The Masnavi, Book Three

by Jalal al-Din Rumi

  While the arrival of the cow was a boon that was understood correctly to be divinely sent, the punishment faced by the ascetic who breaks his vows in the subsequent embedded story (III, vv. 1616–1722) highlights that it is the conviction in such divine communication that counts rather than the nature of the consequences, whether pleasant or painful. The ascetic in this story accepts the amputation of a hand even though he is innocent of the crime for which this punishment is dealt, because he recognizes this as a divinely ordained consequence of his breaking a vow earlier. In this case, any observer would be astonished at the seeming injustice he suffers, but the ascetic accepts it through his divinely communicated knowledge.

  The visionary nature that divinely communicated knowledge can take is illustrated in the story about the extraordinary visions experienced by a character identified only by the name Daquqi of seven transforming candles–trees–holy men (III, vv. 1926–2307), which is at the heart of Book Three. This is a mystical vision that others cannot perceive. The seven men eventually disappear from Daquqi’s vision too when he intercedes for distressed passengers on board a sinking ship. The seven are critical that he noticed the ship while leading the group in prayer and was moved to try to change God’s ordinance. Daquqi is urged to keep on seeking individuals like these seven men who are so detached from the human realm, despite their disapproval of his becoming distracted during prayer. By implication, his visionary experiences are attainable by those still pursuing the Sufipath in the quest for complete mystical knowledge.

  The potentially negative consequences of having extraordinary knowledge are highlighted in the story about the man who asks Moses to teach him the language of animals (III, vv. 3268–3400). The little that Moses is willing to teach him itself proves too much for this person, who does not have the capacity to receive it, because he soon learns about his own impending death from a clairvoyant cockerel’s conversations with a dog.

  The qualification for receiving divinely communicated knowledge is lack of consciousness of self, which makes one ready to accept what is disadvantageous to one as well as what is advantageous. This is memorably illustrated in the story of the Vakil (administrator) of the ruler of Bukhara, as he returns to his master in that city, whom he had previously fled, even though all rational advisers urge him to keep away. The logical consequence of his return appears to them to be his execution (III, vv. 3688–4751), and yet the Vakil is prepared to make that return, driven by his love for the ruler from whom he can no longer bear to be separated.

  The Vakil represents the Sufi mystic who is drawn through the power of love for the Divine, against all logic and prudently self-preserving advice, then receives mystical knowledge and eternal life as a consequence of losing all consciousness of self. A similar gambling away of one’s own self-interest and security is illustrated in the story embedded here about the man who stays overnight in the haunted mosque against all advice (III, vv. 3924–4379).

  For Rumi, both Prophets and Sufi Friends of God are privileged to receive knowledge directly from God, and he emphatically denies any distinction between the kinds of divinely communicated knowledge that comes to them.4 As a SufiFriend of God who was also a prolific poet and teacher, divine communication was predictably a subject of special interest to him. It is well known that the Masnavi is often called ‘the Qur’an in Persian’, and Rumi himself made the first comparison between the two works, towards the end of Book Three (vv. 4230–94). Although he begins by comparing the reception these two books have had from fools who are dismissive of them, Rumi proceeds by developing an argument for the Friend of God’s ability to receive the same kind of divine communication as Prophets, and for the Masnavi to be considered as representing the Qur’an because it is of the same divine origin.5

  The final story of Book Three continues at the start of Book Four, a deliberate strategy referred to in the final verse of this book. Since this unique instance is at the exact centre of the six books of the Masnavi it provides promising support for the theory of Seyed Safavi and Simon Weightman that there is a ring structure to the whole work, in which the first three books mirror the last three books.6 However, the actual story which forms the overlap, ‘The Union of the lover who was not true’, does not have the significance that one would expect in this position. This can easily be seen by comparing it with the immediately preceding story about the self-annihilating love of the Vakil for the ruler of Bukhara. Like other possible indications of a ring structure, Rumi uses such an organizational framework only loosely, unwilling to restrict himself or draw attention to it. He is more concerned that the reader should focus on what is immediately at hand rather than try to intellectualize the relationship of a part to the overall framework.

