SOURCE: Hamid, Farooq. “Storytelling Techniques in the Masnavi-yi Ma'navi of Mowlana Jalal al-Din Rumi: Wayward Narrative or Logical Progression?¹” Iranian Studies 32, no. 1 (winter 1999): 27-50.

ba‘d az samā‘ gūyī k-ān shūr-hā kujā shud yā khud na-būd chizī yā būd va ān fanā shud²

Confounded, after the samā‘ you inquire, “What became of that tumult?” I say, “Either it wasn't anything or maybe it was and simply ceased to be.”

This paper shall deal with the formal aspects of the storytelling technique employed by Mowlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73 C.E.) in his Masnavī-yi Ma‘navī (henceforth Masnavī). I shall begin with the assumption that there is some kind of form to this work and shall try to investigate the nature of that form.

To the casual observer the Masnavī, as a whole, seems to have no narrative sequence with its plethora of apparently unconnected and disjointed stories. Moroever, the narrative order of a particular story may be interrupted by other stories, sermons, expositions of Qur‘anic verses, aḥādīth, stories of prophets (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’), popular Islamic lore and glosses, etc. Throughout this entire exercise Rumi's goal is to drive home various precepts of Sufism via the use of these means. He announces his linguistic aims fairly early in the narrative, as may be seen in the following verse from the most-oft quoted nay, the opening section of Book I of the Masnavī.³

har-ki ū az ham-zabānī shud judā
bī-zabān shud gar-chi dārad ṣad navā

(M, [Matn-i kāmil-i Masnavī-yi Ma‘navī, ed. Reynold A. Nicholson] I: 6, 28)

(But) whoever is parted from one who speaks his language
becomes dumb, though he have a hundred songs.

(MT, [The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí, ed. and trans. Reynold A. Nicholson] I: 6, 28)

Here we are confronted with a work which lacks a telos,⁴ and is seemingly muddled in its narrative progression, yet is considered to be one of the essential elements of the canon of classical Persian literature. The absence of an “organic” ending adds further complications to our understanding of the Masnavī as a representative of the genre to which it belongs. In this respect the reader needs to ask certain questions concerning the consistency and internal logic of the matrix of stories, and these questions will form the loci of my investigation. What I hope to demonstrate is that the form of the narrative in the Masnavī is a necessary outcome, indeed, an instrument of Rumi's didactic purpose with the use of a homiletic method.

One important but easily forgotten aspect of a mystical narrative such as the Masnavī, is that because of its very nature as a mystico-religious treatise, the discursive style and language it employs is not necessarily a drawback for the Sufis, though it may be for the common reader. For the Sufis their intimate experience of the Divine is inextricably linked to the linguistic expression of this experience in the form of poetry, epistles, homilies, tazkiras, and allegorical tales.⁵ If Rumi's own formulations are to be taken as one of the possible ways of reading the Masnavī then the following two verses from the opening section of Book VI addressed to Husam al-Din Chelebi sum it up best:

chūn zi ḥarf o ṣawt o dam yaktā shavad
ān hama bu-gzārad o daryā shavad
ḥarf-gū o ḥarf-nūsh o ḥarf-hā
har si jān gard-and andar intihā

(M, VI: 928, 71-72)

When it [the Masnavī] is made single [denuded] of words and sounds and
breaths,
it leaves all that [behind] and becomes the [spiritual] Ocean.
The speaker of the word and the hearer of the word and the word
[themselves]—
all three become spirit in the end.

(MT, VI: 261, 71-72)

Some of the questions regarding the narrative in the Masnavī which I intend to explore in this paper are as follows: 1) What is the nature of “language” in the Masnavī? 2) Where are the points of break in the stories? 3) What breaks the stories? 4) What is the role and importance of the captions preceding each story? 5) When and where do the stories resume? 6) In a discontinuous story, what do the inserted stories tell us and what is their function? 7) Do the discontinuous stories tell us more about the continuous stories? 8) Why does the narrative cease “abruptly” at the end of Book VI in the middle of a story and what does that tell the reader about the formal structure of the Masnavī?

I shall begin with a survey of the existing critical literature on the poetic and narrative strategies employed by Rumi, both in his ghazals and the Masnavī. This will help us in establishing the broader themes under the above mentioned rubric and will, in turn, allow us to pinpoint the areas of narrative and poetic techniques used by Rumi that have gone unnoticed and unexplored thus far. For the purposes of investigating the six initial queries, and to draw some meaningful conclusions about the storytelling technique employed by Rumi, I shall choose a sample story from Book VI of the Nicholson edition of the Masnavī:⁶

BLINDNESS AND INSIGHT: ON THE DIALECTIC (NOT BLIND RHETORIC) OF THE MASNAVī⁷

Most scholars of Rumi's poetry, both his ghazals and the Masnavī, have implicitly indicated the need to utilize alternate structures of knowledge or “extrinsic”⁸ approaches—as Wellek and Warren would have it—other than a strict literary stylistic analysis in order to understand how the form of a particular poem is employed by Rumi to convey his Sufi message.

The following list of authors is in no way exhaustive but represents a variety of approaches to Rumi's poetry and the Sufi philosophy contained within it. Arberry's works are descriptive and provide synopses of stories from the Masnavī;⁹ Chittick focuses on the mystical message in Rumi's works without explicitly dealing with the literary structures involved but lays the groundwork for the literary critic to examine the non-literary factors operative within Rumi's poetry;¹⁰ Dabashi's essay is written from the point of view of a sociologist/historian of philosophy who examines the problem of theodicy in a cycle of stories by Rumi.¹¹ Schimmel, as a historian of religion, employs a somewhat similar approach in her monograph on Rumi and in her numerous other articles on Rumi's philosophy and poetry.¹²

Furuzanfar in Aḥādīs-i Masnavī and Ma’ākhiz-i qiṣaṣ va tamṣīlāt-i Masnavī supplies us with extensive references to the religious content of Rumi's works;¹³ Huma'i's approach to the Masnavī puts his analysis squarely in the exegetical tradition of examining religious literature and shows that the Masnavī¹⁴ is simultaneously a literary and a religious text, though this recognition has, by and large, not led to the examination of literary aspects of the text among scholars writing in Persian.

Isti‘lami in his article titled “Dar pāsokh bi īn pursish ki āyā daftar-i shishom-i Masnavī va qiṣṣa-yi Qal‘ah-yi Zāt aṣ-Suvvar nā-tamām-ast?” deals with the formal aspects of the Masnavī by analyzing its unfinished ending. He concludes that the widely held belief about the abruptly truncated ending of the Masnavī is erroneous. His evidence is based on a story in Rumi's prose treatise Maqālāt-i Shams-i Tabrīz that shares its subject matter with the last story in the Masnavī, the story of three princes going to China to seek the princess of that land and to marry her. This story in both the works by Rumi ends at the same juncture. The khātima (epilogue) in the Masnavī manuscript Isti‘lami uses is dated three years and nine months prior to Rumi's death, which, Isti‘lami concludes, demonstrates that Rumi himself did not feel that the ending was truncated and was satisfied with where the story stood. Isti‘lami believes that the ending is logical and is based on the fact that the subject matter of the Masnavī and its internal logic drive the form of the narrative.¹⁵

Rehder's work, “The Style of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī”—an analysis of Rumi's ghazal style—is one of the few places where the author explicitly recognizes the importance, and indeed the need, for considering extra-literary factors in order to examine the poetic structures of Rumi's poetry.¹⁶ Bürgel, too, focusing on the formal aspects of Rumi's ghazal poetry while deeming form—poetic and phenomenal—as indispensable, warns the reader not to trust the form but to focus on the meaning behind it.¹⁷ Yousofi gives details of how Rumi uses his stories in the Masnavī to illustrate non-literary points.¹⁸ King's essay, “Narrative Disjunction and Conjunction in Rumi's Mathnawi,” is perhaps the closest we come to a literary analysis dealing with a cycle of stories from the Masnavī in order to establish how the formal arrangement of these stories works in conjunction with their non-literary elements.¹⁹

Each of the previously mentioned studies regarding the Masnavī adds to our understanding of the text. However, their lines of inquiry do not fit Wellek and Warren's requirements for a “literary analysis.” These scholars have used other approaches because the nature of the narrative in the Masnavī is determined by a variety of so called “extrinsic factors,” paramount among which is religion,²⁰ specifically Sufism.

