SOURCE: James Roy King, "Narrative Disjunction and Conjunction in Rumi's Mathnawi," in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall, 1989, pp. 276-86.

[In the essay below, King studies Rumi's narrative technique and asserts that "the 'meaning' of the Mathnawi cannot be separated from the narrative and the peculiar form into which it is cast."]

The Mathnawi, composed during the 13th Century by the Turco-Persian mystic/theologian Jalal ad-Din Rumi, is an enormous poem of 27,500 couplets, regarded by Muslims as second only to the Qur'an in its authority over their lives. In it, Rumi retells some two hundred stories from a wide variety of sources, interweaving them with each other, enriching them with his own searching comments. In his preface, he describes his work as made up of "strange tales and rare sayings and excellent discourses and precious indications,"¹ and at the start of the sixth and last book, he suggests that his couplets are "a Lamp in the darkness of imagination and perplexity and phantasies and doubt and suspicion" (III, 257). Later he asserts that "Every shop has a different [kind of] merchandise: the Mathnawi is the shop for [spiritual] poverty" (III, 343). (The reference to a Middle Eastern suq or pazar, with all kinds of goods displayed in seeming disarray, cannot be missed.) Repeated descriptions of this kind suggest that Rumi was fully aware of his function as a poet and storyteller whose purpose was to help the reader elevate his or her spiritual state. To this purpose the unusual narrative method he chose was uniquely suited.

Rumi was certainly not a pioneer in using stories for religious instruction. Jesus of Nazareth, whom Rumi revered profoundly and who was a wandering teacher himself, made use of similar material in his parables. In later centuries Zen Buddhist monks and Hasidic rabbis also employed the teaching tale. But in Medieval Islam there seems to have been some tendency to hold this material in contempt,² and Rumi reports considerable criticism of his poem by contemporary readers. Once a "great booby popped his head out of an ass-stable," he says, and declared the Mathnawi to be "low … it is the story of the Prophet and [consists of] imitation"; the fool delared that it lacked "[theosophical] investigation and the sublime mysteries towards which the saints make their steeds gallop"; that it did not contain "the explanation and definition of every station and stage, so that by means of the wings thereof a man of heart [a mystic] should soar" (II, 237). In response to such criticism, Rumi reminds his readers that like the Qur'an his Mathnawi has both an exterior and interior sense. Yet Rumi's critics merit some sympathy, for it still strikes us as bold—this decision of his to try to get at the profoundest and most important truths of his faith— the escape from necessitarianism, the destruction of secondary causes and the bonds of the flesh, trust in God and divine grace, the unity of human experience—through anecdotes which are often very amusing, sometimes even a bit silly. (Rumi himself describes some of his stories as donkey's heads [i.e., scarecrows] "amidst the sugar-plantation"—II, 481 n.) But like the metaphor, the tale can imply, suggest, so much, and in the hands of a great artist stories may become a highly effective vehicle for the most profound spiritual truths.

In form, the Mathnawi is unique. The frame tale—a common genre in Middle Eastern literature (witness Kalila and Dimna, Tutinama, and Thousand and One Nights)—comes to mind, but Rumi's poem does not fit, for there is no larger story into which the tale's reflections are inserted. Better, I think, to describe it as the product of an extended stream of consciousness, in which an idea from the middle or one tale suggests another story, and that story gives rise to a moral reflection or a theological question or to yet another story which takes us back finally to complete the first. Motifs from several stories are called upon to enrich each other, and the most tenuous implications of the main story are pulled and twisted about, several narratives and interpretations thoroughly interwoven with each other. The result is a multi-leveled, multi-pronged examination of some significant area of experience, from many different angles. Narrative thus becomes a kind of probe into other realities, with fingers examining this element and that, finding sometimes nothing, sometimes truths of great importance. "Whither will it [the story] flee …?" (II, 129) Rumi asks boldly—and somewhat helplessly. In another striking image he suggests making a breach in the Mathnawi, to let its waters pour out (III, 261). This suggests, among other things, the massive, fortress-like quality of the poem itself: many other works are far more approachable. Perhaps it was in an attempt to help the waters flow that Arberry excerpted the "stories" from the total text and served them up straightforwardly, in two volumes. This reductionist approach yields very clear narratives and beautifully simple morals but it seriously distorts the impact of the difficult original form.