  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, under the direction of his son and eventual successor Soltan Valad, named their order after him. Moreover, by virtue of the intense devotion he expressed towards his own master, Shams-e Tabriz, Rumi has become the archetypal Sufi disciple. From that perspective, the unprecedented level of interest in Rumi’s poetry over recent 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 began 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 ninth century and began to be systematized from the late tenth and early eleventh centuries with the compilation of the manuals and collections of biographies of past Sufisaints. The authors of these works, who were mostly from north-eastern Persia, traced the origins of the Sufitradition 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 had begun 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 dismissing the value of the asceticism of some of their contemporaries on the grounds that it merely increased attention to themselves. In this way, most Sufis began to regard love of God as the means of overcoming the root problem of one’s own self, rather than piety and asceticism.7

  The Sufi practice most widely discussed in the early manuals of Sufism is that of listening to music, commonly referred to as ‘musical audition’ (sama‘). Listening to poetry being sung to music, 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 this practice had already begun to cause a great deal of controversy. Most of the Sufi orders that were later formed developed the practice of surrendering to spontaneous movements while listening to music, but the whirling ceremony of the followers of Rumi, the Mevlevi order, is a unique phenomenon.8 Although it is traditionally traced back to Rumi’s own propensity for spinning around in ecstasy, the elaborate ceremony in the form in which it has become famous today was established only in the sixteenth century.9

  The characteristics of the Sufi mystic who has completed the path to enlightenment is one of the most recurrent topics in Sufi writings of the tenth and eleventh centuries, but students of Sufism at the time would tend to associate with several su
ch 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 Sufiorders 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).10 The former’s more famous brother Abu Hamid 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.11

  In this way, by the thirteenth century diverse forms of Sufism had developed and become increasingly popular. Rumi was introduced to Sufism by his father, Baha Valad, who followed a more conservative tradition of Muslim piety, but his life was transformed when he encountered the mystic Shams-e Tabriz. Although many of the followers of the tradition of his father considered Shams to be 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 only about 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, both within the Sufitradition and outside it, to be the greatest mystical poem ever written.

  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 Faridoddin ‘Attar (d. 1220) 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.12 According to tradition, it was the popularity of these works among 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 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 Archangel 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 about 1262, although tradition relates that Rumi had already composed the first eighteen couplets by the time Hosamoddin made his request; we are told that he 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. The crucial role played by Hosamoddin as Rumi’s assistant in this process is highlighted by the fact that Rumi refers to the Masnavi on several occasions as ‘the Hosam book’.

  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 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, as we have seen. Occasionally the section 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. Occasionally they 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. According to Safavi and Weightman, however, these inconsistent section headings are of crucial importance, in that they represent the original plan of the Masnavi and were therefore probably organized before any of the poetry had itself been composed.13

  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 story-teller despite being primarily concerned with conveying his teachings as effectively as possible to his Sufidisciples. The Masnavi leaves the impression that he was brimming with ideas and symbolic images 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 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.14 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, 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. Nonetheless, 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 this 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.

  NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  RUMI put his teachings into the masnavi verse form in order that, with the benefit of metre and rhyme, his disciple
s might enjoy reading them. I have therefore decided to translate Rumi’s Masnavi into verse, in accordance with the aim of the original work. I have chosen to use rhyming iambic pentameters, since this is the closest corresponding form of English verse to the Persian masnavi form of rhyming couplets. These are numbered and referred to as verses in the Explanatory Notes and Introduction.

  Book Three of the Masnavi consists of over 4,800 couplets, the continuity of which is broken up only by section headings. For the sake of clarity, in this translation further breaks have been added to those created by the section headings. In order for the Contents pages to fulfil their function effectively, alternative headings have been employed there, albeit at corresponding points to the major section headings in the text, which refer in many instances to merely the first few subsequent verses rather than representing the section as a whole.

  Although the Masnavi is a Persian poem, it contains a substantial amount of Arabic text. This invariably takes the form of citations from Arabic sources and common religious formulae, but the sources for some of these passages are either unknown or oral. Italics have been used to indicate Arabic text, except in the section headings, which are fully italicized. Many Arabic terms and religious formulae have become part of the Persian language, and have therefore not been highlighted in this way. Capitalization has been used when reference is made to God. This includes, in addition to the pronouns and titles commonly used in English, the ninety-nine names of God of the Islamic tradition, as well as certain philosophical terms.