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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Poetry

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Editor's note: As prelude consider this outline-information from Wikipedia on Rumi's writing. Notice the parallels with the WG articles on "the "true" and "the false" selves and human godly potential.

The six books of the Masnavi can be divided into three groups of two because each pair is linked by a common theme:

• Books 1 and 2: They "are principally concerned with the nafs, the lower carnal self, and its self-deception and evil tendencies."

• Books 3 and 4: These books share the principal themes of Reason and Knowledge. These two themes are personified by Rumi in the Biblical and Quranic figure of the Prophet Moses.

• Books 5 and 6: These last two books are joined by the universal ideal that man must deny his physical earthly existence to understand God's existence.

In addition to the recurring themes presented in each book, Rumi includes multiple points of view or voices inviting the reader to fall into "imaginative enchantment." There are seven principal voices that Rumi uses in his writing:

1. The Authorial Voice – Conveys the authority of a Sufi teacher and generally appears in verses addressed to You, God, or you, of all humankind.

2. The Story-telling Voice – May be interrupted by side stories that help clarify a statement, sometime taking hundreds of lines to make a point.

3. The Analogical Voice – Interruptions to the flow of narration in order to explain a statement by use of analogy.

4. The Voice of Speech and Dialogue of Characters – Many of the stories are told through dialogue between characters.

5. The Moral Reflection – Supported by quotations from the Quran and hadith

6. The Spiritual Discourse – Similar to analogical and model reflections.

7. Hiatus – Rumi occasionally questions his own verses and writes that he cannot say more because the reader would not be capable of understanding.

The Masnavi has no framed plot and includes a variety of scenes, from popular stories and scenes of the local bazaar to fables and tales from Rumi's time. It also includes quotations from the Qur'an and from hadith, accounts from the time of Mohammed.

Although there is no constant frame, style, or plot, Rumi generally follows a certain writing pattern that flows in the following order:

from https://besharamagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Alan-Williams-Full-Interview-Transcript.pdf

The Operation of Divine Love

An Interview with Alan Williams by David Hornsby, January 2020
 

What would you say is the profound and universal message of the Masnavi?

I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time. The main message cannot easily be put into
intellectual terms, and that is the problem, and why Rumi addresses the reader through poetry:
poetry immediately addresses a different level of the mind from the literal, intellectual mind. The
message is intended for the inner being or higher mind. And, to hear this message, one has to be
very patient and attentive. The message is about the realisation of union with our true reality – but
that is a conditional promise of a result, if you like, because we have to give up everything in order
to know union, and very few of us are able or prepared to do that.

Rumi went to great pains to explain what he meant in the best possible way, through ordinary
language, through stories and fables, but also by direct conversation with his readers, guiding them
along the way. This is really what I talk about in my Introduction to the first book, that he has a way
of leading the reader into a receptive state so that it is easier to understand what he has to say: to
contemplate subtle realities that are much subtler than what we are normally used to reading in
ordinary literature, even in other Persian, Sufi poetry.

One of the people commenting on your books, Ahmad Karimi Hakkak, has said that they are “intensely relevant not just to our time, but to all humanity through the millennia”. Yet you’re saying that it’s actually quite a difficult message?

Well, you asked about the ultimate message. The ultimate message is a difficult message, and it may also be a universal message: how to find liberation or unification. But of course, there are all sorts of other messages that are certainly relevant and important for today.

The core message is the one that I’d like to explore a bit more. What is this union that you’re
talking about?

The union that he is talking about, that I try to translate, is the realisation of ?aqq. There’s no better
word for it than ?aqq, but we can translate it as ‘Truth’ or ‘God’. That is the biggest one to crack and there’s no easy way of simplifying it in intellectual terms. But this is what he does, and this is
why it’s difficult to begin with this question, because it really needs a lot of mental preparation. It is
possible to talk about it, and Rumi himself sometimes seems to fall into ecstatic states while
speaking: he is sharing his insight and opening himself to the reader and practising meaning. And
this is why the book is known as the Masnavi-ye Ma?navi, the ‘Masnavi of Spirit’ or ‘Masnavi of
Meaning’. He does it right in front of us on the page and embodies it in his words, so that the reader
can begin to participate in and share in the world of Being, which is where he wants to take us. I
hope that is a profound enough message for you; he wants to take us to, not merely define in words,
that world of ultimate meaning, which is way beyond any mental conception. Even to talk about it
as ‘Being’ is to degrade it.
We are talking about and translating something we do not fully understand, because we are not
sitting here speaking from the realised mind. So translating such things is something one has to do
with humility. And we must learn to read it with humility. I think ultimately his example has a
subtle effect on the reader. It has a kind of osmotic effect on the reader. I referred to it once in a talk
at Chisholme as what J.G. Bennett and Gurdjieff called a ‘legominism’, because I do think that the
act of reading such a text as the Masnavi has a cathartic and uplifting effect on the reader. It does
this because it is working at a subtle level. I believe that some other poetry has a similar wonderful
effect (Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example), but it is clearly true of the Masnavi.

Can you say something about Rumi, when and where he lived, his life? Who were the spiritual influences on him and his family?

Yes. He was born in 1207 in an area east of modern Iran, in greater Khorasan (which means ‘the
Land of the Sun’), the geographical area of ancient Bactria around Balkh in a region which is now
shared by Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It is actually not located in the territory of
modern Iran, but all these countries, including Iran and Turkey, now claim him as their one of their
national poets. As is well known, his family had to migrate from there when he was still a child,
travelling 2000 miles westward and settling eventually in Konya.