Let us study Rumi's narrative technique by examining the story of the cow, on the surface simple enough, involving a legal judgment and some detective work, though from start to finish it spans over sixty pages in the Nicholson translation. The tale is introduced as an illustration of the injunction—so dear to mystics—that human beings must keep searching: a thought exists in the mind, an image, a goal, and the one who holds it must never falter in his attempt to unfold it fully, to explore all its implications. Everything of value was "at first a quest and a thought" (II, 81).

Once a man prayed that he might have bread without doing any work. He argued that since God had made him lazy, God should support him. Working for one's bread, he felt, was far too fatiguing. So one day, when a cow wandered into his house, he killed it for meat—very quickly, it would seem, and without making any inquiries about its owner. Rumi here pauses to ask for divine aid in discussing the different ways men glorify God, and in considering the mysteries of vengeance and mercy, and the difference between knowledge and opinion. Each issue suggests some unexpected line of reflection to the listener.

One can, for example, relate the knowledge-opinion issue to the man's over-hasty response to the cow, certain assumptions plunging the man into disaster. Or one can recall the earlier position about keeping alive the quest for truth. But this may be forcing the issue unjustifiably: there is an organic structure here that transcends the manipulating intellect. In any case, Rumi digresses now to the story of some schoolboys who, under the leadership of one clever lad, told their teacher how ill he looked. The intellectual abilities of human beings differ, Rumi notes, and even though these boys were young and inexperienced, they were able to overwhelm the imagination of an older person, their teacher, just as the Egyptian Pharoah, his mind turned by the praise of his people, came to believe that he was divine. Imagination can be highly destructive. (We may need to recall here that this long narrative began with a man who suffered from a kind of imagination-problem.) Back now to the teacher, who grew angry with his wife for her lack of sympathy and complained that he had not noticed any illness until his pupils called it to his attention. Here Rumi recalls the familiar story of Zuleika³ and how the friends she invited to enjoy fruit with her cut their hands with their fruit knives when Joseph entered the room. But they felt no pain, their sensitivities being over-borne by the beauty of the young man. Often we become so involved in a situation that we forget all about our own condition—a theme also relevant to the problem of the schoolmaster. This new motif also enables Rumi to note that the body is a garment which at some point we can forget and discard. Back briefly to the story of the schoolboys (whose unhappy mothers complain to the schoolmaster), and then on to the story of a dervish who made a vow to eat only fruit fallen from trees. Unfortunately, circumstances compelled him to break this vow. Then the dervish fell in with twenty robbers and suffered the amputation of his own hand and foot, when they were captured, before his identity was discovered. But he accepted his suffering as legitimate punishment for his breach of faith, in breaking his vow. Later, he was found weaving baskets: God restored his limbs whenever he sat down to this task, as a way of reminding the dervish that even when he died, God would bring together again the scattered parts of his personality. This bit of occasionalism further expands the possible themes of the story of the cow.

But quite a different direction is suggested by a story with which Rumi interrupts the tale of the dervish— a story about a man who asked a goldsmith for scales. I do not have a sieve, said the goldsmith. I want scales, said the man. Yes, I understand: you want to weigh some tiny filings of gold, but you will spill them (because your hand shakes), and you want a sieve— and a broom—to sweep them up. In an instant the goldsmith grasped the entire picture. This motif is not difficult to relate to the theme of the quest, but other themes can be found here too: how the mind is turned by outside influences, the harm wrought by faulty imaginings, the capacity of some individuals to grasp concepts quickly, and the problem of reading accurately the data offered us. The possible permutations of the elements of even these few stories are already enormous.

