , and follows Books One, Two, and Three, also published in Oxford World’s Classics.
As mentioned in the introduction to Book Three, the major preoccupation of each book of the Masnavi is indicated in its exordium and prose introduction. For instance, that of Book Three is pointed out at the very start of the Prose Introduction with which it begins. Rumi comments: ‘Pieces of wisdom are the armies of God by which He strengthens the spirits of seekers, and keeps their knowledge away from the tarnish of ignorance’ (III, p. 3). Book Three as a whole correspondingly presents Rumi’s epistemology by classifying different levels of knowledge, from the limited amount possessed by fools who are controlled by their lusts and the rational knowledge of the well-educated to the all-consuming mystical knowledge of the Sufi adept, or ‘Friend of God’ (wali ), and it does so largely by means of teaching-stories that involve nourishment. Book Two similarly begins with an exordium that stresses the importance of choosing one’s companions carefully, and then expands on this teaching through its stories, while Book One, as mentioned earlier, begins with the famous ‘Song of the Reed’ about the origins of Man with God and then culminates in the story about Ali ebn Abi Taleb succeeding in making the return journey to Him.
Book Three is joined with Book Four through its final story, ‘The Union of the lover who was not true’, which begins in Book Three and finishes in Book Four, and also shares a common general preoccupation with epistemology. However, in Book Four, the focus is the divinely revealed knowledge of the Prophets and Friends of God, which is compared in its exordium with the light of the sun.
The Masnavi, Book Four Page 2