One possible approach to examining the nature of the narrative in the Masnavī would be to investigate the character of the language employed. A question that comes to the fore immediately is whether the Masnavī fits into the Saussurian linguistic dichotomy of langue and parole. Although there exists a specialized language in the Masnavī in the form of the Saussurian la parole or the executive side of the language, to contend that it also points to a langue or an overarching system of language²¹ would be a gross overestimation. Though it is debatable, as we shall presently see, the langue may exist as a system of signification for Rumi and his Sufi followers, but is every reader of the Masnavī a Sufi? Obviously not; and it follows that it would be far more profitable to search for answers in areas other than the “semiotic.” Rumi throughout the narrative in the Masnavī is more interested in “meaning” than in “signification.”²² His primary motivation is to convey his Sufi message and not to call attention to his language:

ṣūrat-i zāhir fanā gardad bi-dān
‘ālam-i ma‘nī bi-mānad jāvidān

(M, II: 222, 1020)

Know that the outward form passes away,
(but) the world of reality remains forever.

(MT, II: 274, 1020)

Would the Russian Formalists' distinction between “ordinary” and “literary” language²³ be beneficial for analyzing the formal patterns of the Masnavī? The Masnavī seems to operate at both levels. It communicates through the use of “ordinary” language by making references to the outer world of phenomena, approximating what Northrop Frye has termed the “descriptive”²⁴ mode, while simultaneously narrating and describing the different inner world of noumena with the use of the “conceptual or dialectic”²⁵ mode.

By this I do not intend to impute a befuddled or illogical structure to the Masnavī, but merely to apply Frye's idea of a speculum (mirror) mediating mimetically between the form (art) and the content of the narrative (nature). Accordingly, we have to depart from the Aristotelian definition of mimesis. Instead of “art imitating nature,” what we have in the Masnavī is “art reflecting nature.”²⁶ I will try to establish this by appropriating and applying Frye's frameworks of “descriptive” and “conceptual or dialectic” modes to the narrative in the Masnavī.

Frye's comments on the use of the descriptive mode in literary compositions do shed some light on the nature of narrative in the Masnavī if we examine his remarks on the formulation of a thought—modified to keep in mind the nature of Rumi's subject matter. Frye says that perception of sense data in the descriptive mode leads to reflection which is the foremost stage when an author formulates a “thought” depicting his sensory experience like a mirror creating a reflection of an object. This entire process is mediated through the use of words, for according to Frye, all perception is potentially verbal and has its genesis in the questions generated in the author's mind, which are verbal by nature.²⁷

For Rumi the sense data are supplied by the phenomenal world around him which he views through his Sufi lens, but the created narrative, the Masnavī, is designed not to ask questions but to provide answers since the questions in Rumi's “thoughts,” at least the ones concerning noumena, have already been answered:

‘ishq rā panj o bā shish kār nīst
maqṣad-i ū juz ki jazb-i yār nīst

(M, VI: 925, 5)

Love hath naught to do with the five [senses] and the six [directions]:
its goal is only [to experience] the attraction exerted by the Beloved.

(MT, VI: 258, 5)

We may be able to apply the Aristotelian notion of mimesis, i.e. art imitating reality, in studying the narrative of the Masnavī. But in order for such an analysis to be fruitful we have to greatly broaden the definitions of art and nature by equating art to the form of the Masnavī narrative and nature to its Sufi content. In this verbal plan, put forth by Frye, content (nature, reality) is contained in the narrative form (art).²⁸ In agreement with Isti‘lami,²⁹ I would argue that the Sufi content of the Masnavī, with its subject being a single Divine reality manifesting itself in myriad forms in the realm of the outer world of phenomena, makes it necessary that the form of the narrative also be multitudinous. If Rumi's contention, that the forms of “reality” are infinite, is valid then the mimetic possibilities of this “reality” are infinite too. This would lead us to conclude that the form of the Masnavī narrative corresponds with the infinite mimetic probabilities, thereby obviating the need for the idea of the “organic unity” of a literary text. Since the narrative in the Masnavī is not driven by a generic telos, in the manner Riffaterre defines a telos, the only possible way Rumi can end the Masnavī narrative is the way he did, or else he would have had to live eternally for his project to finish.³⁰

The “literature as an organic unity” model presupposes a beginning, a middle and an end to the narrative. It follows a pattern that closely resembles human life. As Lawrence Lipking points out, despite the poet's desire to transcend death in their work, their project fails when they are faced with the realization that poetic form, too, is finite. Lipking's remark, “death is the mother of beauty and also of authors,”³¹ echoes Rumi's own reflections on the nature of human existence and its end in a section attributed to his son Sultan Baha' al-Din Valad:³²

vaqt-i raḥlat āmad va jastan zi jū
kullu shayinn hālik illā wajhahu
guftogū ākhar rasīd va ‘umr ham
muzhada k-āmad vaqt k-az tan vā raham
It is time now to depart from the stream of space,
“Everything perishes save his face.”
My conversation ended and my lifespan too,
Glad tidings came,
“It is time that your soul from your body withdrew.”

Rumi's death is a certainty, but the “organic” end of the poetic form he employs is nowhere in sight.³³

In Rumi's narrative, the questions, “I wonder, what if?” of Frye's descriptive mode turn into an answer, a simple “is.” For Rumi the perception of his sensory data, his Sufi experience and his vision of the Divine reality, simply is. He has perceived the Divine reality. Rumi's epistemological position is laid out in detail in a lengthy passage of the opening section of Book VI of the Masnavī, which addresses Husam al-Din who symbolizes the murīd. Other readers/listeners have to follow the same process if they want to be convinced of Rumi's message.

What of his act of reflection now? The narrative of the Masnavī then proceeds to reflect its author's unfailing faith with no questions involved. The Masnavī narrative, in effect, is the Sufi personality of its author speaking to the listener/reader through a very thin mask of argument that relies on rhetoric but only begrudgingly:

bā bayānī ki buvad nazdīk-tar
z-īn kināyāt-i daqīq-i mustatar

(M, VI: 925, 7)

With an eloquence that is nearer (to the understanding)
than these subtle recondite allusions.