The issue of amputation (suggested by the story of the dervish) leads Rumi back again to Pharoah and (this time) his magicians, whose hands and feet Pharoah threatened to amputate because he thought their imaginations out of control. Hence Rumi passes to dreams about amputations and the nature of dreams and sleep. (Pharoah, it will be recalled, had dreams which Joseph interpreted; here is one connecting link.) Then, to illustrate a point about vision, Rumi recounts the story of a mule who kept falling down because his eyesight was clouded. Discussion of the importance of clear vision leads to speculation on the nature of human growth (the coming together of scattered particles), a concept which reminds Rumi of a skillful tailor who could make invisible seams and of a sheikh who did not weep when his sons died because, he said, he was already united to them by spiritual vision. Eventually we reach a long and complex narrative about Daquqi, a man with extraordinary visionary powers, who saved the lives of many, only to be accused of meddling. But Daquqi is urged for the good of mankind to continue his quest, a motif that will soon tie into the determination of the judge, in the cow story, to find the truth, no matter what the cost.

Now, forty-seven pages after the introduction of the story of the cow, Rumi gets back to the theme of gaining one's livelihood without work and the joy of the man who killed the cow that his prayer had been heard. There was, of course, a legal dispute and both parties went to David for a judgment, violent protests being made by the owner of the cow: How can that lazy man's prayers make my property his? What validity can his dreams about the truth of the matter have? Wrangling thus and insulting each other viciously, the two litigants approach David, who hears the case and rather hastily, it seems, subjects the defendant to a series of "loaded" legal questions. The defendant begs David to avoid appearances and seek inner truth through prayer, and David does appear eager to "connect" on some deeper level. As a result, the truth is eventually revealed to him, and he orders the owner of the cow to turn over to the lazy man all his property. Unaware of the basis of this decision, the people cry out against David, who explains that an older crime has come to light: the owner of the cow and his wife had been servants to the grand-father of the defendant, but when that family had grown destitute, they had taken everything, even murdering the grandfather and burying his head. The knife is found beneath a tree, and the owner of the cow is ordered executed with it. All men have an instinctive yearning to see justice done, says Rumi (and, we might add, an instinctive taste for irony), and those who demand justice a little too shrilly (this seems to have been an important clue for David) call attention to themselves and may get more justice than they seek.

This section concludes with a long allegorical interpretation of the story, throughout which, I believe, Rumi is not being true to his own best instincts as poet and seer. Here he abandons his technique of communicating by image/action-clusters and takes refuge in words and seriality. We are told, for example, that the claimants of the cow are the fleshly soul, which can be conquered only by the kind of insight into inner truth that David brings to the situation. But Davids are rare, and not all who pretend to have his powers do indeed possess them! Moreover, it is noted that with the slaying of the murderer the world once again became alive. Such suggestions, though they may point to one kind of meaning, seem thin and vapid by contrast with the rich messages borne along to the intuition by the intertwining narratives. In any case, some 1,100 couplets after he began the tale, Rumi brings it to a conclusion.

Throughout his poem Rumi seems to be quite aware of the problems his readers may have with it—and indeed he invites us to a kind of reader-response criticism of his work. He is conscious that many different kinds of readers may study his poem (I, 409, 419). For certain readers a hundred explanations of a particular story may prove too subtle, and others may misinterpret a story as the result of a long-drawn-out explanation (I, 264). Moreover, Rumi complains that his own narrative is too long, that his purpose has grown obscure, even that madness is overtaking him. And often he expresses distaste for the poetic process: "Let a torrent take away these rhymes and specious words!" he says; "They are skin! They are skin! Fitting only for the brains of poets! … Take this poetry and tear it up.… meanings transcend words and wind and air."⁴

It is also surprising, in the light of his own willingness to be the flute on which God plays His music (I, 35) and his conviction that he was essentially only a transcriber of material from other worlds, to see him complaining that poetry is as uncontrollable as a sling: one can never be sure in what direction the missile will shoot off or where it will hit (I, 84). Any single image may generate any number of metaphors in a given reader's mind, because we always judge by the analogy of ourselves, in terms of our own contexts.⁵ Moreover, inspiration (according to our Rumi the capacity to grasp materials from the spiritual world) may flag, for it is a fragile thing, and "it needs a very well illumined eye" to grasp the links between this world and the world of the spirit (I, 273). Little wonder that Rumi felt the need to descend to allegory from time to time.