Why did they have to migrate?

This is actually disputed by scholars, but it is suggested that Rumi’s father, Bahaoddin Valad, may
have been in dispute with his employers there and wished to leave. But the most likely underlying
reason is the mass Mongol invasion that was on the horizon and which destroyed Samarkand a few years after they left. This is the invasion that came right into Asia Minor (modern Turkey), and in
fact, many folk from Khorasan had gone before them, having migrated and settled there in Anatolia,
driven by fear of annihilation. When Rumi began the Masnavi in the early 1260s the Abbasid
caliphate had just been overthrown by the Mongol armies of Hulagu Khan who sacked Baghdad in
1258. Rumi probably did not know if his civilisation would survive, as we do not these days.
These were very traumatic times for him and his family, and I think the signs are there in the
Masnavi of a person who has been traumatised. There is the theme of deep spiritual nostalgia in the
Masnavi, which may have arisen from his own experience of being uprooted with his family from
his homeland and transported to a completely new environment in which he was a stranger. He was
a young man when he grew up in Konya, not a child anymore, but his whole life is a catalogue of
losses: loss of his homeland, loss of his mother and a succession of teachers, loss of his first wife
Gowhar Khatun, not to mention the sudden disappearance of Shamsoddin. All this was transformed
and transmuted by Rumi in the Masnavi into a spiritual nostalgia that was cathartic and led him to
the spiritual understanding for which he is famous.

What traditions influenced him in the environment in which he grew up? Was it the Zoroastrian tradition, the Islamic tradition, the Christian tradition? Konya seems to have been in a certain way at the heart of all of these.

This is true, Konya is one of the ancient centres of civilisation, and was in his day too. Certainly we
have two sets of influences. The influence of his background in Khorasan: he was profoundly
influenced by the Sufi traditions of Khorasan; this is different from those of the Middle East,
different from that of the traditions in which he was educated and studied in Anatolia and
Mesopotamia. These two traditions come together in Rumi, and it is not surprising that you can find
both – namely, the quietest tradition associated with Junayd and the more ecstatic tradition
associated with Abu Yazid of Bistam.
One influence people forget is that of his own father and his early teachers. (We tend to jump
forward to the influence, profound influence, of Shamsoddin and his later teachers.) But his own
father and his first teachers as a young man when he was learning the Quran, and later studying the
sciences of Islam, rooted him in his faith and in the spirituality of his father’s tradition of piety and
homiletics. And then, of course, we have this later development into a Sufi of the more ecstatic kind
with Shamsoddin. I have tried in my Introduction to say something more about the nature of
Shamsoddin’s influence on Rumi – both called one another Mowlana ‘Master, Lord’ out of respect. I shan’t say anything about the influence of Zoroastrianism here but I am aware of it as I read the
language of his poetry. The Persian language he spoke is immensely ancient and rich in pre-Islamic
nuances. To take one instance alone: for Rumi fire is not just the Muslim fire of punishment, but it
is also the fire of love.

Turning to the Masnavi, this huge work that you have been so engaged with. What is it? How long is it? It’s been translated before, most notably by Reynold A. Nicholson and that is a work which is still very widely read and admired. What has driven you to do this massive work to produce a new version?

This is a very long work of thousands of couplets. It has grown slightly over the centuries, as
copyists and editors added to it. But there has been some wonderful scholarship done, by Nicholson
and more recently by Iranian scholars, such as Mohammad Estelami and most recently Mohammad
Ali Movahhed, to find the earliest manuscripts. In these there are some 25,500 couplets that are
attributable directly to Rumi.
He began this work about ten years before he died, in the early 1260s. He died in 1273. He had
already written thousands of ghazals, roba’is (‘quatrains’) and other short poems that make up the
Kulliyat, ‘collected poems’ popularly known as the Divan of Shams of Tabriz. But the Masnavi is
quite a different sort of work. Its name Masnavi in modern Persian, or in Arabic transcription
Mathnawi, means simply ‘couplet’ or ‘double verse’ from the Arabic numeral ithna, ‘two’. So it is
named after a poetic form, it’s not a thematic name: this was the genre of Sufi didactic, instructional
works, as opposed to their panegyric paeans, ghazals, rubayat, and similar short lyrical verses.