(MT, VI: 258, 7)

The use of the “descriptive” mode in the Masnavī narrative with its hypothesis of not “what if” but its answer “is” then pairs up with the “conceptual or dialectic” mode that Frye says manifests itself in its best form in the most highly developed metaphysical systems. The narrative, as a dialectic, becomes an argument to convince the reader to reflect and perceive what the phenomena has to say about the noumena. Rumi's metaphysical “speculation” (mirroring) of his perception of the Divine reality is no verbal illusion as the Logical Positivists would have us believe:³⁴

zān-ki ānjā jumla ashiyā‘jānī ast
ma‘nī andar ma‘nī andar ma‘nī ast
hast ṣūrat sāya ma‘nī āftāb
nūr-i bī-sāya buvad andar kharāb

(M, VI: 1131, 4746-47)

Because all things there are spiritual:
'tis reality on reality on reality.
Form is the shadow, reality is the sun:
the shadowless light is (only to be found) in the ruin.

(MT, VI: 520, 4746-47)

The next problem facing Rumi is that of communicating the highly subjective answer he has found through his use of the descriptive and conceptual/dialectic modes. Should he act like other Sufis, who maintain a strict silence regarding the verbalization of their perception of the Divine reality? For Rumi such a thought would be unthinkable. He says that he has Divine grace and sanction to reveal the Truth/Reality:

bū ki fi-mā ba‘d dastūr-ī rasad
rāz-hā-yi guftanī gufta shavad
rāz juz bā rāzdān anbāz nīst
rāz andar gūsh-i munkir rāz nīst

(M, VI: 925, 6, 8)

Afterwards, maybe, permission will come (from God):
the secrets that ought to be told will be told.
The secret is partner with none but the knower of the secret;
in the sceptic's ear the secret is no secret (at all).

(MT, VI: 258, 6, 8)

To his scheme of the two modes already articulated above, Frye adds an unnamed mode, which I will call the “prophetic,’³⁵ one which reflects the personal vision of the speaker/author, exemplified in Socrates' pursuit of truth. In this mode the writer is more of a speaker and the narrative in such a mode is written down later by a “writer.” The Socratic dialogues where the speaker, Socrates, has a writer in Plato find parallels in later human history: the Gospels of John, Matthew, Mark and Luke serving as the written vehicle for the words of Jesus Christ. Scholars of the Synoptic Gospels have implicitly assumed that there is a linearity to their narrative structure and have proceeded to overlook the variance generated by the “oral” and “written” modes of communication.³⁶

In the Islamic tradition, to which Rumi belonged, there was an existing model of such a scheme. The Qur'an was communicated by the angel Gabriel to Prophet Muḥammad who recited the verses as he received the revelation. Muslims of later generations were the compilers of this text. The circumstances of the composition of Rumi's Masnavī were approximately the same; he recited the verses, which were in turn written down either by Husam al-Din Chelebi or one of Rumi's other close disciples. Within the story I will be examining shortly Rumi instructs Husam al-Din Chelebi to copy his (Rumi's) verses:

chūn nabishtī ba‘ż-ī az qiṣṣa‘-i Hilāl
dāstān-i Badr ār andar maqāl

(M, VI: 978, 1207)

Since thou hast written part of the story of the New-moon (Hilál),
(now) put into words the tale of the Full-moon.

(MT, VI: 325, 1207)

In a five-verse passage from Book II of the Masnavī (M, II: 219, 926-30) Rumi implicitly acknowledges the ongoing use of the “prophetic” mode by considering prominent Sufis like Junayd Baghdadi, Ma‘ruf Karkhi, Bayazid Bistami, Shaqiq Balkhi, and Ibrahim ibn Adham as links in that chain and he sees himself as a continuation of that link.

The reason Jami characterizes the Masnavī as “hast Qur’ān dar zabān-i Pahlavī” may not be simply that the Masnavī is a storehouse of the inner teachings of the Qur’ān for the Sufis³⁷ but, perhaps, also the similarities in the circumstances of their composition and the common verbal techniques employed by each of these texts. Rumi has already alluded to such techniques and strategies in the preface to the Masnavī.³⁸

Like Socrates, Rumi is dedicated in his pursuit of truth, though for Rumi it is enshrined in his search for knowledge of the Divine. He must pursue his goal by subordinating the aesthetic of his spoken words to his dialectical metaphysics to persuade and convince his listener/reader. For Rumi, a strategy relying entirely on the use of rhetorical argument would not convince his audience. This much Rumi informs us himself. In a manner akin to Socrates' refutation of the rhetorician Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic,³⁹ Rumi reveals his barely disguised distrust of rhetoricians and their methods in the story of the rhetorician and the boatman in Book I of the Masnavī. This story has close metaphoric parallels to the tale of Hilal. In the story of the bedouin, of which the story of the boatman and the grammarian is an allegory, the source of guidance for the bedouin (the river Tigris) is right in front of the bedouin's eyes but he goes from place to place seeking knowledge from other sources (M, I: 127-8, 2839-52). Similarly, in the story of Hilal, the Amir is unaware of his spiritual guide, Hilal, who works in the amir's stable.

Rumi must speak of the unspeakable truth of the Sufis, but the use of a non-rhetorical verbal structure will not convince his audience, and that leads to problems of communication. What is the solution? He must create and use such a poetic form that constantly and repeatedly reinforces the nature of his subject matter: the various tenets and purposes of his Sufi vision. Much like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, who use techniques of communication that rely on a moral level of persuading their readers to action and who tell them what they should do, because an appeal to the readers' reason will not be beneficial—a style termed “tropological or figurative” by Frye⁴⁰—Rumi also has to use some of the elements of that level of verbal communication. In his role as a speaker or an orator, instructing his Sufi listeners what to do in order to be proper Sufis, Rumi has to employ the techniques of an orator: antithesis, simile, allegory and, most importantly, repetition. As we shall presently see, this will have important implications for the form of the narrative in the Masnavī.

I shall now attempt to demonstrate Rumi's narrative strategy by examining a story from Book VI of the Masnavī about a pious man named Hilal. The underlying purpose of this tale is to convince his readers about what they should do in order to advance on the Sufi path. Rumi will commence the narrative with a caption highlighting the problem he is going to address. Soon he will deviate from his stated goal and will introduce a parable to emphasize his point. He may pick up the principal theme of the story at another juncture, but not before he has repeatedly driven home his point.

Rumi's scheme begins in the world of phenomena and refers to everyday occurrences and historical/religious events, which he outlines by the use of the “descriptive” mode. For him such incidents are mere masks of the noumenal world which he has perceived and which he will now reflect through the use of the “conceptual or dialectic” mode by explicating and narrating them to his listeners. Subsequently, like the speakers of metaphysically sophisticated systems such as Socrates, Jesus Christ, and Muḥammad, he will subjugate his use of rhetorical strategies—which he will still make use of—to his Sufi metaphysics and will endeavor to convince his followers of the veracity and efficacy of the Sufi message through the use of the “prophetic” mode.

