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Masnavi (Spiritual Couplets)

Rumi

A didactic poem of some 25,600 couplets in six books, written in the ramal metre of the *masnavis* of Sanai and Attar. It opens with the lament of the reed severed from the reed-bed, image of the soul far from its origin, and moves through linked stories (the king and the handmaiden, the merchant and the parrot, the elephant in the dark, Moses and the shepherd) which the narrator interrupts to comment on in the light of the Qur'an and hadith. It follows no systematic plan: it thinks by association, retraces its steps and leaves tales unfinished. Persian tradition called it "the Qur'an in the Persian tongue" and has commented on it without pause for seven centuries.