Editor's note: compare this to the "mashal" style of the Hebrew Proverbs

But, as I’ve said, Rumi’s masnavi became known as the Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, ‘Masnavi of Meaning’ and
was distinguished from all other masnavis, of which it is the most massive, the paragon and most
important example. The most famous one before Rumi’s was the Man?eqo??ayr, ‘The Conference of
the Birds’, of Attar. A masnavi poem was long but also highly memorable and repeatable because
of its narrative story element (such as in Attar’s journey of the 30 birds to find the Simorgh): also,
the metre is eminently sustainable over very long passages. Rumi’s Masnavi of 25,500 couplets is
equivalent to 51,000 lines of English poetry – around five times the length of Milton’s Paradise
Lost, and four times Dante’s Commedia Divina. Rumi regarded the whole thing as a work that had a
life of its own, as revealed to him by God. This wasn’t a way of promoting himself to prophetic
status; rather he saw himself as a medium for its transmission. He passed away very soon after he
got to the end of the sixth book. Yes, it was translated by Nicholson in the 1920s and 30s, and nobody can replace that: I’m certainly
not trying to replace Nicholson. Nicholson did a scholarly job of editing all the oldest
texts/manuscripts he could manage to get his hands on. And interestingly, he was into the third
book before he found the oldest manuscript, that is the Konya ‘G’ manuscript from which I have
worked – the one on display in the Mevlana Musesi in Konya. He revised his translations after
seeing that manuscript, knowing it to be the oldest. Nicholson was the first westerner to edit and
translate all six books, but as a Cambridge scholar in the 1920s he regarded editing and commenting
– scholarly commentary – as rather more important than doing a ‘crib-sheet’ for students of Persian.
But he published a translation and it’s a very good one, excellent because it’s so literal, but it’s not
really for modern public consumption because it just flies way over everyone’s head. Unless you’re
really dedicated to ploughing through it, it makes tough reading and it’s difficult to get the juice out
of it.
Nicholson’s translation was done into a deliberately archaic style of English in imitation of the King
James Version of the Bible (which was itself archaic even in its own day). Anyone who tries to read
the Masnavi in Nicholson’s English alone would not be aware of the richness of the original Persian
poetry. I had to learn Persian to discover this for myself when I was a student in Oxford nearly 50
years ago. In translating it now I have tried to do a double job, which is to be as literal as possible,
but also to anchor it onto a comparable metre in English, which is the iambic pentameter of blank
verse. The ramal metre, the mystical metre of Rumi’s Masnavi, means ‘running’, but it is quite
complex to the English ear. It is a driving, syncopated rhythm. I can demonstrate what it sounds like
in Persian on a recording. The metrical pattern is summarised in the Arabic phrase fa?ilatun
fa?ilatun fa?ilun, that is 11 syllables, 22 in the full couplet, i.e. (reading from left to right) where ‘−’
is a long syllable and ‘∪’ is short:
− ∪ − − / − ∪ − − / − ∪ − // − ∪ − − / − ∪ − − / − ∪ −
It is quite different from the metre pentameter I’ve used in my translation, which visually looks
more pedestrian:
∪ − / ∪ − /∪ − / ∪ − / ∪ − / (∪) // ∪ − / ∪ − /∪ − / ∪ − / ∪ − / (∪)
But in fact in English, because of the great wealth of literature there is from Shakespeare onwards,
to Milton and Wordsworth, blank verse has been developed and enriched by centuries of use. And
the English ear is totally accustomed to it, so it’s an ideal form for translation, especially for
dramatic narrative and dialogue – pentameter is second nature to me, as English speech is naturally
iambic.

So what I’m trying to do in my translation is to liberate the poetry from a prosaic prison, something
similar in a way to what Coleman Barks has said he was trying to do with the old translations in
front of him. Now I’ve gone back to the Persian verse, and am trying to be as faithful as I can to the
text. It’s very difficult to find the right words in the right order, because Persian poetry is so much
more concise – lacking definite and indefinite articles, pronouns and all the auxiliary verbs of
English – just to name a few. This is why it is taking me so darned long to do.

How long has it taken?

So far I’ve been working on it for decades. I published the first book in 2006 and I started three
years before that. I’m now well over halfway through, but it will take me another few years to finish
all six books. I’m quite prepared to do that because something happened to me halfway through my
academic career, which I will mention in a minute.

People in this field sometimes say, ‘Well, these kinds of things really cannot be translated and
therefore you’re interpreting them’. Some people say, ‘I’m rendering it into English’, and
you’ve taken the approach of having both the Persian text and the English text side by side.

Yes, I asked an Iranian academic, Professor Mohammad Estelami, if I could incorporate his edition
of the G Manuscript into my books, and he was delighted. It’s not actually side by side, as we
couldn’t achieve that logistically. What happens is that these books begin at both ends and the
English starts at the English beginning and the Persian at the other. They work towards one another
and the texts are symmetrical rather than parallel, meeting in the middle, with notes and appendices
in between. I had tried to find a solution to the problem for months until I came up this. I couldn’t
do it the way I’d hoped, with the Persian on the right and the English on the left, because the scripts
and texts work in opposite directions; also, a Persian poem is laid out in a completely different way
from an English one, running across the page – the two hemistichs of each couplet run in parallel,
from right to left: we couldn’t typeset the English translation in that way, with the couplets running
across the page – it wouldn’t look right. We managed to get a maximum of English 34 lines on a
page = 17 couplets. So there were logistical problems, but the solution was to keep the texts
separate and bind in a simple ribbon for the reader.
To have the text there with the translation, is, you might say, a risky thing to do, for Iranian and
western academics/mother-tongue speakers to have the original there in front of them, and Williams’s efforts to boot. So it’s a risk. But I’m taking that risk for the sake of transparent
translation, and not hiding anything. Translation is interpretation: the very word is a Latin form of
the Greek ‘metaphor’. But then, according to the very philosophy of Rumi and the Sufis, everything
is in a sense translation, a version of a version, and of course philosophically, even we are versions,
as, ayan al-thabita ‘manifestations’, in form. So I’m taking this very literally – that, yes, one is
always only approximating the original form of the poem – but I’m hoping that by looking more at
the spiritual form of the text, by looking at both the micro-structure and macro-structure of the
poem, one gets more than just the mere words. In short, translating the words is always an act of
interpretation, but then when you look at what he is actually doing dynamically, you can identify
that ‘something else’, a bigger voice is being heard. And that is the mind of Rumi. I’m trying to
translate not just words, but what I hear as the mind of Rumi as he is working through the text.