I have chosen the following story from Book VI of the Nicholson edition of the Masnavī to investigate the nature of the narrative in the Masnavi. The narrative is broken down as follows:

1. The story of Hilal. Lines 1111-17.

2. A story to illustrate this point. Lines 1118-30.

3. A parable. Lines 1131-49.

4. Hilal falls ill. Lines 1150-72.

5. Prophet Muhammad comes to visit the ill man. Lines 1173-85.

6. The statement of Muhammad concerning Jesus and his faith. Lines 1186-1221.

BLINDNESS AND ELUSIVE WISDOM: THE STORY OF HILAL AND THE AMIR

Hilal was a spiritually illuminated, pious individual—we assume that he is a Sufi although Rumi does not explicitly state so—employed as a groom in the stable of a certain Amir who was also a Muslim but was not as spiritually advanced as Hilal.⁴¹

There is a lengthy caption to the story in which Hilal is compared to other prophets who had served as slaves, namely Joseph and Luqman. Joseph was known for his ability to interpret dreams and Luqman was considered one of the wisest of all human beings. Further, Joseph's eventual reversal of fortune, from being a slave to eventually becoming the ruler of those who ruled him, serves to highlight Hilal's position serving the Muslim king, who is simply called the Amir. In this story these prophets represent the intellect of the Sufi shaykh/pīr which can become manifest to the follower (murīd) only if he acknowledges that his own relative position is much lower than that of his guide. This theme in the caption will be the force propelling the narrative and will be repeated under a number of guises as the story progresses. It is important to note Rumi's use of “analepsis” and “prolepsis”⁴² in setting up his narrative. The narrative will constantly go back and forth within this story as well as during the entire Masnavī narrative.

The metaphor used for a spiritual guide is that of a mother who nourishes and tends her child and is a paragon of devotion to her progeny in the same manner as a Sufi shaykh would be to his murīd. The only being who is able to provide selfless guidance to a child is his mother. It is an inbred instinct in all children when they need protection to run towards their mothers to seek security. In a shaykh/murīd relationship the follower may not recognize the importance of his spiritual guide and he must be reminded again and again of such a guide's position. The follower should also pay the respect due to the guide. The maṣlaḥat (prudence, good reason) Rumi refers to in the caption to the story is to stress this point by making the spiritually superior Hilal work as a subordinate in the Amir's stable. The verse quoted in the caption is to illustrate this point:

dānad a‘mī ki mādar-ī dārad
līk chūnī bi-vahm dar n-ārad

(M, VI: 974)

The blind man knows that he has a mother,
but he cannot conceive what she is like

(MT, VI: 320).

The Arabic statement in the caption drives home the mother-son/wise-blind dichotomy further. It refers to a ḥadīth by a certain Abu al-Darda':

One day the Prophet was seated with the narrator when suddenly the Prophet stood up and said to Abu al-Darda', “One of the men of paradise entered from this door and exited from that. Did you see him?” Abu al-Darda' answered, “No, I did not see anyone.” To this the Prophet replied, “O Abu al-Darda'! indeed you were not (spiritually) with him.” Shortly a man with an Abyssinian visage entered from the first mentioned door. The Prophet stood up to greet him and said, “How are you, O Hilal?” to which he responded, “I am well, O Apostle of God!” The Prophet said to him, “Pray for us and forgive us.” Hilal said, “May God be pleased with you and forgive you.” Then Abu al-Darda' said, “Forgive me too, O Hilal!”⁴³

Even before we encounter the main story of Hilal, Rumi has already set about conditioning the mind of the listener/reader by using a proleptic metaphor (mother), antithesis (the verse in the caption about a blind man who has a mother but cannot see what she looks like, highlighting the antithesis between blindness and perception), and a direct ḥadīth reference. Rumi sets the tone of this story at the outset by comparing the Amir to a blind man and Hilal to the blind person's mother. But the Amir is not aware of Hilal's lofty spiritual status and is thus incapable of giving respect to him as Abu al-Darda' in the ḥadīth could not do because he was blind to the spiritual presence of the angelic Hilal.

From the very outset of the poetic narrative Rumi reiterates his message in the caption of recognizing respective spiritual positions in a shaykh/murīd relationship, abandons the main narrative and turns to admonish his reader/listener's blindness in matters spiritual. He introduces a parable about a Khwaja (learned man) and his young guest in order to illustrate the relative spiritual positions of the Amir and Hilal. In that inserted parable, upon the Khwaja's asking his age, the guest answers equivocally and is then verbally abused by the Khwaja for regressing towards his (the young guest's) mother's “cunnum” (MT, VI: 320, 1118).

This shockingly vulgar reference serves three functions: it keeps the listener/reader's attention involved by alluding to the Persian verse in the caption, it sets up the narration of the next segment of the story illustrating the danger of spiritual regression by the use of a prolepsis, and most importantly, highlights the moral focus behind the Khwaja's rebuke of the young man. The Khwaja mirrors Hilal's spiritual position and the earlier talked about wisdom of Joseph and Luqman whereas the juvenile of the parable is the spiritually young Amir. The Amir's socially superior position is turned on its head and Rumi portrays him as a babbling idiot unaware of his own spiritual status. He must go back to the source of his wisdom, his Sufi guide personified by the metaphor of “mother.”

This section is followed by a seemingly abrupt break titled “ḥikāyat dar taqrīr-i īn sukhan” (Story in exposition of the same topic) in the form of a thirteen-verse story. The sukhan of the sub-heading directs the reader/listener to the act of regression. This section acts as further reinforcement of the “blindness” theme in the caption. The moral example of this section comes from the world of phenomena but Rumi spends merely three verses on describing such events. A man asks the Amir for a horse and is told to take a certain gray horse from the prince's stable. But the man refuses to accept it, as it is restive and moves backwards (towards the phenomenal world) and not forwards (towards the world of Reality). That the Amir provides advice to the man about turning the horse's “tail towards home” (verse 1120) when he is not aware of his own shortcomings is ironic. Of more importance here is the subtle hint provided by Rumi that the Amir is indeed a Muslim and is capable of providing advice—faulty though it is—to the man asking for a horse, but is blind to his own condition, which takes us back once more to the caption of the story and the Persian verse on blindness therein. Rumi attributes the source of the Amir's blindness to his haughtiness which prevents him from accepting and respecting anyone of a lower social status: he is burdened by his nafs. Such dependence on nafs in an individual will result in his providing advice that causes spiritual retardation, not progress. (Cf. verse 1126)

In the remaining ten verses of this section we hear Rumi sermonizing about the importance of subduing the lower carnal nafs in order to succeed on the spiritual path. He tells us how to overcome one's animalistic desires and how to transform the nafs (lust) to serve the ‘aql-i sharīf (noble intellect):

chūn bi-bandī shahvat-ash rā az raghīf
sar kunad ān shahvat az ‘aql-i sharīf

(M, VI: 974, 1123)

When you bind its lust (and debar it) from the loaf,
that lust puts forth its head from (is transformed into) noble reason,

(MT, VI: 320, 1123)

In Rumi's scheme of gradation of intellects, the Prophet Muḥammad represents the ‘aql-i kull (the universal intellect); the Sufi shaykh or Hilal, the ‘aql-i sharīf (noble reason); and the Amir displays the nafs-i shāhvānī (animal self, lust). This distinction appears twice later in the story under the guise of equally appropriate metaphors. Heeding the advice of a person driven by his nafs-i shāhvānī (the Amir) will take the Sufi backwards away from Reality (and now we have another connection to the Khwaja's profane utterance; cf. verse 1117). When the Amir tells the man to bind his lust and transform it into noble reason he is conveniently forgetting that he (the Amir) exemplifies lust and the source of noble reason, Hilal, is in his vicinity, of whose presence he is ignorant. Once more it is stressed that not only is he blind to his spiritual lack, but he is also regressing on the Sufi path. According to Rumi, there are people, like the Muslim Amir, who get tangled in their nafs, continue to worry about ridding themselves of its trappings, and end up spiritually going backwards (cf. verse 1113). But the real Sufis are the ones who progress on the path of spirituality, for whom Rumi uses the metaphor of asbān-i rām (docile horses):

ḥabbazā asbān-i rām-i pīsh row
na sipas row na ḥirūnī rā girow

(M, VI: 974, 1126)

How excellent are the docile horses which go forward,
not backward, and are not given over to restiveness.

