Tales from the Masnavi

A. J Arberry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136776649
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Poetry

The Masnavi of Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273), a massive poem of some 25,000 rhyming couplets, by common consent ranks among the world's greatest masterpieces of religious literature. The material which makes up the Masnavi is divisible into two different categories: theoretical discussion of the principal themes of Sufi mystical life and doctrine, and stories of fables intended to illustrarte those themes as they arise. This selection of tales is the most accessible introduction to this giant epic for the non-perisan reader.

1

The lament of the reed-flute is a symbol of the soul’s sorrow at being parted from the Divine Beloved

LISTEN to this reed, how it makes complaint, telling a tale of separation: ‘Ever since I was cut off from my reed-bed, men and women all have lamented my bewailing. I want a breast torn asunder by severance, that I may fully declare the agony of yearning. Every one who is sundered far from his origin longs to recapture the time when he was united with it. In every company I have poured forth my lament, I have consorted alike with the miserable and the happy: each became my friend out of his own surmise, none sought to discover the secrets in my heart. My secret indeed is not remote from my lament, but eye and ear lack the light to perceive it. Body is not veiled from soul, nor soul from body, yet to no man is leave given to see the soul.’

This cry of the reed is fire, it is not wind; whoever possesses not this fire, let him be naught! It is the fire of love that has set the reed aflame; it is the surge of love that bubbles in the wine. The reed is the true companion of everyone parted from a friend: its melodies have rent the veils shrouding our hearts. Whoever saw poison and antidote in one the like of the reed? Whoever saw sympathizer and yearner in one the like of the reed? The reed tells the history of the blood-bespattered way, it tells the stories of Majnun’s hopeless passion. Only the senseless is intimate with the mysteries of this Sense; only the heedful ear can buy what the tongue retails. Untimely the days have grown in our tribulation; burning sorrows have travelled along with all our days; yet if our days have all departed, bid them be gone—it matters not; only do Thou abide, O Thou incomparably holy! Whoever is not a fish is soon satiated with His water; he who lacks his daily bread, for him the day is very long. None that is inexperienced comprehends the state of the ripe, wherefore my words must be short; and now, farewell!

2

The king and the sick servant-girl, on the redemptive power of love

THERE was a king who lived in former time, and to him belonged power both temporal and spiritual. Now by chance one day he was out riding together with his courtiers upon the chase, when on the highway he beheld a servant-girl; and his soul immediately became enslaved by her beauty—the bird of his soul fluttered within its cage, and he gave money and straightway purchased the maiden. After he had bought her and enjoyed her charms, fate would have it that the girl fell sick. Thereupon the king mustered the physicians from left and right and said to them, ‘The life of both of us is in your hands. My life indeed is a thing of no account, but she is the life of my life; I am in agony and sore wounded, she is my cure. Now whoever shall heal her who is my life shall carry off my treasure, my pearls and all my coral.’

All the physicians declared, ‘We are ready to risk our lives; we will gather our wits together and pool our intelligence. Every one of us is a Messiah sent to heal his people; the balm for every pain is in our hands.’ But in their overweening conceit they forgot to add ‘If God wills,’ so that God demonstrated to them the incapacity of Man. For all the treatments and cures they tried, her sickness only worsened and her need remained unfulfilled; the distemper reduced the girl till she was as thin as a hair, and the king’s eyes flowed with tears of blood like a veritable river.

When the king saw that the physicians were powerless to effect a cure, he ran barefoot to the mosque, hastened to the prayer-niche and drenched the sanctuary with his tears. Coming to himself again out of the deep waters of ecstasy, he loosened his tongue right purposefully to praise and petition God. ‘O Thou,’ he cried, ‘the least of whose gifts is dominion over the world, what shall I say, seeing that Thou knowest all hidden things? O Thou who art ever our refuge in time of need, behold, once again we have lost the way; yet Thou Thyself has said, “Though I know thy secret, yet for all that quickly make it manifest in thy outward act”.’

As he raised this loud cry from the midst of his soul, the sea of divine bounty began to surge. Sleep carried him away in the midst of his lamentations, and he saw in a dream an old man appeared to him saying, ‘Good news, O king! Your prayers are answered. If a stranger comes to you tomorrow, know that he comes from me; he is the clever physician indeed, and you may take what he says for truth, for he is both truthful and trustworthy. In his treatment you will behold wizardry at its supreme, and in his temper you will perceive the omnipotence of God!’