You’ve been for many years Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at the
University of Manchester. Can you say something about your background and how you came
to be equipped to listen to Rumi’s voice in this way? How did you first come to engage with
Rumi and what kind of preparation do you think has been necessary for you to undertake this
task and to be able to do it?

I didn’t come from an academic background at all: my parents were working people – Welsh and
Scots, in fact, so no English blood in me – and as a Celt I have something of a poetic and musical
bent. I also spent a lot of my youth in church. My father was quite devout, and so I know the music
and texts of the Christian tradition well, having spent years in church choirs, and my childhood and
adolescence listening to liturgy and sermons. I got a scholarship to a big public school in London,
where my whole world was transformed overnight. I didn’t board, but it was a six-day week in a
very academic, totally male environment, very old school as you might say – in fact it was still
pretty Victorian. Corporal punishment was beginning to be phased out; the teaching was excellent
and I was learning Latin from 11 and Greek from 13. I was thinking of doing a degree in English
literature, but I ended up doing Classics.
I lost my Christian faith along the way (religious instruction there beat religion out of me), but
oddly, in the 1960s, Dulwich College had a quite strong bohemian culture. Maybe to get away from
school, I became interested in meditation and lots of things like that from a pretty early age, like 15
or 16. I remember reading Ouspenksy and Gurdjieff on a Christian retreat that I was taken on by the
church – I was devouring Tertium Organum on the quiet. I fell in with Pir Vilayat Khan, went to
meditation retreats, met Reshad Feild, went to Sion Chapel, and ended up at Swyre Farm, because it opened the same year I went up to Oxford. I read Classics at The Queen’s College and I lasted
about six months doing that because I was bored, already having read the texts at school. So I told
my tutor I wanted to study Persian and Arabic. This was actually a time-honoured route for
orientalists; Nicholson was a classical scholar before he studied Persian and Arabic.
I had been studying Ibn al-?Arabi and reading translations of Mowlana in my first year at Oxford,
while still doing Classics, with Stuart and Rahima Kenner at the Oxford Beshara Centre. I’d
attended the first Beshara Ibn al-?Arabi course in Radnorshire, and had been practising zikr and had
my first experience of states of being (?al). At the same time I had no doubt about my studies, I had
no idea of what I wanted to do with them.. I remember someone you know asking me to translate
the Neyname – the beginning of the Masnavi – when I was in my first year of Persian and I gave it
to him. I’ve lost it. You’ve lost it. I wouldn’t like to see it. But I had a terrific time learning Persian
and Arabic. I was in a new world, totally different from what I had grown up with, but I had the
preparation of languages under my belt already as I had also learnt German and French.
On the whole I was taught rather poorly at Oxford, I hate to say it, because in those days you didn’t
get taught so much as you learnt. Almost in spite of your lecturers. Robin (R.C.) Zaehner, for
example gave a dry-as-dust series of lectures on the early Sufis of Baghdad and Khorasan. I was
rebelling against the world-weary Orientalist attitudes I came across, which were so different from
the much more enlightened approach of scholars like Nicholson, who was by that time already my
virtual mentor – his books were on my shelves (in fact his were almost the only books on Sufism in
Blackwells in those days). They were my vade mecum. I was fortunate to be taught by one or two
very inspiring scholars: one, the wonderful Mohammad Reza Shafi’i Kadkani who has since
become one of Iran’s most celebrated contemporary poets (some of whose poems I’ve translated
with Pari Azarm Motamedi, and met 40 years on); another was the late Patricia Crone, who
delivered her radical revisionist study of the origins of Islam, which, with Michael Cook, she soon
after published as the notorious Hagarism The Making of the Islamic World.
Then in 1975 I went to Iran, which was smoldering in the last embers of the Shah’s regime. That
had a powerful effect because I visited Zoroastrian sites, much encouraged by my lifelong friend,
Khojeste Mistree, who was also a fellow student at Oxford at that time. Remarkably, when I came
back from Iran, I attended the Ratanbai Katrak lectures, which in Michaelmas 1975 were given by
the doyenne of Zoroastrian studies, Professor Mary Boyce, who happened to be talking about those
exact villages near Yazd I had just visited, which she had visited 10 years previously (published by
OUP in 1977 as A Persian stronghold of Zoroastrianism). After her final lecture I mustered up the courage to ask her to take me on to do a PhD at SOAS, London in the following September, and
happily she agreed. Professor R.C. Zaehner had just passed away, and there was only the young
postgraduate, the late Julian Baldick, teaching about Sufism (he of the subsequent Mystical Islam,
IB Tauris, 1989). So, alas I gave up on Oxford (for which one is never forgiven) – and, for the time
being on Persian and Arabic and the idea of a doctorate on Sufism – and for several years I studied
Pahlavi, Avestan and other pre-Islamic Iranian languages, and Zoroastrian religion and literature at
SOAS in London. I also studied the social anthropology of religion at Kings College London.
In that period, I also went along to Kabbalah classes with Warren Kenton and Glynn Davies, and
got myself thrown out of a Gurdjieff movements class for ‘not taking it seriously’. I was also drawn
to the forest tradition of Buddhism, to Samatha-Vipassana and Zen meditation, and to Joanna, who
is the mother of our three children. She and I married in 1979, and fortunately I got a job teaching
Religious Studies at the University of Sussex (as there were no jobs in Iranian Studies at the time). I
finished and published the doctorate and continued working in pre-Islamic Iranian Studies for two
more decades, having moved up to the University of Manchester in 1985, after Mrs Thatcher’s
Education Minister closed Religious Studies at Sussex and at several other universities too.
It wasn’t until 2000 that I was invited to do a paperback of the Masnavi for Penguin Classics. They
wanted me to do an anthology, and I said no – I want to translate the whole fish not fillet it. But
they already had Coleman Barks, and didn’t want any more than one book. After that one was
published in 2006 I went back to writing about what I knew best, Zoroastrianism, and I carried on
publishing on that subject, but I was always looking for a publisher to publish the whole of the
Masnavi and it took me several years to find one, when Iradj Bagherzade of IB Tauris kindly agreed
to take the whole project on. That was around the time I was invited up to Chisholme to give the
first of several talks on one of the long Beshara courses. I walked into the Mead Hall there, looked
up and saw old friends from Swyre Farm and Sherborne House, looking like their parents after 30
years. Sadly, Bulent had passed in the intervening years, so I never got to meet him again so long
after he had given me the Sufi name ?Alim.