(MT, VI: 321, 1126)

Here Rumi falls back on the formula of Divine Grace or God's will (an allusion to the ḥadīth of the opening caption) and faith: two fundamental requisites for a Sufi to progress spiritually. He highlights this by the story of Moses and his long spiritual tribulations which were eventually rewarded by God when Moses traveled to the top of Mount Sinai to converse with God in person. The “Moses as spiritual guide” theme in this subsection reinforces the necessity of right spiritual guidance, while stressing the perils of being led astray by Samiri and his golden calf. Samiri as a member of the tribe of Israel is capable of leading his own people astray just as the Amir's erroneous advice will waylay the Sufi.

The journey theme taken from the Moses story carries over to the next segment and appears under the subtitle of a misl (parable). This narrative segment tells how a group of people traveling in a caravan arrive at a village and upon seeing the village gate open decide to enter it with their baggage. A voice from within the village forbids them to do so until they have left their worldly belongings outside the confines of the village. Rumi employs the metaphor of “unloading the burden” to illustrate his earlier point about getting rid of the burden of the nafs in order to successfully advance on the Sufi path. But at the same time the listener/reader is warned about the difficulties of getting rid of the burden of the world. Within this section Rumi revisits the story of Hilal and the Amir and introduces an allegory involving a bird sitting on a minaret, and focuses on how the bird appears differently to different people who have different capabilities of viewing spiritual reality. The three levels of vision are the Prophetic, which is driven by ‘aql-i kull and is the most discerning; the Sufi, driven by ‘aql-i sharīf; and lowest of all, the animal or satanic vision, driven by nafs, which focuses only on physical appearances. The nafs was only able to perceive the minaret (the bodily form) (cf. verse 1145). Since the Amir is only capable of perceiving and acting upon what was phenomenal he is unable to use other higher forms of intellect. The one illuminated by the light of God (Hilal) was able to see beyond bodily shapes and concerns:

ān manāra dīd va dar vay murgh nī
bar manāra shāhbāz-ī pur fannī
v-ān duvvum mī-dīd murgh-ī par zanī
līk mūy andar dahān-i murgh nī
v-ān-ki ū yanzur bi-nūr Allāh būd
ham zi murgh o ham zi mū āgāh būd

(M, VI: 975, 1140-43)

One (person) saw the minaret, but not the bird (perched) upon it,
(though) upon the minaret (was) a fully accomplished royal falcon;
And a second (observer) saw a bird flapping its wings,
but not the hair in the bird's mouth (beak);
But that one who was seeing by the light of God
was aware both of the bird and of the hair.

(MT, VI: 321-22, 1140-43)

But before introducing this allegory Rumi categorically tells us that though Hilal is a groom in appearance, in truth he is the spiritual leader of the Sufis:

bud Hilāl ustād-i dil jān rowshan-ī
sā‘is o banda‘-i Amīr-i Mo‘min-ī
sā‘isī kardī dar ākhūr ān ghulām
līk sulṭān-i salāṭīn banda nām

(M, VI: 975, 1135-36)

Hilāl was a spiritual adept and a man of illumined soul,
(though he was) the groom and slave of a Moslem Amīr.
The youth served as groom in the stable,
but (he was really) a king of kings and a slave (only) in name.

(MT, VI: 321, 1135-36)

and the Amir, driven by his corporeal vision, was thus ignorant of the true Reality:

ān Amīr az ḥāl-i banda bī-khabar
ki nabūd-ash juz balīsāna nazar
āb o gil mī dīd va dar vay ganj na
panj o shish mī dīd va aṣl-i panj na

(M, VI: 975, 1137-38)

The Amīr was ignorant of his slave's (real) condition,
for he had no discernment but of the sort possessed by Iblīs.
He saw the clay, but not the treasure (buried) in it:
he saw the five (senses) and the six (directions), but not the source of the
five.

(MT, VI: 321, 1137-38)

At this juncture Rumi reverts to the original story by introducing a section about Hilal's ailment. Meanwhile the Amir remains “blind” towards Hilal's physical condition. The news of Hilal's ailment reaches Prophet Muḥammad's heart. The Prophet plans to visit his spiritual adept but the Amir, blinded by his involvement in the existing world and his false sense of piety, believes that the Prophet is coming to see him. The Prophet rebukes the Amir and declares the reason for his visit:

guft-ash az bahr-i ‘itāb ān moḥtaram
man barāi‘-i dīdan-i to n-āmadam

(M, VI: 976, 1164)

The venerable (Prophet) said to him by way of rebuke,
“I have not come to visit you.”

(MT, VI: 323, 1164)

This instance in the narrative serves as a good occasion for Rumi to reiterate his earlier observation that though the Amir is a Muslim he is blind towards those who are more spiritually adept than him. Even someone like Hilal, who is involved in such a lowly task as tending the Amir's horses and dealing with their refuse, may be closer to God in spiritual terms than the Amir himself.

In this section Rumi plays on the meaning of the word ḥilāl (crescent), also referring to the name of the Sufi the Prophet was visiting. Hilal, the Sufi, represents the Sufi intellect (‘aql-i sharīf) appearing as a hilāl (crescent) waiting to go forward (unlike the Amir's animal intellect) and to spiritually grow to become the universal/prophetic intellect (‘aql-i kull) represented by Muḥammad in the metaphor of māh or badr (full moon) (this metaphoric duo appears again in the next section):

pas bi-guft-ash k-ān hilāl-i ‘arsh kū
ham-cho mahtāb az tavāżu‘farsh kū

(M, VI: 976, 1167)

Then he (the Prophet) said to him, “Where is that New-moon (hilāl) of the
highest heaven?
Where is he that in his humility is spread as moonbeams (like a carpet on
the ground)?—

(MT, VI: 323, 1167)

The next section recounts the Prophet's visit to the Amir's stable in order to ask about Hilal's welfare. Hilal senses the prophetic smell and comes crawling through the refuse in the stable to greet the Prophet. Rumi uses the symbol of a shīr (lion) to describe Hilal and focuses on that animal's ability to sense its kin through the olfactory faculty. Through his focus on the faculty of smell Rumi emphasizes the Sufi's ability to distinguish his spiritual kin from others. He drives home his prophet (Prophet Muḥammad)/mystic (Hilal) dichotomy by providing a secondary reference to the story of Jacob and Joseph. Here the implicit reference to Joseph's shirt and its link with the olfactory faculty ought not to escape the attention of the reader/listener. These two prophetic figures serve as symbolic substitutes for the Prophet and Hilal. Once again, the reader/listener is redirected to the caption of the story where Hilal is likened to Joseph.

