Book Review

Jalal al-Din Rumi
Masnavi (Selections)
By Farida Maleki
Publisher: Beas, India: Radha Soami Satsang Beas, 2023.
ISBN 978-81-19078-25-7

Rumi’s Masnavi is generally acknowledged as the greatest masterpiece of Persian literature. It has also been called “the pinnacle of all knowledge and experience” of Muslim mystics. Farida Maleki’s translation of selections from Rumi’s Masnavi offers readers an accessible and authentic portal into this epic treasure of spiritual teachings. Her translations are easy to read and understand, and the poetry seems to capture something of the melodious rhythm of the original. She also explains unfamiliar terms well.

A masnavi is a form of Persian rhyming poetry. It is more flexible than other poetic forms in Persian, ideal for relating extended stories in verse. Rumi began his Masnavi late in life, when his dearest disciple, Hosām al-Dīn, observed how his fellows liked to read other mystics for their beautiful teaching stories. He requested Rumi to write a book in a similar style. Rumi said he would compose it orally if Hosām would write it down. And so he began, with the famous cry of the reed flute, a symbol of the soul’s longing for its home:

The sound of the flute is fire not wind –
may those without this fire not exist!
What is caught in the flute is the fire of love.
What bubbles in the wine is the fervour of love.
The flute befriends those parted from a friend;
its melodies rend all our veils.

The structure of Rumi’s Masnavi is often baffling to modern readers. Rumi, like other Sufis, uses teaching stories or parables to convey his spiritual insights. In his Masnavi, he starts a story, then interrupts it with verses reflecting on the deeper meaning of the story. Then he starts a different story, again interrupting its plot to muse on its meaning. Even a third story may start and be interrupted, before he returns to the first one. Rumi uses all the stories and their characters flexibly to illustrate different teachings at different points. And all this mix of storytelling and teaching continues through six volumes!

For this book Maleki has made selections from this voluminous masterpiece. She assembles the pieces of a particular story to tell it in sequence. She presents the narrative of the story in prose, but keeps in verse Rumi’s frequent interspersed commentaries, which draw from the story the deeper lessons he wishes to convey.

To take an example, consider the story of the clever hare that killed a lion. The lion, the king of the forest, was tormenting all the animals with his periodic hunts for prey. Wanting to live in peace, the forest beasts proposed a system by which they would send the lion one of their number each day as his daily food. The lion objects to the proposal with arguments about the value of effort. Here, Rumi cuts through the tangled theological question about the relationship between trust in God and effort. Effort, he says, is simply the gratitude to God for the gift of hands, feet, intelligence, and all the things that make effort possible:

Your effort to thank Him for his gifts is your strength;
waiting on fate denies his gifts.
His gifts multiply with your gratitude;
fatalism removes his gifts from your hands.
Waiting on fate is like sleeping on the road;
don’t sleep till you see the gate and threshold.
If you trust in God, trust him as you strive;
sow the seed and then rely on him.

Eventually the lion accepts the proposal, and for a long time the beasts all live without fear of being hunted. Then it is the hare’s turn to be torn apart by the lion. The hare delays going to the lion, and the other animals urge him on. The hare explains, “O companions, God inspired a weakling like me with a great idea!” This gives Rumi the opening to write verse after verse about the prophets and saints who bring the message of deliverance to suffering humanity.

The hare tricks the lion into believing that another lion has come as his rival. Furious, the king of the forest immediately sets out to fight with the other lion. The hare brings the lion to a well, saying that the other lion took abode in that fortified well. When the lion looks down, he sees his reflection and, enraged, he plunges into the water to his doom. The cautionary tale of the lion serves as a backdrop to a stern warning: “O you who are cruel, you are digging a well for yourself with your own hands.” A further message is that our own negative qualities get reflected back to us:

Many flaws you see in others
are your own nature reflected in them.
In them shines forth your hypocrisy,
wickedness and jealousy.
You are striking those blows at yourself.
You are that; you are cursing yourself….
The Prophet said, “The faithful are mirrors for each other.”

Rumi wittily presents the ego as stolen, borrowed godhood:

Dishonest godhood has no hand or sleeve,
stolen godhood is heartless, soulless and blind.
The godhood given by people will be taken back
from you like a loan.
Give your borrowed godhood to God
and he will give you Godhood by union.

The hare is triumphant, but Rumi does not let the reader be carried away with the elation of victory. Instead, he urges us to fight our own mind which is “part of hell.” This is the “greater holy war.”

O kings, we have slain the outward enemy,
but the worst one remains within.
To slay that one is not the work of intelligence or wisdom;
the hare cannot subdue that inner lion.

Throughout the Masnavi, Rumi weaves the themes of divine love, longing, separation, and union with themes of how the disciple must “polish the mirror of the heart” to reflect the “light of the Beloved”:

How can I know what’s ahead or behind
if it’s not lit by my Beloved’s light?
Love wills that these words should be known,
what else but reflect can a mirror do?
Do you know why the mirror of your soul reflects nothing?
Rust has yet to be cleaned from its face.

Only by becoming dead to the false self and the world can the lover experience the Beloved as alive, as the one truly existent:

All is the Beloved and the lover is a veil,
the Beloved is alive and the lover is dead.

The Masnavi challenges the reader at every turn to look beyond form and find meaning, to go beyond the visible to the invisible. Rumi says, “If that world and the path to it were visible, no one would remain even a moment here.” God is beyond duality and therefore hidden:

By their opposites hidden things become manifest,
but without an opposite God remains concealed.
God’s light has no opposite in creation,
so you can’t find him by his opposite.

The soul is also beyond form:

A person’s image on the wall shows the form of a human being,
but what does it lack of that person’s form?
That image lacks the soul; go seek that rarely found jewel!
The sun-like soul can’t be contained in the sky;
it shines into the body from No-Place.

Rumi, for all his eloquence and mastery of image and idiom, helplessly gives up when it comes to describing the mysteries within. For example, when telling us how, upon hearing the inner melodies, dead souls come back to life in a state of ecstasy beyond words, he adds,

If I told you just a bit about those melodies,
souls would lift their heads from their tombs.
Bring your ear close for it isn’t far,
but to tell you about it is not allowed.

Everything in the Masnavi – its stories, profound mystical verses, and suggestive silences – irresistibly pull the reader into its enchanted sphere of influence. Maleki’s translation and her choice of verses make this book an inviting and illuminating introduction to Rumi’s magnificent work.