Bulent Rauf very much liked the story of the Turkish poet, Yunus Emre, who went to see
Rumi and asked him about his teaching, and Rumi gave him a long explanation as to what his
work was about. Listening carefully, Yunus Emre said, ‘If I understand you rightly, basically
what you are saying is “I wrapped myself in flesh and blood and appeared as Yunus”.’ That
seems to encapsulate, or to be the starting point rather, of the Masnavi that he put his finger on in these few words. The Masnavi is full of many extended and often apparently quite
rambling stories.

Yes, that is what it looks like. The German scholar Hellmut Ritter once wrote:

Rumi’s peculiar looseness in the association of ideas, which almost resembles a flight of
thought. The relationship between the tale and the accompanying moral is also very curious.
The point in view is sometimes neither allegory nor moralizing fable, but that the tales
should simply arouse interest in the reader for what is to come, though the degree of
coherence is but slight. One expects to gather the moral from the essential point of the story.
But this is by no means always the case.

Now I think that is a harsh and a wrong reading of the Masnavi and it is so because we are misled
by what appears to be the predominant feature of the text, namely story. But I’ve done some
analysis of the text of the second book and found that the 65 stories and anecdotes occupy only
1,650 of the total 3,836 verses (44%), and the other 2,146 verses (56%) are taken up by nearly 100
different discourses, reflections and commentaries. Many people will begin reading the Masnavi
mostly for the pleasure of the stories, but they will find that there is much more going on besides.
Publishers (e.g. Penguin) might prefer an anthology, and that is why A.J. Arberry did his 1961 and
1963 books (More) Tales from the Mathnawi (in prose translation) – hence it is fixed in the popular
mind that the Masnavi is all about the ‘tales’. I’m hoping that my work might help correct that
impression.
I’ve described the experience of reading the Masnavi as ‘open heart surgery’, qualified with the
subtitle ‘The Operation of Divine Love in the Masnavi’, and this is now published. I got my come-
uppance for this just a few weeks ago, when I received a formal invitation from the Dean of the
University of Jordan asking me to referee an internal promotion to a Chair in their Cardiology
Department! They assumed that having written on ‘open heart surgery’ that I must be a cardiologist.
In my paper I described story narrative as the anaesthetic by which the divine surgeon puts the
intellect to sleep: in this state of reverie or relaxation the Masnavi acts as a heart-lung machine to
keep the reader alive. The diseased heart is then replaced by a new heart purified of selfhood, and
the story is thus the means by which this is taking place. (I never got an acknowledgement from
Jordan when I explained that my kind of cardiology was metaphorical.)
I developed this idea in my Introduction to Book 1, talking about the poetic structure of the
Masnavi, about how it is a process of transformation, at a macro level, and why the reader comes
out of it feeling different than when he or she began: it has an osmotic effect. Rumi layers his
writing – beginning a story, and then moving into telling another story within that story, and
another one within that. What is happening here has the effect of disorienting the reader, creating a
sense of dislocation from the self, and from the mind, so the intellect is befuddled. This nesting, or
layering, is one feature of the structure of his composition, and within it he introduces many voices,
moving between the high and low registers of Rumi’s range – just like the flute or ney: by blowing
harder when the neyzen (ney-player), brings the notes up an octave. This is what Rumi does, as he
changes the octave and escalates the tone, switching the reader/listener into another mode.

This is a perfect analogy with the famous story in the Masnavi of the blind men and the elephant...

Funny you should say that, though it’s not quite what I meant. But if you asked me what my
favourite story is, I might say that it is that one. It’s a remarkable story because it’s very old and
widespread across folklore internationally. But in all the versions I’ve ever found of it, it’s called
‘the story of the blind men and the elephant’, as you call it. Rumi’s story is called ‘The
disagreement about the nature and shape of the elephant’, and it is about an elephant in a darkened
room – no one is blind, they cannot see because the room is dark. I wrote an article about blindness
and the Masnavi because – in the metaphor of light, which is powerful in Sufism in general – the
blind usually get a bad deal and are treated as disabled. And I was inspired by a blind theologian I
was fortunate enough to meet shortly before he died, John Hull who had written a great book I
strongly recommend, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness (SPCK 2013).