The focus now shifts to the phenomenon of mu‘jiza (miracle).⁴⁴ The Amir required a miraculous visit from the Prophet to be convinced of his own spiritual state. Hilal has faith and hence does not require miracles; they are reserved for those who dwell in the realm of phenomena, who are driven by their inferior intellect, and who thus require this intellect to be subjugated by the spiritual force of prophetic miracles:

mūjib-i īmān na-bāshad mu‘jizāt
būy-i jinsiyyat kunad jazb-i ṣifāt
mu‘jizāt az bahr-i qahr-i dushman ast
būy-i jinsiyyat pay-i dil burdan ast
qahr gardad dushman ammā dūst nī
dūst kay gardad bi-basta gardan-ī

(M, VI: 977, 1176-78)

Miracles are not the cause of religious faith;
'tis the scent of homogeneity that attracts (to itself) qualities (of the same
kind).
Miracles are (wrought) for the purpose of subjugating the foe:
the scent of homogeneity is (only) for the winning of hearts.
A foe is subjugated, but not a friend:
how should a friend have his neck bound?

(MT, VI: 324, 1176-78)

This section presents the resolution of the low spiritual state of the Amir by the intercession of a prophetic miracle that helps lift the veil of blindness woven by the animal intellect. Because the Amir is a Muslim, his affairs have to be resolved in the narrative if they are to be of any value in providing a moral model of action to other Sufis. Rumi having accomplished this task, the listener/reader would assume that the action in the narrative has achieved some form of resolution and Rumi will now focus on something related to this.

As the story is about Hilal and not about the Amir (the opening caption will tell us as much), the more central problem of the condition and state of the intermediate level Sufi intellect, ‘aql-i sharīf, represented by Hilal still remains. Through his narration of the story of the Amir, Rumi has managed to provide us with a resolution of the problems associated with the animal self. Now he must tackle the next higher level of intellect he had defined in his scheme (the Sufi intellect). Rumi resolves this issue by providing the listener/reader with a parable about Jesus Christ.

The Amir needed the intervention of an active prophetic miracle to convince him of his low spiritual state. But if Hilal is more spiritually advanced than the Amir, why does he need to be convinced by the use of the same strategy? The answer lies in their respective spiritual conditions. Hilal's more spiritually advanced intellect dictates that he be convinced by an indirect allusion to an allegory about different spiritual positions. This Rumi accomplishes by providing a story illustrating the relative spiritual merits of Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muḥammad and their ability to perform miracles. Rumi makes the distinction between the two prophets by asserting that Jesus was merely able to walk on water while Prophet Muḥammad went farther when he took to the air in his mi‘rāj sojourn to meet God. Prophet Muḥammad's spiritual status is beyond this world—even beyond Jesus'—and his intellect is truly universal, and perfect, as he has no need for water, an earthly, phenomenal matter:

gūyad Aḥmad gar yaqīn-ash afzūn budī
khud havāy-ash markab o ma'mūn budī
ham-cho man ki bar havā rākib shudam
dar shab-i mi‘rāj mustaṣḥab shudam

(M, VI: 977, 1187-88)

Aḥmad (Mohammad) says, “Had (his) faith been greater,
even the air would have carried him safely,
Like me, who rode upon the air
on the night of Ascension and sought communion (with God).”

(MT, VI: 324, 1187-88)

Here Hilal is depicted as still being preoccupied by his newly-realized high spiritual status and throughout his dialogue with the Prophet keeps asking how and why such a low person (himself) could be made a spiritual leader and dispenser of Sufi knowledge. Rumi puts the answer to Hilal's queries into the Prophet Muḥammad's mouth, one which equates Hilal's position to that of Jesus Christ:

tā zi chūnī ghusl n-ārī to tamām
to bar-īn muṣḥaf ma-nih kaff, ay ghulām!
to marā gūyi ki az bahr-i savāb
ghusl nā-karda ma-row dar ḥawż-i āb
az birūn-i ḥawż ghayr-i khāk nīst
har ki ū dar ḥawż n-āyad pāk nīst

(M, VI: 978, 1195, 1197-98)

Until thou wash thyself entirely clean of “how-ness,”
do not put thy hand on this (Holy) Book, O youth.
You say to me, “For the sake of the (Divine) reward,
do not go into the water-tank without having washed”;
(But) outside of the tank there is nothing but earth:
no one who does not enter the water is clean.

(MT, VI: 325, 1195, 1197-98)

In order to be worthy of Divine Grace, Hilal, like Jesus, must rid himself of his preoccupation with the how and why of the world. These questions relate to the phenomenal world, and the noumenal is only apparent to those who have left their worldly concerns behind.

Having finished his exposition of the story of Hilal by providing him with a mode of spiritually appropriate action through the use of metaphor, antithesis, and repetition, Rumi now turns to address Husam al-Din in the final segment of this part of the Masnavī narrative. Here he summarizes and reiterates the situations of the Amir and Hilal in order to provide a normative course of action for his own disciples:

har do chūn dar bu‘d o parda mānda-and
yā siyāh rū yā fasurda mānda-and

(M, VI: 978, 1206)

Inasmuch as both (of them) have remained far (from the Sun) and veiled
(from it),
they have remained either black-faced (like night) or cold (like the bat).

(MT, VI: 325, 1206)

By providing the story of the incomplete and faulty efforts of Hilal and the Amir on the Sufi path Rumi hopes to keep other Sufis from falling into the same spiritually problematic situation. But he absolves Hilal of absolute blame because he is progressing on the path, unlike the Amir who regresses:

ān Hilāl az nuqṣ dar bāṭin bar-īst
ān bi-zāhir nuqṣ tadrīj āvar-īst

(M, VI: 978, 1209)

The new moon is inwardly free from imperfection:
its apparent imperfection is (due to its) increasing gradually.

(MT, VI: 325, 1209)

Rumi now proceeds to highlight the characteristics of an ideal Sufi shaykh and his murīd. He directly addresses his followers, ay mustafīd (O seeker of instruction) (cf. verse 1214). The ideal Sufi adept grows gradually in his perception of the Divine Reality, just as the Sufi intellect (‘aql-i sharīf) grows to become the universal intellect (‘aql-i kull) that rests squarely in the domain of prophets. The story comes full circle with a reference to the necessity of God's grace in the intellectual progress for a Sufi, echoing the ḥadīth of the opening caption. For Rumi, this progress is gradual, for even in other forms of the phenomenal world we witness a gradual coming to fruition of the innate characteristics of material things such as plants, animals, and celestial bodies.

CONCLUSION

Through the preceding analysis of the story of Hilal from the Masnavī we see Rumi employing all three modes of verbal communication that Frye outlines: the descriptive, the dialectical, and the prophetic. Most prominent of the three modes in the Masnavī narrative is the prophetic mode, with its use of repetition, metaphor, and antithesis.

The opening caption of the story is a prolepsis that outlines what is to appear later, whereas the subsequent subheadings make use of both prolepsis and analepsis, ordering the narrative in a circular manner. The breaks in the story occur when Rumi feels the need to stress his position, and as we have seen he is not averse to bringing in allegory, ḥadīth, Qur'anic verses, etc., as long as they serve his didactic goal. Repetition for him is a necessary tool. Within each subsection the main narrative resumes when Rumi feels that he has provided enough analogical material to convince his reader/listener. The main story either is thematically interlinked with the subsections or makes use of allegory to further its narrative progress.

