The Book of Rumi
Copyright © 2018 by Maryam Mafi
Foreword copyright © 2018 by Narguess Farzad
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.
Cover art: One of a series of paintings of birds and fruit, Wang Guochen (late 19th century) / School of Oriental and African Studies Library, University of London /
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Book design by Kathryn Sky-Peck
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ISBN: 978-1-57174-746-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on request
Printed in Canada
MAR
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Mahsima and Alexandre,
the light of my eyes and much more . . .
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
MASNAVI I
The Parrot and the Grocer
The Angel of Death
The Fly Who Thought She Was a Sailor
Merchant and Parrot
The Old Harp Player
The Sailor and the Professor
The Man Who Wanted a Tattoo
The Lion, the Wolf, and the Fox
The Deaf Man and His Sick Neighbor
Chinese and Greek Painters
The Lover Who Was Nothing
Spitting at Imam Ali
MASNAVI II
The Snake Catcher and the Thief
Jesus and the Skeleton
The King's Falcon
The Shaykh and the Tray of Sweets
The Sufi Who Lost His Donkey
The Man Who Killed His Mother
Sound of the Splash
Thorny Shrubs
Zolnoun in the Hospital
Loghman and His Master
Moses and the Shepherd
Friendship with a Bear
Two Different Birds Flying Together
The Prophet Visits a Sick Man
The Clown and the Prostitute
The Wise Madman
The Night Watchmen and the Drunk
A Thief at Hand
Four Indians in Prayer
Setting an Example
The Old Man and the Physician
Juhi at the Funeral
A Sackful of Pebbles
God Will Not Punish Me
Camel and Mouse
Shaykh on the Boat
Reprimanding a Darvish
The Tree of Eternal Life
Grapes for Four
The Duckling
MASNAVI III
Elephant Eaters
The Painted Jackal
Elephant in the Dark
The Grey Beard
The Sound of the Slap
The Love Letter
Students and Teacher
The Wise Goldsmith
The Basket Weaver
Not Mourning the Dead
Valuable Advice
Escaping the Fool
The Drummer Thief
Dogs' Shelter in Winter
Lover of Prayer
Patience
Balal's Passing
Which City Is Best?
Guest Killer Mosque
Camel and Drummer Boy
The Chickpeas
The Mosquito and the Wind
MASNAVI IV
Praying Only for Sinners
The Most Difficult Thing in the World
The Sufi and His Cheating Wife
The Tanner in the Perfume Bazaar
Jump Off the Roof
Mud Eaters
The Darvish and the Firewood Gatherer
Giving Up a Kingdom
Darvish in the Garden
Silence Is the Reply to Fools
The Large Turban
Intelligence
Leadership
Three Fish
I Am God
The Bird's Advice
Child on the Roof
The King and the Servant
Ants and Calligraphy
The Crow and the Grave
MASNAVI V
The Famished Dog
Peacock
The Ready Lover
Tears during Prayer
Charity
Majnoun
The Water Carrier's Donkey
Catching Donkeys
Fear of Hunger
Cow on a Green Island
The Zoroastrian and the Moslem
True Servitude
Love Pulls the Ear
The Muezzin Caller
The Jester and the Chess Game
Guest on a Rainy Night
MASNAVI VI
Father's Will
Poet in Aleppo
Tolerance
Camel, Bull, and Ram
Treasure in Egypt
Bibliography
FOREWORD
Philip Pullman, the Carnegie Medal winner and internationally celebrated author of novels including the trilogy His Dark Materials, has remarked that “after nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
Whatever our cultural or linguistic background, we can all claim some knowledge of the lives of others, and this knowledge has reached us through stories. These stories may have been told by an animated grandparent; maybe we heard them on the radio or encountered them during a religious-studies lesson at school, where we learned about the lives and times of saints, gods, and goddesses.
The literature and history classes that have made the longest-lasting impressions on me are those in which I was allowed a glimpse of the life story of a writer or when my teacher focused on the human stories of the period being taught, peeling away the layers to reveal something of the ordinary life or emotional experiences of the towering figures whose conquests or defeats we were studying or, more poignantly, about the ordinary lives and emotional experiences of the common people of the time. It really did not matter whether these peripheral accounts were tenuous or apocryphal, since their inclusion in the lesson made the whole episode under scrutiny more gripping and memorable.
Stories need not always refer to the great or the good or the legendary. In our own daily lives, we continually share snapshots of our social experiences with ever-expanding and overlapping circles of acquaintances. We ritualistically mark an occasion, such as a significant birthday, an anniversary, or a remembrance, by concentrating on stories that subtly and carefully bring to the fore an individual's vulnerabilities, passions, and idiosyncrasies. Like master storytellers of the past, we edit out the unnecessary infelicities and shine our light on the unforgettable characteristics and achievements we are witness to and, in the process, create yet another indelible substory, some of which may be told in years and even generations to come.