When the promised hour arrived and it was day, when the sun rose from the east burning up the stars, the king was in the belvedere all expectant to behold that which had been shown to him so mysteriously. He saw a noble and right venerable personage, a sun in splendour in the midst of shadows, who arrived from afar slender as the crescent moon, slim and unsubstantial as a very phantom; that phantasy which the king had beheld in his dream now appeared manifest in the face of the stranger. The king himself in the place of his chamberlains hastened forward to greet the stranger come to him from the unseen world. Both of them were mariners who had learned to swim, the souls of both were knit together without stitching. ‘You were my true beloved,’ the king cried, ‘not she, but in this world one work issues out of another. You are as Mohammed to me, I to you as Omar, and I will gird up my loins to serve you.’

So saying, the king opened wide his arms and took him to his breast, receiving him like love into his heart and soul; he kissed him upon the hands and brow, and enquired after his home and the journey he had made. So questioning him all the while, he drew him to seat of honour saying, ‘At last out of my patience I have found a treasure! You are a gift vouchsafed by God to fend off hardship, the meaning of the adage, Patience is the key to deliverance. Welcome to you, chosen one, the heart’s approven!’

That assembly and bountiful banquet being concluded, the king took him by the hand and led him into the harem; he recited to him the history of the sick girl and her sickness, then seated him down beside the patient. The doctor examined her colour, her pulse and her urine and listened attentively to her symptoms and the causes of her illness. Then he declared, ‘Not one of the remedies which they have applied is a true restorative, they have only served to destroy. They were utterly ignorant of her inward state: God preserve me from their concoctions!’

He perceived the nature of her pain, and her secret malady was entirely revealed to him, but he kept it hidden and did not tell the king. It was not the bile, black or yellow, which was the root of her disorder; the smell of every tinderwood becomes apparent in its smoke, and he saw from her sore sorrow that it was her heart that was sore. Her body was well enough, but she was afflicted in her heart; a sure sign of being in love is when the heart is sore—there is no sickness like heart-sickness. The lover’s infirmity stands apart from all other infirmities; love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries. So the physician said to the king, ‘Empty the house, drive away everyone, kinsfolk and strangers alike. I wish to ask this girl a few questions; let none be listening in the porticos.’

The house stood empty, not one inhabitant remaining apart from the physician and the patient. Then very gently he asked her, ‘Where is your home-town? You see, the people of every town require their own treatment. And in that town what relatives have you? With what do you have kinship and connexion? So saying he laid his hand upon her pulse, while he questioned her detail by detail about the injustice of Heaven. When a thorn darts into a man’s foot he will put his foot on to his other knee and hunt for the tip of the thorn with the point of a needle; if he cannot find it, he keeps moistening it with his lip. If a thorn in the foot is so hard to find, tell me, what of the thorn that is sticking in the heart? But since that physician was a master at plucking out thorns, he kept laying his hand on one spot after another by way of exploration. As if in conversation he went on asking the girl about her various friends, and she told the doctor all about her home, her former masters, her home-town, her environment. He listened as she told her story, all the time keeping alert to observe the beating of her pulse, knowing that when her pulse began to throb at the mention of a particular name, that person would be her heart’s desire in all the world.

First he counted over her friends in her home-town, then he passed on to name another town. ‘When you left your home-town,’ he asked her, ‘in what town did you for the most part dwell?’

She named one town, then passed on to another, without any change of colour or pulse; she enumerated one by one the masters she had served, the towns where she had lived, the houses she had lived in, the hospitality she had enjoyed. She told of town after town, house after house, and still not a vein in her quivered, her cheek did not turn pale; her pulse remained quite normal and unaffected, until the doctor asked her about Samarkand, sweet as sugar-candy. Then suddenly her pulse leaped, she blushed and went pale by turns; for it was from a certain goldsmith of Samarkand that she had been parted.

Having discovered the patient’s secret, the physician also found the source of her suffering and affliction. ‘Which quarter does he live in as you pass through the town?’ he asked. ‘Bridge-head,’ she replied, ‘and his street is Ghatafar Street.’ ‘Now I know what your illness is,’ he told her, ‘and straightaway I will demonstrate my magic art to rescue you. Be of good cheer, cast cares aside and rest secure, for I will act on you like the rain on the parched meadow. I will worry for you, so do not worry about yourself; I will be kinder to you than a hundred fathers. Only beware, tell not this secret to any one, not though the king himself make much enquiry about you. Let your heart be the grave of your secret, then you will all the sooner realize your desire.’