The task of explicating the Masnavī may be made easier if we were to assign correspondences between Frye's three modes and the three levels of intellects Rumi talks about. In this plan, the descriptive mode is equated to the animal intellect (nafs); the dialectic mode to noble reason (‘aql-i sharīf); and the prophetic mode, the highest and most profound, to the universal intellect (‘aql-i kull). This design of verbal communication appears to be an inherent feature of the Masnavī. Verbal communication in the dialectic mode retains the ability to transcend to the prophetic mode if the metaphysical system of the speaker/writer combines the techniques of the dialectical mode with his vision of the Truth or Reality. In Ibn Sina's terms, the prophetic soul has an inherent ability to receive true knowledge, whereas the non-prophetic soul can receive it only accidentally.⁴⁵ The narrative in the Masnavī works in a similar manner, challenging the reader interested in its message to constantly go beyond the descriptive and the dialectical modes in order to reach the prophetic mode of understanding. It is not without reason that Rumi himself uses the metaphor of a nardbān (ladder) to describe the Masnavī.

ba‘d azīn bārīk kh(v)āhad shud sukhan
kam kun ātash hīzum-ash afzūn ma-kun

(M, VI: 928, 82)

The discourse, (if continued) after this (point), will become subtle:
diminish the fire, do not put more firewood on it.

(MT, VI: 262, 82)

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Middle East Literature Seminar held at Washington University in St. Louis, March 27-29, 1998. I would like to thank Drs. William L. Hanaway, Richard Davis, Th. Emil Homerin, Zayn Kassam, and James R. Russell for providing critical feedback enabling me to further clarify the salient points of my initial presentation.

2. Jalal al-Din Rumi, Dīvān-i kāmil-i Shams-i Tabrīzī, ed. Badi‘ al-Zaman Furuzanfar, comp. M. Darvish, 9th printing, 1370/1991 (Tehran: Intisharat-i Javidan-i ‘Ilmi, 1346/1967): 337, ghazal no. 844, verse no. 1.

3. All verses are quoted from the edition of the Masnavī titled Matn-i kāmil-i Masnavī-yi Ma‘navī, ed. Reynold A. Nicholson, comp. Mehdi Azaryazdi (Khurramshahi) (Tehran: Intisharat-i Pizhohish, 1374/1995), henceforth M, followed by book, page, and verse numbers. All translations are Nicholson's from The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí, ed. and trans. Reynold A. Nicholson, with commentary, 8 vols. (Lahore: Islamic Book Service, 1989), henceforth MT, with book, page, and verse numbers, except for the two verses on p. 15, note 30, which are mine.

4. Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 131-2, where telos is defined as “the limited options for and restrictive means towards the denouement of a plot allowed by the narrative given and by the genre to which the narrative belongs.” The oldest definition of telos occurs in the works of Aristotle, e.g. in his Metaphysics and Ethics. In his Metaphysics, 994b9-13 telos is described in the following manner: “The final cause is a telos, and that sort of telos which is not for the sake of something else, but for whose sake everything else is; so that if there is to be a last term of this sort, the process will not be infinite; but if there is no such term, there will be no final cause.” The translation of this section of Metaphysics is given in Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 332.

5. Fatemeh Keshavarz in her recently published work on Rumi's ghazal poetry titled Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 9, argues that mystical poetry “… is an active part of the [mystical] experience, the incomprehensible rendered comprehensive through poetic transformation. In this respect, poetry with all its elements, is not the key to a mystical truth, it is the mystical truth in the guise of a linguistic message …”

6. Unless another story from the six-volume Masnavī is explicitly related to the one I have chosen, I shall refrain from interlinking this story and various others to one another, as other critics writing in English such as A. J. Arberry and John Renard in his All the King's Falcons: Rumi on Prophets and Revelation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) have done an admirable job. Suffice it to mention that enough interlinkages among the stories of the Masnavī exist to fit an ocean in a jar (a rather shameless borrowing of the title of ‘Abd al-Husain Zarrinkub's work on the Masnavī, Baḥr dar Kūza: naqd va tafsīr-i qiṣṣa-hā va tamsīlāt-i Masnavī [Tehran: Intisharat-i ‘Ilmi, 1368/1989]).

7. This sub-heading is a reworking of the title of Paul De Man's work, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 7 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), wherein De Man reevaluates the works of key literary critics of late 19th and 20th centuries. Blindness as a metaphor is one of the central features of Rumi's story of Hilal.

8. See Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), 73-135, for the five most common types of extra-literary elements (biographical, psychological, social, borrowings from other arts, infusion of ideas or philosophies) influencing literary analysis that Wellek and Warren believe are not helpful in establishing literary criticism as a system of knowledge.

9. Arthur J. Arberry, Tales from the Mathnavi (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961) and More Tales from the Mathnavi (London, n.p., 1963).

10. William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983).

11. Hamid Dabashi, “Rūmī and the Problems of Theodicy: Moral Imagination and Narrative Discourse in a Story of the Masnavī,” in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rūmī, ed. Amin Banani et al., Proceedings of the 11th Giorgio Levi Della Vida Conference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 112-35.

12. Some examples are The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalāloddīn Rūmī (London and The Hague: East-West Publications, 1978); “Maulānā Jalāluddīn Rūmī's Story on Prayer (Mathawi III 189),” in Yádnáme-ye Jan Rypka, ed. Jirí Becka (Prague: Academia Publishing House, 1967), 125-31; and “Mystical Poetry in Islam: The Case of Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi,” in Religion and Literature 20, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 67-80.

13. Badi‘al-Zaman Furuzanfar, Aḥādīs-i Masnavī, 3d ed., 1361/1982, Amir Kabir (Tehran: Intisharat-i Danishgah-i Tehran, 1334/1955); and Ma’ākhiz-i qiṣaṣ va tamsīlāt-i Masnavī, 2d ed. (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1347/1968).

14. Jalal al-Din Huma‘i, Tafsīr-i Masnavī-yi Mowlavī: Dāstān-i Qal‘ah-yi Zāt aṣ-Suvvar yā Dizh-i Hūsh Rubā (Tehran: Intisharat-i Danishgah-i Tehran, 1349/1970).

15. Muhammad Isti‘lami, “Dar pāsokh bi-īn pursish ki āyā daftar-i shishom-i Masnavī va qiṣṣa-yi Qal‘ah-yi Zāt aṣ-Suvvar na-tamām-ast?” in Irān Shenāsī 1, no. 3 (1368/1989): 513, note 1. Prof. Isti‘lami has prepared a new edition of the Masnavī based on a variant manuscript of the text which has fifteen verses in Book VI different from those in Nicholson's edition. His recently published edition is, Masnavī, ed. Muhammad Isti‘lami. 6 vols. (Tehran: Intisharat-i Zavvar, 1375/1996).

16. Robert Rehder, “The Style of Jalal al-Dīn Rūmī,” in The Scholar and the Saint: al-Bīrūnī and Rūmī, ed. Peter Chelkowski (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 275-85.

17. J. Christoph Bürgel, “‘Speech is a Ship and Meaning the Sea’: Some Formal Aspects in the Ghazal Poetry of Rūmī,” in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rūmī, ed. Amin Banani et al., Proceedings of the 11th Giorgio Levi Della Vida Conference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 44-69.