Can we turn now to the famous opening couplets of the Masnavi, which have been referred to
as “the most captivating ever written, even in comparison to Shakespeare, and fill the heart of
the reader with sadness”. Yet people seem to love being filled with this sadness, because these
words are famous and have resonated across countries and peoples all over the world. Today
the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk is famed for his uzun, his nostalgia. What’s going on here?
And how did you find working with this voice of Rumi which has such huge strength and
sadness and possibility in it? Can you comment on the opening lines?

One reflects on what is the most beautiful music; or, what music do I find most beautiful in the
Western canon? For me, almost always, there is a degree of melancholy in it. Of course, thoroughly joyful music is uplifting, Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ in his Ninth Symphony is uplifting and
powerful. But there is a different kind of beauty in melancholy music. In Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, or
in so many composers, including Beethoven, we find the melancholic intrinsically touching.
Melancholyic music makes us sad yet we are uplifted (at least I am – in my youth a friend once
dubbed me ‘Alancholy Melon’).
Such melancholy is characteristic of so much of Persian poetry and music. It sounds melancholic,
but of course what it’s doing is pulling the heart, pulling the heart upwards – to reach beyond
sensuality to something truly tender. An example on a grand scale is the opening few minutes of
Bach’s St John Passion which, with its discordances in the woodwind is tremendously evocative of
the Passion Bach is about to unfold musically. Rumi’s Neyname, ‘The Song of the Reed’ has that
character, because it is an intimate tugging at our heart strings; it is Rumi’s invitation to come into
the Masnavi – and there are so many passages like this in it. I do find that particular passage very
moving, but it doesn’t overshadow everything else. I cannot compare it to Shakespeare: Rumi was
not a professional poet like Shakespeare, though he was indeed a consummate one – he was
essentially a spiritual teacher who found in the long form of the Masnavi a perfect platform for his
teaching.
The Neyname is not a story, it is what I’ve called the voice of the Sheikh, that initial voice of the
beginning of the Masnavi: he has just given us his Preface to the first book. In each of the books
there is a Preface in Persian or Arabic prose, and they are delivered from a sublime place, as he is
letting the revelation come into him. (Instead of a thematic title for each book, I’ve chosen some
idea or phrase from his Prefaces.) After he has finished the first Preface, he is still in a very uplifted
state, and I call that the voice of the Sheikh. It is just 35 verses, and leads straight into the long first
story. But that story lasts only a few lines before it is interrupted and transformed into something
else. What catalyzes that shift is that he introduces an analogy (Ar. mathal, P. masal, ‘example’):
these are a kind of electric pulse, almost like an injection of intellect into his story, which challenge
the reader, by introducing an anecdote or analogy to illustrate or exemplify what he’s just said.

Professor James Morris mentions on the edition of your book that Rumi’s work is “the mirror
of our innermost state” and it seems that his work is much more challenging, or that you are
delivering a much more challenging version, than is implied by his super-popularity these
days as a poet, particularly in the United States?

That is right. What Coleman Barks did was to ‘normalise’ or to de-islamicise the Masnavi and the
ghazals, to take the Islam out of it. And I can see why he wanted to do that.

By Islam, do you mean the religion or the spiritual tradition?

No, he’s not really trying to take the spirituality out, although it has changed because in taking the
Islamic aspect out of it he has turned it into a more psychological than spiritual wisdom.

It’s a bit like mindfulness and Buddhism?

Exactly so. The Masnavi has been compared to the Quran. It is said to be ‘the Quran in the heroic
Persian language’ (masnavi-ye ma?navi qor?an be zaban-e pahlavi), a saying attributed to the 15 th -
century Persian poet Jami, probably apocryphally. No poet with any sense of shame would compare
himself or any other poet to the Quran. It’s verboten, so it is ‘attributed’ to Jami.

It’s an extraordinary thing to do, considering the Quran is constantly assuring us that it’s not poetry.

That is right. This is an interesting point because Rumi’s Masnavi is full of the Quran, and yet it is
all in poetry – in fact he even translates verses of the Quran, and also examples of ?adith, into the
ramal metre so that they fit. If you remember a couple of years ago, I gave the Beshara Lecture in
London in which I explained how Quranic it is. It’s not a very popular thing to say at the moment,
as there is an unfortunate ambivalence, even antipathy, towards Islam in Europe and North America
among non-Muslims. I don’t make a big thing of it, but I would see it as similar to pretending that
Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare or Milton were not writing from within a Christian milieu. There is no
doubt that the Masnavi is constantly echoing the Quran and hadith. Some ‘Rumiphiles’ deny this,
and on air, I have had ‘discussions’ on national radio with people who refuse to accept either the
Islamic or Sufi nature of the Masnavi and view it as purely universal. They are entitled to that view,
but I am to mine too.

Even universality can be conditioned or qualified by a level of understanding. Rumi is often
thought of as being in a Christic saintly tradition in himself, developing the universality of
that tradition in an Islamic context. Have you found this to be so?