Behind Rumi's anxiety lest his poem be misunderstood and his generally (I think) misplaced effort to offer some guidance for his readers, lies the Medieval Islamic concept of a world of images or similitudes, 'alam al-Mithal, whence streams material into the consciousness of individuals able to receive it.⁶ Presumably, some of this material is embodied in the stories Rumi tells, and it is to be distinguished from purely fanciful or made-up products of the human imagination. As Rumi observes, "Whither will it [the story] flee, since wisdom has poured [on us] from the clouds of God's bounty?" (II, 129). And elsewhere, "the troops of imagination arrive unwearied from behind the heart's curtain," streaming into our consciousness in "company after company." These pictures, which God is drawing on our minds, become the regulators of the phenomenal world. But while most people see only the outer form of these images, and take that outer form for reality, the saints are able to see beyond externals, thereby gaining knowledge about the World of Non-Existence, the world of unity. The saints thus may be described as "scouts" reaching the "watch-tower … of Nonexistence" and what they do is comparable to seeing a painting still in the painter's mind.⁷

In his discussion of the World of Similitudes, Henri Corbin emphasizes that it is an "imaginal" not an "imaginary" world, a world made up of images that have, in some important sense, absolute reality. "We are not dealing here with irreality," Corbin insists, but with a world of "autonomous forms and images" not graspable by the senses or by the intellect but by the "imaginative consciousness" or by some imaging power.⁸ Marshall Hodgson agrees: the 'alam al-Mithal is the source of visionary experiences that are in some sense "genuine," not merely subjective fancies, pictures of "ultimately valid, objective facts of life."⁹ And a Medieval Sufi describes the 'alam al-Mithal as a kind of mirror reflecting the contents of both the everyday real world (the world of bodies) and the world of spirits,¹⁰ which has already been referred to as the world of non-existence. This mirror image may also be applied to the stories which Rumi tells in the Mathnawi. The existence of this world, which is without limits of any kind, has been affirmed repeatedly by spirituales of every age and place (Rahman 415).

The concept of a "world of non-existence" back of the world of similitudes (Mathnawi I, 168-9) is critical for any attempt to grasp Rumi's views about poetic inspiration and narrative technique. It suggests that he was responding to pressures and inspiration other than the logical and the lineal. It is, ultimately, what he was trying to get at; it is both a matter of technique and content. The structure of his poem illustrates another mode of being. The world of non-existence has been described as a treasure house from which all things are created,¹¹ and it suggests fecundity and potentiality, that which continues to manifest itself. While Sir Thomas Browne referred to a very similar "place" as "the deep dark and abysm of time," Rumi turns to images of sleep, the ocean, leaves and trees (Schimmel 78, 87), music, and wine. When we see Rumi's stories and reflections against the background of this very rich concept/reality, we gain a new understanding of what he felt their significance to be and we realize that the thrust of the stories and their source is one and the same thing: if you can move along from story to story, under the guidance of the spirit, you also gain some foothold in that other world. So rich and complex lines of interpretation are opened up, and we draw back from easy allegorizing of the material, as well as from attempts to see Rumi as just a storyteller, or just a theologian-moralist.

In Rumi (and in al-Arabi before him), this combination of the spiritual/intellectual/conceptual and the physical/material, of form and content, is often symbolized by the figures of Mary and Gabriel and the story of the conception of Jesus.¹² In this great event, Gabriel may be regarded as the notional or intellectual element, the "idea" or "image" of a Jesus in the mind, the abstraction (the "word" which was "in the beginning"); Mary can then be seen as the flesh, the material being, the good soil (I, 104) without which the notion cannot be realized (the logos "became flesh and dwelt among us"). Gabriel "breathes" on Mary and Jesus is conceived. Thus it might be said that the earthly Jesus himself is the supreme product of the imagination, the finest manifestation of the 'alam al-Mithal, the supreme intermediary (Rahman 419). But in the class to which Jesus belongs we must also place certain stories, certain melodies, scents, dances, faces, the Qur'an—all instances of a very special kind of abstraction or notion being accorded physical form.