Thereupon he rose up and went to see the king. He informed the king of some part of the affair, and then added, ‘The best plan would be for us to fetch the man here to cure the girl’s sickness. Summon the goldsmith from that distant city; trick him with gold and fine robes.’ The king despatched two messengers to those parts, men shrewd, competent and entirely equitable. The two messengers having duly reached Samarkand in quest of the gay and mischievous goldsmith, they addressed him thus: ‘Master-goldsmith, fine craftsman and perfect in knowledge, whose quality is famous throughout all cities, behold, King So-and-so has chosen you to be his goldsmith because of your supremacy in the art. Take these fine robes and gold and silver; when you come to his city, you will be his favourite and boon-companion.’

The man, deceived by the sight of so much wealth and fine clothes, forsook his home-town and his children and set off gaily enough on the road, quite unaware that the king had designs on his life. Mounted upon an Arab steed, he galloped along happily, taking for a robe of honour what was in fact his blood-price. When he arrived, a stranger, from the road the physician at once brought him before the king. The king looked upon him with great consideration, and bade him make himself free with his treasure-house of gold.

Then the physician said to the king, ‘Mighty monarch, give the girl to this fine fellow. She will be so happy to be reunited with him that the water of their reunion will extinguish the fire of her pining.’

The king gave that moon-faced beauty to the goldsmith and joined together in wedlock that pair so eager for each other’s society. For the space of six months they were free to gratify their desire, so that the girl was restored to perfect health. Then the physician prepared a draught for the goldsmith, and as soon as he drank it he began to waste away before the girl’s very eyes. His handsome looks did not withstand his sickness, and so the girl’s soul no longer remained a victim of his deadly charms. Now that he had become ugly, hideous and hollow-cheeked, little by little her heart cooled towards him.

Love that is for the sake of a fine complexion is no true love; in the end it proves nothing but a disgrace. Would that he had been too a disgrace entirely, for then so evil a judgment would never have come upon him. Blood ran from his eyes like a river, and his good looks proved to be his deadliest enemy: the enemy of the peacock is its fine feathers, and many a king has been the victim of his own splendour. He cried, ‘I am the musk-deer for the sake of whose musk-pod that huntsman has shed my innocent blood; I am the fox of the field whose head they have cut off, springing out of ambush, all for the sake of its fur; I am the elephant struck down and slain by its keeper because of its tusks. He that has slain me on account of something other than my true self, does he not know that my blood will not sleep? Today I am the sufferer, but tomorrow it will be he, for shall the blood of one the like of me be shed in vain? Though the wall casts a long shadow, in the end that shadow returns towards the wall. This world is a mountain, and our deeds are a shout echoed back to us.’

So he spoke, and in that same moment passed below the soil. The girl for her part was cleansed of her sickness and her love; for the love of the dead is not enduring, seeing that the departed one never returns to us. But the love of the living is fresher every moment in the spirit and the sight than the bud of a flower. Choose therefore the love of that Living One who is everlasting, the divine saki whose wine outpoured increases life.

3

The greengrocer and the parrot, on the dangers of false analogy

ONCE there was a greengrocer who owned a parrot; it was a green parrot with a fine voice, an excellent talker. Perched outside on the bench, it looked after the shop and exchanged pleasantries with all the tradesmen. One day it sprang off the bench and flew away, spilling the bottles of rose-oil as it went. Its owner, coming out of the house and squatting down on the bench like a true proprietor as if he had not a care in the world, observed that the bench was all oily and his clothes covered with grease. He thereupon struck the parrot on the head, and the blow rendered the bird completely bald.

For a number of days the parrot was silent, and the greengrocer drew deep sighs of regret, plucking out his beard and saying, ‘Woe, alas, the sun of my bliss has vanished under the clouds. Would that my hand had been shattered in that moment! How could I ever have struck that sweet-tongued one on the head?’

He gave presents to every passing dervish, in the hope that he might restore the bird’s speech. Three days and three nights passed, and he was seated on the bench bewildered and miserable, in utter despair; he kept showing the bird all kinds of wonderful things, still hoping to make him speak again.

Presently there passed by a dervish clad in sackcloth and bareheaded; his head was as innocent of hair as the outside of a bowl or basin. Immediately the parrot started to talk, screeching at the dervish and saying, ‘Hullo, you there! How did you, baldpate, come to be mixed up with the bald? Did you perhaps also spill oil from a bottle?’

All the people laughed at the inference the parrot had drawn, supposing the dervish to be in the same case as himself.

The moral is, do not judge holy men’s actions by your own standard; the word shir in Persian means ‘milk’ and ‘lion’, but there the resemblance ends.