Prophets and preachers of all religions and creeds, too, have been masters of the practice and have relied on parables and maxims to communicate complex theologies to their followers. Parables of the tragedies of martyrs have drawn, and continue to draw, men and women to places of worship around the world, to shrines and town squares; such parables often comprise bits of truth side by side with bits of myth, using literary finesse to stir passions and breathe new life into common themes.
Those who hear or read these stories never seem to find the new varia
nts of old themes tedious. Perhaps there is some reassurance in the predictability of how these tales of morality inevitably conclude. Modern-day films depicting the lives of greed merchants on Wall Street, spiced up with titillating subplots, are, in essence, adaptations of ancient lessons that one cannot serve both God and money. Furthermore, almost all morality tales ascertain that “lust for the flesh and the lust of the eye” invariably lead to trouble.
Hungry for stories that give us respite from the drudgery of our lives, we now gather before the pulpit of Instagram and Facebook and YouTube to get our daily if ll of the antics of the modern deities, the 21st-century gods and goddesses and gurus who inhabit the heights of Hollywood and its tinseled replicas throughout the world.
For many communities and in many cultures, the most trustworthy narrators of irresistible tales are the poets. Poets, in their own inimitable ways, tell us about the challenges and failures of finding love and the joys of forming friendship. They warn us of the pitfalls, of the betrayals and injustices, that we always encounter along the way, yet encourage us to banish envy and the desire for revenge from our hearts. It is almost always the poets who teach us how to gauge the enormity of a loss, to grieve with dignity, and ultimately to accept mortality.
For more than eight hundred years, countless numbers of people in the Persian-speaking lands, and in recent decades many more around the world who have access to a growing number of excellent translations, have chosen Mowlana Jalal od-Din Balkhi, Rumi, as the spiritual teacher whose coruscating turn of phrase, coupled with the poignancy of candidly expressed emotion, has been a source of comfort as well as instruction.
Although the extent of academic scholarship on the philosophical and theological foundations of Rumi's order of mysticism now outweigh the poet's own writings, it is more rewarding to read Rumi's actual stories, which open the mystical portal to his world.
The stories that Rumi invents or reuses to aid in understanding the principles of Sufism are intricately woven into the warp and weft of the fabric of his teachings, yet to see them in isolation as the parables that they are, we need to painstakingly work our way through twenty-six thousand double lines of metrical verse, compiled in the six books of the Masnavi-ye Manavi (Spiritual Couplets), his magnum opus.
It is a relief and a delight to have the task completed for us by Maryam Mafi, one of the most respected, faithful, and eloquent translators of Rumi's poetry. Mafi the translator moves effortlessly between the two languages of Persian and English as she delivers the semantic meaning of the original text in English. However, Mafi the writer and close reader of the Masnavi transfers the exquisite subtleties, precise vision, and spontaneous wit of the original to the English version, thus giving life to Robert Frost's definition of poetry as “that which is lost out of verse in translation.”
Mafi's own devotion to Rumi and years of study of his works alongside scholars of the field in Iran and elsewhere, as well as her impressive track record in translation, place her in a unique position to sustain “the afterlife” of the Masnavi, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator.” In her latest translation, The Book of Rumi, Mafi has turned her attention to more than one hundred stories that she has selected from the Masnavi. These stories include well-known and popular tales such as “Angel of Death,” “Sufi and His Cheating Wife,” “Moses and the Shepherd,” “Chickpeas,” and “Chinese and Greek Painters,” as well as the less commonly quoted parables, “The Basket Weaver,” “The Mud Eater,” and “A Sackful of Pebbles.”
The Masnavi of Mowlana Rumi offers numerous edifying epistles; it is an unmatched compilation of stories in verse that doubles as an elucidation of the philosophical and theological doctrine of Islamic worship. In page after page of parables and tales, Rumi not only entertains but also guides the reader, or more accurately the listener, in making sense of the complexities of life, in obeying the authority of love, and in resolving conflicts. Throughout the book, Rumi raises unanswered as well as unanswerable questions.
The cast of most of his tales are recognizable characters whose clones inhabit stories around the globe: wise or deceptive judges, cunning or distrustful women, wily or lachrymose beggars, charlatans, gullible souls, and many talkative animals. Rumi tells of kingly deeds and the miracles of prophets; he elaborates on the mischief of rouges and catches out mercenaries. Bodily functions, disguises, deeds of heroism, mistaken identities, sexual entanglements, consequence of gluttony and hubris, and all imaginative and extravagant accounts of vices and virtues, as well as common superstitions, are thrown into the mix.