The relationship of Gabriel and Mary I have compared to the aesthetic question of the relationship of form to meaning, and Rumi is determined to do justice to both sides of the equation, as I am trying to do in talking about both the narrative of the story and its meaning. Thus Rumi speaks of the exterior journey (made up of speech and action) and the interior journey above the sky (I, 33), and he notes that "Outward acts of kindness bear witness to feelings of love in your heart" (I, 143). So we should say too that the "meaning" of the Mathnawi cannot be separated from the narrative and the peculiar form into which it is cast—stories within stories, broken up by prayers, hints, images, proverbs, ejaculations, and intricate reflections. On any given issue, light is shed from many different quarters. Neither the stories alone nor the ideas alone, nor the images alone constitute the work. The particular combination which Rumi has created exists for one purpose alone—to help the reader move within, to escape the phenomenal world, after he/she has gained the kind of strength which it is Mary's role to bring. The stories which Rumi tells are thus of immense importance; they are the very "marrow" of inward states (I, 6). They transcend the elements of which they are formed—words, sentences, episodes—just as their relationship to one another transcends the seeming illogic and confusion of their arrangement.

The problem of bringing the two worlds together engaged Rumi all his life, and his struggle with narrative seems to have been only one attempt to deal with it. Dancing interested him because he saw in it an instrument of both passage and connection, of transcendence and incarnation. The ney or flute, which accompanies the dancing, is valued for its thin, reedy sound, and it became one of Rumi's favorite images for the call of the other world. Clearly, he saw certain of his followers—particularly his beloved scribes—as yet other instruments of this process, as was the act of writing poetry—not the problem of dealing with rhyme and meter, but the more important process of reading off a script unfolding, as it were, from the other world. Thus Rumi speaks of himself, the poet, as a diver after pearls, bringing up from deep beneath the surface of the sea beautiful objects found within the rough oyster, at great risk to himself. He reminds us that Muhammad once described a particularly probing question as "boring the pearl" (I, 356).

One of the first stories Rumi tells deals with this very problem of using physical/material data to probe the spiritual world. It is the story of a king who falls in love with a beautiful woman, marries her, and then has to watch her pine away in sadness. None of his physicians can determine the cause of the woman's sickness, but a dervish offers to help. He encourages the woman to talk about her previous life in a distant city, and as she talks about places and people, he keeps his finger on her pulse, watching the beat increase as they close in on the place where lives the man she loves (I, 12-3). So spirit and body join to create a problem and point the way to its solution.

Rumi recognizes the problems created by the meddlesome intellect for those who would move between the two worlds: the intellect interferes with the flow of images from the other world (I, 83) and resists the often-peculiar (to us) form into which the other world casts its material. Allegorizing is an example of the way the intellect can misdirect. Moreover, the intellect tends to be fascinated by secondary causes—causes other than God (cf. I, 83, and II, 141) and by logical order, and over-intellectualizing often manifests itself in an over-emphasis on the importance of words. Words are thorns in the hedge of the vineyard (I, 95); old words fall short of the new meaning (II, 65); tongueless love is clearest (I, 10); eloquent speech comes as from a sea (I, 265). Through such brilliant metaphors does Rumi express his awareness of the phenomenal world (as represented by words and formulas), at the same time affirming his recognition of the even greater importance of an inner, wordless perception of contact with the realm of the imagination, which, to repeat, is reflected in the peculiar form his narrative takes.

Elsewhere the issue of the meddlesome intellect is put in terms of missing the inner reality because one has become preoccupied with form. A Bedouin takes pure water from the desert to the Caliph in Baghdad as a gift. Most of the courtiers snicker at the man's naivete, but the caliph accepts the gift solemnly and gratefully. "The followers of Form were woven [entangled] in pearls; the followers of Reality had found the Sea of Reality" (I, 148-9; cf. I, 410). And just what is the form of something? Rumi suggest sucking on a confection shaped like a loaf of bread. Will anyone believe it is bread, not candy? (I, 157). A poet's sweetheart complains to him—Why are you thinking about your rhymes now? Why are you missing my presence? (I, 95). And, Rumi advises, a child needs to be given special training in not being satisfied with purely formal, verbal formulations (I, 375). Hence, again, the fundamental importance of stories, which are marvelously vivid, earthy, and concrete, and of the way Rumi intertwines them with other stories, and with his reflections, so as to replicate the precise process through which the reader/thinker/hearer passes, as he moves from the literal story to the world of the imagination and submits himself to the influence of the world of images.