4

The Jewish king and the Christians, on the peril of consorting with cunning hypocrites

A KING once reigned in Judea, a worker of oppression, an enemy of Christ and a liquidator of Christians. It was the era of Jesus and his turn to prophesy; he was the soul of Moses, and Moses was his soul, but that squint-eyed king made division on the way of God between those two divine confederates, becoming so squint-eyed in his Jewish malice that one might well cry ‘Good Lord, preserve us!’ He slaughtered hundreds of thousands of true believers unjustly, proclaiming, ‘I am the shelter and shield of the religion of Moses.’

Now the king had a vizier, a sly and artful infidel whose craftiness was such as to tie even water into knots. ‘These Christians,’ he said, ‘are seeking to save their lives by concealing their religion from the king. Spare to slay them, for there is no profit in their slaughter. Religion has no perfu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The lament of the reed-flute
• 2 The king and the sick servant-girl
• 3 The greengrocer and the parrot
• 4 The Jewish king and the Christians
• 5 The lion and the beasts
• 6 Solomon and the Angel of Death
• 7 The merchant and the parrot
• 8 The Bedouin and his wife
• 9 The grammarian and the boatman
• 10 The man who wanted to be tattooed
• 11 The lion, the wolf and the fox
• 12 The man who said ‘It is I’
• 13 Joseph and the mirror
• 14 Harut and Marut reproved
• 15 The deaf man who visited a sick neighbour
• 16 The Greek and the Chinese artists
• 17 Muhammad and the vision of Zaid
• 18 The fire that consumed Medina
• 19 Ali and the infidel who spat in his face
• 20 The fall of Adam
• 21 Omar and the man who thought he saw the new moon
• 22 The man who stole a snake
• 23 Jesus and the dead bones
• 24 The Sufi and his unfaithful servant
• 25 The king and his falcon
• 26 The saint and the halwa
• 27 The Sufis and the dervish’s ass
• 28 The scoundrelly bankrupt and the Kurd
• 29 The ruined house
• 30 The man who killed his mother
• 31 The king and the two slaves page
• 32 The falcon and the owls
• 33 The man who tore down a wall
• 34 The man who let his thornbush grow
• 35 The baptism of God
• 36 Dhu ’l-Nun in the madhouse
• 37 Luqman’s answer
• 38 The unbelieving philosopher
• 39 The coming of Wisdom
• 40 Moses and the shepherd
• 41 The prince and the man who swallowed a snake
• 42 The blind beggar
• 43 The man and the bear
• 44 Galen and the madman
• 45 A story of Moses
• 46 The Sufi, the Fakih and the Sharif
• 47 Bayazid and the man who claimed to be the Kaaba
• 48 The man who married a harlot
• 49 The saint who feigned to be mad
• 50 The policeman and the drunkard
• 51 A vision of the Last Day
• 52 The two thieves
• 53 The Devil’s debate with Moawiya
• 54 The Mosque of Opposition
• 55 The stray camel
• 56 The old man and the doctor
• 57 Goha and the orphan
• 58 The Bedouin and the philosopher
• 59 The miracle of the needles
• 60 The miracle of the wine
• 61 The mouse and the camel
• 62 The miracle of the pearls
• 63 The Indian tree
• 64 The men who ate the elephant
• 65 The prayer that was answered
• 66 The countryman and the townsman page
• 67 The jackal that pretended to be a peacock
• 68 The birth of Moses
• 69 The snake-catcher and the frozen snake
• 70 Moses and Pharaoh
• 71 The elephant in the dark
• 72 Noah and Canaan
• 73 The striker and the stricken
• 74 The lover and the letter
• 75 David and the man who begged for food
• 76 The schoolboys who made their teacher think he was ill
• 77 The prescient goldsmith
• 78 The hermit who broke his vow
• 79 The mule and the camel
• 80 The shaikh who showed no sorrow
• 81 Buhlul and the dervish
• 82 The miracles of Daquqi
• 83 How Jesus fled from a fool
• 84 The story of the people of Saba
• 85 The prince and the slave
• 86 The miracle of the napkin
• 87 The miracles of the water-skin and of the negro who was made white
• 88 The miracles of the baby who spoke and of the eagle and the snake
• 89 The man who asked Moses to teach him the language of beasts and birds
• 90 The woman whose children died
• 91 How Hamza in old age went into battle unarmed
• 92 How Bilal died rejoicing
• 93 The Virgin Mary and the Archangel
• 94 The chamberlain of Bukhara
• 95 Satan and the tribe of Quraish
• 96 The chickpea in the pot
• 97 The foal that would not drink
• 98 The guest in the enchanted mosque page
• 99 The elements converse with the body
• 100 The gnat appeals before Solomon
• Notes