Masnavi (Spiritual Couplets)

The Masnavi-ye ma'navi — "spiritual couplets" or "couplets of inner meaning" — is Jalal al-Din Rumi's major work and one of the great poems of world literature. It runs to six books and some 25,600 couplets in Persian, written in the ramal metre that Sanai and Attar had already used for didactic Sufi poetry. The Persian tradition called it "the Qur'an in the Persian tongue", and although the phrase is hyperbole, it describes well the place it holds: for seven centuries, from Anatolia to India, it has been the bedside book of Persian- and Turkish-speaking Islamic spirituality.

It is neither a treatise nor an epic. Rumi proceeds by stories — animal fables, anecdotes of prophets and kings, crude jokes, Qur'anic episodes, popular legends — which are constantly interrupted to be commented upon, which give rise to further stories, and to which the narrator sometimes returns many verses later. The effect is that of an inexhaustible conversation in which the meaning never lies in the tale itself but in what the tale reveals when looked at from within. Rumi says it with his own image: the story is like the grain and the meaning like the flour; or, elsewhere, form is the vessel and meaning the water.

The poem opens with the famous "Song of the Reed": the reed flute laments because it was cut from the reed bed, and its music is longing for its origin. That image gives the key to the whole work: the human soul is separated from its divine source, and all its yearning, love and suffering are forms of that desire to return. The way back passes through love, which Rumi presents as the force that moves the universe; through the struggle against the ego (nafs), depicted as a hungry and cunning animal; through the guidance of a master who has already walked the path; and through a series of inner deaths in which the human being abandons what he believes himself to be in order to be reborn at a higher degree.

The work matters because of its extraordinary blend of depth and closeness. It contains a sophisticated metaphysics, indebted to the Sufi tradition and the Qur'an, but sets it out with examples from the life of a bazaar, a kitchen or a school. Alongside passages of dazzling lyricism there is humour, obscenity and scenes of great vividness. Some of its tales — the elephant in the dark, Moses and the shepherd, the merchant and the parrot — belong to the narrative heritage of the Islamic world and have spread far beyond it. And its vision of a love that transcends everything, including the boundaries between religions, explains why Rumi is today one of the most widely read poets in the world, though often in versions that simplify him.