Jalaloddin RUMI’s best-known text is his vast, sixvolume compilation of Sufi thought known as the
Masnavi-ye ma’navi, or Spiritual Couplets. Composed of numerous anecdotes or parables drawn
from a variety of Persian, Arabic, and other sources
(somewhat in the manner of Faridoddin ATTAR),
the Masnavi is revered by Sufis as second only to
the KORAN itself in importance and influence. Indeed, in Persian it is sometimes popularly called the
Koran.
The Masnavi was inspired by and dedicated to
Rumi’s disciple and close companion Celeb Humam
al-Din Hasan, who lived with Rumi the last 10 years
of the poet’s life and who succeeded Rumi as head of
the Sufi order called Mawlawi that Rumi had
founded. The text is made up of some 26,000 long
couplets in Persian verse. The Masnavi is a learned
work, the culmination of Rumi’s years of study and
teaching, and so is rich in allusions to the Koran and
the life of Muhammad. But it is also a creative and
original text, full of deep emotion and admirable
wit. The intent of Rumi’s parables and allegories is to
lead his reader in the path of spiritual perfection, in
the tradition of Islamic Sufi mysticism.
In general, Rumi’s Sufi thought has been compared with Neoplatonism. For Rumi, ultimate reality, that is real existence, is an attribute that
belongs solely to God. The image of God is fixed
on all created things, since they were formed by
him. The final destiny of all things is to return to
God, if in fact they are not already a part of him.
The mystic’s desire is to achieve unity with the
Godhead—to return to him even in this world.
Thus the accumulation of worldly goods is futile.
Learning gleaned from books can only give one
knowledge of the physical world, not of ultimate
reality. To achieve this higher knowledge, one must
transcend the self, the nafs. This is for Rumi the
mystery of love—“to die before dying.”
But the Masnavi gives no straightforward or
systematic guide to mystical practice. Instead, it
seems at times a rather random collection of
thoughts, images, and poetry—a story will grow
out of another story, which may lead to a dazzling
lyrical section, followed by a digression, which may
ultimately lead back to the original anecdote, from
which Rumi may veer away again. Rumi’s own
comments in parts of the Masnavi imply that his
original readers were frustrated by this storytelling
method, and by his refusal to provide any clear instruction in the Sufi path. Rumi answers these objections by asserting that the tales (sometimes
apparently irrelevant, sometimes even bawdy)
were not included merely for the sake of entertainment, but must be understood for their didactic
significance—readers must learn, he says, to separate “the grain from the husk.” In response to the
common Muslim attitude that fiction was a disreputable form of literature, Rumi responds that
even the Koran itself used illustrative stories.
The opening passage of the Masnavi, a poem
recited in the ritual of the Mawlawi dervishes, is
called “The Song of the Reed,” and illustrates some
of these precepts. The reed flute (the instrument
used in the dervishes’ ritual dancing) becomes in
the poem a symbol of the Sufi adept: Torn from
the reed bed that is its natural home, the reed flute
plays music expressing its longing to return. In the
same way the soul of the Sufi, knowing its place of
origin is in God and feeling the love that draws it to
its first home, expresses its own song of longing.
Later in book II of the Masnavi, Rumi discusses the
pitfalls of mistaking the transient things of this
world for the highest good and loving those things
rather than the ultimate reality. It is, he says, like
mistaking lightning for the sun:
A lack of knowledge cannot discern;
it mistakes a flash of lightning for the sun.
Lightning is transient and faithless;
without clearness you will not know
the transient from the permanent.
Why is lightning said to laugh?
It is laughing at whoever
sets his heart upon its light.
(Helminski 1998, 44)
The Masnavi has always been revered by Persian
readers, and many have committed it to memory.
But by the mid-14th century it was translated into
Turkish and eventually into Arabic, and thus became popular throughout Islam, and hundreds of
commentaries on Rumi’s text in many languages are
extant. His work became influential in 19th-century
Germany and impressed Hegel. Rumi’s enormous
recent surge of popularity in the English-speaking
world rests on translations of parts of the Masnavi
as well as of the short lyrics of Rumi’s other major
work, his Divân-e Shams-e Tabrizi (Collected Poems
of Shams Tabrizi), but translations fail to do justice
to the rhythm and imagery of the verse.
Bibliography
Keshavarz, Fatemah. Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case
of Jalal Al-Din Rumi. Studies in Comparative Religion. Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1998.
Rumi, Jalaloddin. The Essential Rumi. Translated by
Coleman Barks. San Francisco: Harper, 1997.
———. Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and
Longing. Translated by Coleman Barks. San Francisco: Harper, 2003.
———. The Rumi Collection. Edited by Kabir
Helminski. Brattleboro, Vt.: Threshold Books,
1998.
Schimel, Annemarie. The Triumphal Sun: A Study of
the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi. Persian Studies Series, 8. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1980.