When we confront a document such as the story of the cow, we may be inclined to regret that Rumi too often took his own advice to "sell intellect and talent and buy bewilderment" (II, 65). Rumi seems to be moving in far too many directions and in ways that are most difficult (for the intellect, anyway) to follow. The ending of that story seems to shed very little light on the point that Rumi seems to have intended to illustrate. Rumi's disclaimers and apologies and expressions of distress often seem all too relevant. So we must ask if the peculiar form into which he cast his long poem or (as he might prefer to put it) into which it was cast by his inspiration is justified by the result. Does the theory about the imagination which was so critical to the tradition he worked in stand up? Is there some depth-unity to his poem or to the story of the cow which makes it a genuine work of art? Or is his poem best seen as a compilation of charming stories and one-liners and striking theological assertions? These, of course, are intellectual formulations which scarcely do justice to the workings of the imagination. Chittick, who has assembled a collection of his statements arranged by topic, and Arberry, who has given us two anthologies of his tales, seem to stand at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum, one implying that the tales get in the way of the important ideas; the other, that the concepts are less important than the stories.

Let us look again at the story of the cow. One way of approaching it would be to say that Rumi tells the story (as has already been noted) to illustrate the importance of keeping alive the search, any search, no matter how far or how deep it must go. Of course, to say this goes against my argument that in reading Rumi we are not trying to extract discursive meanings from his stories, but rather that story, form, and ideas constitute a whole which we are invited to experience. Better, therefore, to say that the idea of keeping alive the search is one possible way of putting into words part of what emerges from a series of tales which coalesced in Rumi's mind as he contemplated the story of a slain animal, and schoolboys, and a goldsmith, and Pharoah, and a dervish. But of course the problems created by an over-powerful fancy are also important and can lead us to combine the stories in quite another way. In either case, the act of putting a theme into words is not necessarily a desirable or only possible outcome of reading the stories. All that the words do is suggest that the experience we can have with these stories may be related to a larger cluster of experiences open to all of us, experiences that seem to include laziness, dependence upon grace, work, trust in God, the escape from determinism, the power of the imagination, the role of desire as a motivator, the validity of dreams and intuitions, the uncovering of past misdeeds, restitution and justice, patience in suffering, a sense of union with loved ones who are dead, heeding God's voice, contentment. But words will be of little help where participation in such experiences is lacking—particularly a real-life experience of the way these issues are interwoven.

The same point might be made about the metaphors that Rumi offers in this passage, for in their own way they bear into our minds the truths which Rumi wishes to convey, but truths inseparable from pictures—putting on asses a load suitable for horses (81); climbing the sky without a ladder (83); a cow running into a house (83); a one-winged bird falling through the sky (85); the dust of evil imagination (87); staggering as one walks a high wall—even when the wall is quite wide (88); a sick man sweating under coverlets (90); a palsied man trying to weigh gold (92); a bird flying into a snare, eyes wide open (93); a one-handed man weaving a basket (96); invisible seams (99), etc. All— and these are a mere sample of the rich texture of metaphor Rumi gives us—contribute in one way or another to our sense of the strengths and weakness of the human psyche, as it struggles to bring its ideas and dreams into some kind of fruition, a theme that is certainly relevant to the story of David and the theme of the quest.