The language of the poetic narrator of the tales soars to the heights of high verse with flawless use of metaphors and intricately structured internal dialogues, then plunges into the use of puns, vernacular idioms of the time, expressions of ribaldry, and pure bawdy humor. He quotes from the best of Persian and Arabic poetry of his era and relies on his scholarly knowledge of the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed to support his arguments. Rumi is just as comfortable with the parlance of the lowlife and the rascals of the souk as he is with the rhetorical discourse of theologians at the mosque and grammarians at the madrassa.
Rumi deploys many dramatic devices to communicate with people from all walks of life. The roles that he assigns to animals, the flora and fauna, are in keeping with millennia-old traditions of storytelling in the East, where the sagacity of animals or their mischief-making are on par with human character.
No story is complete without a convincing and competent narrator, and the narrator par excellence of Rumi's stories whom we meet in the opening of Book One of the Masnavi is none other than the end-blown reed flute, whose breathy stories of separations, the pathos of exile, and the longing to be scorched by love immediately enrapture the listener. Thereafter, almost every page of the Masnavi contains a relevant or surprising story.
Mowlana Jalal od-Din, along with many of his medieval contemporaries in Iran, such as Sa'di of Shiraz and Nezami of Gandja, valued the potency of stories as the most reliable ambassadors to diffuse cultural and oral traditions across political, religious, and national boundaries.
If we were to conduct the most rudimentary survey of fables and old tales that exist around the world, we would realize quickly how closely they are linked; even fables told in far-flung lands, in languages that are endangered or only distantly related to the world's major languages, are often familiar, drawing comparison with tales we've heard since we were children. These fables not only travel from “breast to breast” and down through generations, they relocate across borders. Moreover, in the process of migration, bearing the hallmarks of their origins, they soak up many characteristics of the landscapes and societies at which they have arrived. Like the passport of a veteran traveler, the best and most enduring itinerant stories bear the stamp of each checkpoint at every cultural border crossing.
The most popular tales, whether from East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Iran, or the Arab world, or those that originate in the heart of Europe, the Americas, or Africa, all share the same themes, motifs, and didactic tones, communicating the principles of morality and the values of courage and chivalry. It is therefore tempting to believe that all fables can be traced back to a single progenitor. Can we identify the original sources and locate them in a fixed time and a place?
Several scholars of Asian and Middle Eastern fables and folklore believe that the wellspring of legendary tales such as the Thousand and One Nights, the animal fables of Kalila and Demna that are reminiscent of Aesop's Fables, and the Persian wisdom tales of Marzbānnāme, is most likely none other than the Jātaka, a Pali collection of literature from India that dates back to at least 300 BC. The Jātaka tales recount the lessons and inner wisdom that spring from the many lives of the virtuous Buddha through his incarnations in human as well as animal forms.
The setting of the Jātaka tales is Banaras, or Varanasi as it is called today. This northern Indian city is known as the “Abode of Supreme Lig
ht” and the residence of the deity Shiva, the god of destruction and re-creation. Legend has it that Shiva dug the “well of wisdom” in that city, and its water continues to carry the “light of wisdom.”
As these Indian stories began their journey west, they seem to have soaked up the colors of the wisdom/literature of the Parthians and Sasanians, and the attributes of their main characters seem to have been fused with those of the pre-Islamic Iranian legends, whose trials and tribulations inform much of the later heroic and romantic epics of the post–10th century Persianate world.
With the movement of people, the stories continued to wind their way further west and soon became infused with a body of lore from Arabic, Hebrew, Coptic, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian oral and written traditions. The resultant hybrid interrelated fables have been told throughout these regions for well over a millennium.
It is in such a culturally rich but historically turbulent region in AD 1213 that we can locate a six-year-old boy by the name of Jalāl od-Din Mohammad, living in the city of Samarkand, now in Uzbekistan. Having moved from the outskirts of Balkh, Jalāl od-Din's family, headed by the patriarch scholar and cleric Bahāoddin Valad, had made Samarkand their home, a city described as one of the most prosperous and beautiful metropolises on the eastern edges of the Perso-Islamic empire.
A century earlier, the Persian medieval geographer, Istakhri, had depicted Samarkand and its surrounding districts as “the most fruitful of all the countries of Allah.” Of the city itself, he wrote: “I know no quarter in it where if one ascends some elevated ground one does not see greenery and a pleasant place.” Istakhri recounts that he once traveled out of the city for eight days through unbroken greenery and gardens, “where every town and settlement has a fortress . . . where the best trees and fruits are a plenty, in every home are gardens, cisterns, and flowing water.”
Despite living and teaching in such paradisal surroundings, the forty-five-year-old Bahāoddin was anxiously contemplating the future of his family as ominous political clouds were darkening the relatively peaceful horizons of Khorasan and threatening the tranquility of the diverse and multifaith city and its many centers of trade and learning. After all, Samarkand was the city that boasted the foundation of first paper mills of the Islamic world, in the middle of the 8th century.