Certainly Jesus is, after Mohammed and Moses, the most mentioned of all the prophets in the
Masnavi, and he is spoken of with great feeling, as is Mary his mother also. And you could say that
there is a very strong Christian theme in the Masnavi that God is Love, that Love is God. But Rumi
is very anti-trinitarian and rejects the doctrine of incarnation. I also talked about that two years ago.
But this is part of his appeal to the West, I would say, that he talks about the embodiment or
presence, or possibility of presence, of the divine in the human heart. This is a very powerful
teaching – that the human heart is capable of such depth, of such transcendent strength. He doesn’t
use the word insan al-kamil in the Masnavi, but does talk about the ‘man of God’, and alludes to
what Christian mystical theologians call theosis – ‘becoming God’, ‘divinification’. He doesn’t go
as far as some mystics, such as Meister Eckhart or Ibn al-?Arabi, to talk about the absolute Godhead
and elevate the concept of Perfect Man to a virtual doctrine, although this is debatable. What I
would say on this subject is that for Rumi there is a universal presence in form, and that without
form there would literally be nothing, and no point. There is also the idea that all is meaning, or
spirit; but without form there would be no manifestation, and without this there is no purpose in
creation.
And also in the Yunus Emre saying of ‘wrapping oneself in flesh and blood’?
Yes indeed.
How has your own relationship with Rumi changed over the many years of doing this very intimate work?
Well, you know, it’s played havoc with my social life, because I’ve had to become a hermit and a
bit of a monomaniac. If you don’t use it every day you lose it. There has to be focus and discipline
in doing it. And I’ve not found that easy, and very solitary at times. I’ve had great fortune in the last
few years of having a lot of research sponsorship from the British Academy and then from the
Leverhulme Foundation, and my colleagues are understandably a little envious of that, having that
kind of time – six years of research leave is almost unheard of. Bizarrely, it was almost a kind of
semi-retirement, or even an experience of unemployment, working from home. I missed the
collegiality of the University and teaching students, but not the committee meetings.
Did you feel that you had Rumi’s company with you?

There was that, of course, as Mowlana’s hand seems always to be extended to the reader. I was
fortunate, however, that just over a year ago I met an American Sufi who was visiting Konya for the
Seb-i Arus last year, namely Ibrahim Gamard. I met him in the Manuscript Museum in Konya, and
though we only spent one day together, we have been in touch constantly ever since, and I have
visited him twice at his home in Marin County in California. He is not only a Mevlevi sheikh, but
also a fount of knowledge of all things to do with Mowlana, and the Masnavi in particular. Your
readers might like to look at his wonderful websites ‘Dar al-Masnavi’ ( http://www.dar-al-
masnavi.org/ and ‘Masnavi’ (http://www.masnavi.net/). His career was not in university academe,
but rather as a Doctor of Psychology for the State of California. He knows Persian and Arabic very
well, and is the author of articles and two scholarly books – one the Quatrains of Rumi, and a new
book, with Hülya Küçük, Rumi’s Son and Father of the Mawlawi: Sultan Walad and his
Understanding of Sufism.
With such companions, loneliness is banished. One can make a distinction between being alone and
being lonely. For me a lot of it was a matter of endurance, because much of the Masnavi is very
long and drawn out by modern standards. Rumi did not, it seems, have an editor who would take
one aside and say, ‘Come on, Mowlana, get to the point!’. On the positive side, this teaches great
patience and respect, as one experiences the full flow of his associative mind at work. You can see
his mind laid out before you, and sometimes he goes off into passages we might call digression for
pages and pages. My job is to translate every verse as faithfully as I can.
You said earlier that it is an inspired book. Perhaps there is a purpose in those apparent goings off which we cannot get?
There is indeed, and it’s important. I’ve tried to explain that there is a stable structure to it, that
there is a cyclicality, a cycle of seven different voices that start at the highest level of spirituality
and come down to earth with the story, and then re-ascends through analogy, dialogue, moral
discourse or homily, ecstatic discourse, and back through hiatus to a point of silence. This is the
general pattern. I’ve even drawn a diagram of that in the Introduction to my first book, showing the
cycle of voices. The smallest element of the single masnavi couplet is powerful and interesting in
this respect: its two-part structure means that it can answer itself, so each verse is in dialogue with
itself.
There is also an enormous amount of wordplay going on in the text, which is a challenge to the
translator. Unless one is very careful, one can miss all sorts of wordplays that come in the Persian –
often fiendishly difficult to render into English. My rule of thumb is that wherever there is an
opportunity to make a play on words in English, I do so, whether or not Rumi is at it at that
moment: one has to grab one’s opportunities. That can be a lot of fun. Translators do it for
themselves, and the reward of translation is the pleasure of creating something beautiful. I never
found that in any other academic work I did in pre-Islamic Iranian studies. My academic career
changed (for the better) when beauty came into the equation, exactly at the half way point twenty
years ago.
Yes, indeed. And this is only the first two books and you’ve got four more to go!
Pretty daunting, isn’t it! But I have decided that at the moment there’s nothing else I’d rather do
within Persian/Iranian studies and academe in general, so that’s okay by me. I have translated the
third book and many passages from 4, 5 and 6 as well, and I plan to try to publish one book a year
from now on. There are some wonderful passages I just couldn’t wait to get to. There is one famous
passage from Book 4 that is so beautiful I couldn’t resist spending days translating it properly, and
I’ve used it several times, ironically only at funerals. The first time, back in 2005 when my father
died, I could see no better way of dealing with my own grieving than to read this passage at his
funeral, which is about the idea that death is a waking up from the sleep of life. Then a dear friend,
Patricia Buckle died, sadly prematurely. She had been trained to turn as a Mevlevi, so I thought it
appropriate to read this passage out for her. It was a Buddhist funeral, organised by a dhamma
friend, Ajahn Candasiri, and the Buddhists fully appreciated the idea that death is an awakening and
not an oblivion.
There are many wonderful passages like this, but they may be missed by those who are just looking
for stories. When I was teaching this subject to students I provided a kind of navigational chart for
them, so they could spot where they were situated on the ocean and not get lost: it’s possible to
identify whether you’re in a story, analogy, speech, moral discourse, or an ecstasy from linguistic
features of the text. In a story or analogy, everything is in the past tense. In a discourse, they are in
the present and future. In a moral homily, there is constant reference to imperatives and texts of
admonition and challenges. In ecstatic discourse there is a constant present, of accelerated and
evanescent exclamation. Even when there is a sense of being becalmed in a vast passage, there is
the feeling of the deep oceanic swell of the Masnavi.
Rumi the poet is himself moving in the Masnavi: Books 2 and 3 are much darker than the first,
there is more madness and bewilderment, and the development of soliloquy. Rumi no longer has to
pull the reader out of the story into the text of a discourse; he just continues by making the story go
into a dramatic dialogue, where a soliloquy doubles as his own voice, the voice of Mowlana. It
makes it a dickens of a job to translate, and even more perplexing to punctuate.
If people are to get the best out of reading this work, what kind of preparation would you say
they need? What sort of frame of mind should they approach it in?
First of all, it has to be taken seriously. And that is why I kind of have a problem with what I could
call ‘Rumi Lite’. What I’ve tried to do by putting the Persian text into the publication, is to
graphically show that this is not something of the 20/21st century, not something American or
English, or modern at all. It is in some ways foreign and alien to this world of ours. I’ve indicated
this to the reader semiotically, using colour illustrations from the oldest manuscripts and miniature
paintings on the dust jackets from 500 years ago, so that they can see that this is a text from another
era and another world.
Also the challenge, because I have included everything, is that I’ve not made it easy for readers. If I
say it’s a terrific read, I mean that in another sense as well – it’s a heck of a long read, and some
people are going to fall asleep. Perhaps the volumes should come with their own bookstand as well
as a ribbon, because these heavy books are going to be dropped if the reader drops off. Rumi
occasionally chides his own audience for falling asleep while he is talking, and knows his words
lead to other states of consciousness, one of which is sleep. It is a challenging read and the only
preparation I can offer is my own Introduction, where I’ve tried to prepare the reader for the
rollercoaster that it is.
Rumi is a very kindly man and calls on you the reader, as ‘son’, ‘brother’, ‘uncle’, even ‘father’; in
Persian these words can be said euphemistically, and are not always endearments, as they
sometimes chide the reader as ‘lazybones, wake up!’. But there is also a strong connection, in that it
is always addressed to you: you, David, and You, God. Sometimes he segues directly from one
‘you’ into to the other You. The passage I will read out to you on tape will probably be the story of
the parrot. This ecstatic passage, in which he goes through all seven voices in a matter of a few
lines, starts with the parrot talking to her owner, the merchant, who is going to relate her story to the
parrots in the forests of India – and the reader is suddenly witness to her addressing God Himself.
There’s just no doubt about that, because it then turns into a kind of zikr towards the end so you can
see that he comes to a point of passing out. So in answer to your question, it is a tough read, and the
only way readers can prepare themselves is to dive in and be drowned in it.