In trying to understand the interplay of reason and imagination in the Mathnawi it may also be helpful to look at the way Rumi moves from section to section of his narrative, his use of the segue. The supposition would be that there is some logic here (after all, he is trying to get his reader to follow his narrative) but also something unexpected, since he was dealing with material from 'alam al-Mithal, with the workings of the spirit, which Jesus compared to wind blowing where it chose. For example, Rumi moves into the story of the cow with the observation that when you have at hand what you seek, the quest is over—otherwise, keep searching. He finds the entry of the cow into the lazy man's house a case of answered prayer, and yet he prays for help with his poem, as he senses the demands of God upon him. This will eventually relate to David's quest for the truth. The movement of Rumi's mind can be followed, but it is tricky. His prayer for aid leads him to a distinction between knowledge and opinion, out of which grows the story of the schoolmaster who was rendered sick by suggestion. Faulty imagination also led Pharoah to believe that he was divine, which leads him back to the schoolmaster and his anger at his wife for not being sympathetic enough. The mothers of the schoolboys visit the master, who notes that until his attention was called to it, he did not realize he was ill. Then on to the story of Zuleika's friends (another Egyptian connection), who were so entranced by Joseph's beauty that they did not realize that their hands were cut, and so to the Platonic concept of the body as a garment to be sloughed off by the soul. This process, of which I have described only a tiny section, may be linked to the free association of stream of consciousness, to make an anachronistic comparison, but Rumi obviously believed that other forces were at work.

In his study of the way we organize our world, The Order of Things, Michael Foucault discusses a suggestion of Jorge Luis Borges for a new division of the animal world—into such bizarre divisions as those belonging to the emperor; those embalmed, tame, fabulous; stray dogs; those drawn with a camelhair brush; those that have just broken the water pitcher, etc. Foucault wonders about the impossibility of such an analysis, being particularly fascinated by "the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite.…"¹³ But such groupings also suggest a kind of order by which the seeming disorder of the Mathnawi might also be thought about, a disorder-in-order which is, finally, about all that we have to grasp when we try to talk about the impact of the 'alam al-Mithal upon Rumi. How can we bring together the story of the cow rushing into the house and the friends of Zuleika, looking at their wounded hands? Daquqi rescuing the shipwrecked sailors and the insistence of the Mu'tazilites that the intellects of people are originally different? A palsied man shaking as he weighs gold and an armless dervish being supplied with hands when he weaves baskets? The pitfalls of opinion and a schoolmaster's rage at his unsympathetic wife? David's discovery of the knife beneath the tree and a bird with one wing crashing out of the sky? A fool's determination not to work and Rumi's need of inspiration?

It would be a task worthy of the imaginations of Borges or Kafka to identify (even with the help of both modern computers and the 'alam al-Mithal) all the possible ways of putting together the material Rumi has given us. He did not supply all the clues, but through the literary form in which he worked he seems to have pointed the way, to have shown how each motif of each story can resonate in so many different ways with motifs from other stories. For in some way—in many ways perhaps—the badly confused David, and the palsied man with his gold-scales, and the questing Daquqi—all towering figures who possess my imagination so powerfully—lead me by paths I'm not quite certain of to a response to the problems of one man who sought from life a "free ride" and of another whose behavior did not quite resonate appropriately with the wrong that had been done him.

Notes

1. I, 3. All references are to the three-volume translation by R. A. Nicholson originally published in 1926. London: Luzac, 1977.
2. See, for example, al-Kisai, The Tales of the Prophets, trans. W. M. Thackston, Jr. (Boston: Twayne, 1978), xiv-xv.
3. The wife of Potiphar, in the Joseph story; see Qur'an XII.
4. William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), 271.
5. See, as a case in point, "The Story of a Parrot," I, 17.
6. See Fazlur Rahman, "Dream, Imagination, and 'Alam al-Mithal," in G. von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois, The Dream and Human Societies (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1966), 409.
7. Chittick, 250-6.
8. Henry Corbin, "The Visionary Dream and Islamic Spirituality," in von Grunebaum and Caillois, 406-7.
9. Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1974), III, 43.
10. Quoted by Rahman, in von Grunebaum and Caillois, 419.
11. Annemarie Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun (London: Fine Books, 1978), 228. Prof. Schimmel offers a valuable analysis of image-patterns in Rumi in Chapter 2.
12. Ibn al-Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. R. W. J. Austin (London: SPCK, 1980), 174-179.
13. Michael Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970), xvii.