Is there more Rumi scholarship in the United States than in England where you have been
ploughing a pretty lonely field? Are more people working on this academically in America?
In America, there are a few scholars of the older generation – like James Morris, William C.
Chittick, Carl Ernst and others. Franklin Lewis at Chicago is a bit younger than me and is the main
Rumi authority in the US academe. There are a number of others working on various aspects of
Rumi, the Mevlevi tradition and Persian Sufism in general; and more still working on Sufis in
Arabic texts and tradition. In the UK there are very few of us working on classical Persian: I am
Chair of Research at the British Institute of Persian Studies in London, where in total, in all periods
and disciplines we are still a rather small group of a few score academics. Across Europe there are a
number of scholars working on Rumi studies in France, Germany, and elsewhere; and because of
the emigration of Iranians and Afghans etc. to Europe and America there are now a good number of
mother-tongue Persian scholars, especially in the younger generation, many of whom have had very
good university educations in Iran and the West.
Many people in the West are interested in the Mevlevi dervishes and the spiritual tradition of
Rumi. Do you think your work will help open it up a bit more for them?
I would hope so. I have been to Konya three times in my life – when I was a young man, in 1973
for the 700 th anniversary of Rumi’s death, then again in 2007 for the 800 th birthday; then, as I said, I
went last year. All I can say is that Konya and the Mevlevi tradition have changed enormously in
that time. Some might say that that tradition is in decline. But last year in Konya I met the 22 nd
generation grand-daughter of Mowlana, Esin Chelebi, and I shall send her and the Mevlana Musesi
copies of my books, and will willingly go and talk and do all I can to support them. Additionally,
I’m hoping my publisher will send the books to journals like the London and New York Review of
Books, and other literary heavyweights, because I want the mainstream to review these as well, so it
doesn’t just get out to a ‘New Age’ periphery of publications.
It was the aim of the Mevlana Rumi Review to redress the lack of attention in world literature
to the works of Arabic and Persian thinkers, because people focus on Dante and Shakespeare
and Milton. Is this work adding enormously to world literature?

I would hope so. I hope that that will happen. As for myself, I shall go and talk to anyone who
wants to listen to me on this subject: I am even hoping to go back to Iran one day, and perhaps to
Afghanistan, and to Rumi’s earthly native land.