18. Gholam Hosein Yousofi, “Mawlawī as a Storyteller,” in Chelkowski, ed., The Scholar and the Saint, 287-306.

19. James Roy King, “Narrative Disjunction and Conjunction in Rumi's Mathnawi,” in Journal of Narrative Technique 19, no. 3 (1989): 276-85.

20. See the preface to the Masnavī, Book 1, p. 3, where Rumi characterizes his work as follows, “hādhā kitāb al-Mathnawī, wa-huwā uṣūlu uṣūli uṣūli-d-dīn …” (“This is the Book of the Mathnawí, which is the roots of the roots of the roots of the [Islamic] Religion”). Nicholson's translation has “Mohammedan” rather than “Islamic,” MT, I: 1, above.

21. Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, rev. ed., (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 39-40.

22. I make this distinction despite the forceful warnings by Fatemeh Keshavarz about the popular misconception regarding Rumi's status among some past critics as a mere versifier of mystical thought. See the section titled “Rumi's Experience: Poetic or Mystical? The Second Misconception” in her work, Reading Mystical Lyric, 18-21. She argues that for Rumi, his interaction, and perception, of the Divine and his act of composing poetry are one and the same process (p. 19). Along the same lines, I contend that it is futile, even fatal, to separate the two factors in reading the Masnavī. As with Rumi's ghazal poetry there is no either/or solution in the Masnavī where the arena of the “mystical” and the “poetic” is enlarged to include the “prophetic” and all are equally implicated in the production of the Masnavī. As I subsequently argue in this paper, my purpose in highlighting Rumi's preference for “meaning” over “signification” is solely to attempt an investigation of the process of storytelling he employs without valorizing any single category.

23. M. H. Abrams, “Theories of Poetry,” The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 211.

24. Northrop Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 7-8.

25. Ibid., 8-9.

26. Cf. Fazlur Rahman, “Dream, Imagination, and ‘Ālam al-mithāl,” in The Dream and Human Societies, ed. G. E. von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 419. Also see, the introduction to Huma'i's Tafsīr-i Masnavī-yi Mawlavī, pp. dah-shānzdah on the various terminologies used to signify the manifestation of reflected Reality among the Medieval Islamic intellectuals. For the Sufis such a process occurs via the medium of ilhām, which is only one step removed from the prophetic vahī.

27. Frye, Words with Power, p. 9. See also Richard Walzer's comments on al-Farabi's prophetology. al-Farabi identifies “imagination as the seat of prophecy,” quoted in John Renard, All the King's Falcons, 6.

28. Frye, Words with Power, 9.

29. Isti‘lami, “Dar pāsokh …” 504-13.

30. This method may be most suitably explained by the term aperture as Gary Saul Morson applies it to the narrative in Tolstoy's War and Peace. “A work that employs aperture renounces the privilege of an ending. It invites us instead to form a relative closure at several points, each of which could be a sort of ending … There will be no final ending, only a potentially infinite series of relative closures. …” See Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 170.

31. Lawrence Lipking, “Life, Death, and Other Theories,” in Historical Studies and Literary Criticism, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 191.

32. This section appears on pages 1139-41 of my edition of the Masnavī. I shall quote only two verses from it.

33. Rumi's Masnavī is one of those rare examples in Persian poetry where the “elegiac” mood, so pervasive in Persian lyric poetry and other genres, is starkly absent. Whether this is a product of the respective generic expectations or a special feature of Rumi's poetics is a tantalizing question waiting to be explored. Though the question has not been fully answered, Fatemeh Keshavarz in her Reading Mystical Lyric has pointed us in the right direction as far as Rumi's lyrical output is concerned, but the Masnavī still awaits a similar treatment. By this token the Masnavī's relation to the rest of the Persian poetic canon is confounding as well as worthy of further examination.

34. Frye, Words with Power, 10. Frye believes that the “conceptual” mode has two important characteristics which have been lost in the wake of 19th century philosophical developments with their fetish for linear argumentation: “One is that ambiguity may become, not a mere obstacle to meaning, but a positive and constructive force … The other feature is that, especially when the relation to the concrete seems uncertain, conceptual writing is sometimes called ‘speculative.’ Here the metaphor of the mirror (speculum) recurs, in a different mode from the ‘reflection’ of descriptive writing. If we ask what the speculation is a mirror of, the traditional answer is being, a conceptual totality that transcends not only individual beings, but the total aggregate of beings.” Further, Frye says that these developments in philosophy describe metaphysics as “a gigantic verbal illusion based, on a misunderstanding of what language can do.”

35. I use this term advisedly making a distinction between the “prophetic” mode of thought and speech and the institution or the act of “prophethood.” Rumi's “prophetic” ideas and ideals are prescriptive only for the Sufi elect.

36. The literature on “orality” and “literacy” and the implications of their uses in narratives is too vast to be judiciously accounted for here. For a critique of the assumed linearity of the Gospels in form criticism and redaction criticism of the Bible see Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), esp. 32-34. Cf. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 24-25.

37. Much like the Gnostic Gospels of the Nag Hammadi papyri, specifically the Gospel of St. Thomas believed to contain the secret inner teachings of Jesus Christ. See, James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990), 126. The first two lines are: 1) These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down. 2) And he [Jesus] said, “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.”

38. Cf. Renard, All the King's Falcons, 14: for the Sufis, “… poetic imagination is in fact, if not in theory, the principal means by which the mystical poets transport the reader (or the listener) to an understanding of prophetic revelation …”

39. The argument between Socrates and Thrasymachus is too lengthy to be quoted here in full. For one instance of Socrates' refutation of Thrasymachus' position on the definition and nature of justice and good, see Plato, The Republic and Other Works, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 18-20.

40. Frye, Words with Power, 17.

41. It is more than a passing coincidence that the respective positions of Hilal and the Amir correspond to the twin categories of “internal vision” and “external vision” of the various characters in a narrative discourse that Todorov outlines in his analysis of Les Liaisons dangereuses. See Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction to Poetics, trans. Richard Howard, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 34-5. In the case of our Masnavī, story Hilal's perception of noumena and phenomena is through the means of an “internal vision” and is, not surprisingly, closer to Rumi's not-so-implicit homiletic message, whereas the Amir's character, driven by an “external vision” of the events in the narrative, i.e. his observation of the phenomenal world, misinterprets the substance of Rumi's message.

42. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980), 39-40. Prolepsis is “any narrative maneuver that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later” whereas an analepsis is “any evocation after the fact of the event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at a given moment.”

43. Furuzanfar, Ma’ākhiz-i qiṣaṣ, 203-4. The occurrence of the name Hilal in this story is important in our understanding of this story. Between the years 1199 and 1201 C.E. Ibn al-‘Arabi composed a treatise named Mawāqi‘al-nujūm for one of his companions who is named Badr al-Habashi in the introduction to that work. Moreover, the title of Ibn al-‘Arabi's work is derived from a Qur'anic verse concerning the stipulations of ritual purity in handling the Qur'an. This and a host of other themes from the Mawāqi‘al-nujūm make a prominent appearance in Hilal's story in the Masnavī. On this theme in Mawāqi‘al-nujūm see Michel Chodkiewicz, An Ocean Without Shore: Ibn Arabi, the Book, and the Law, trans. David Streight (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 101-2. The metaphoric coincidence between the name of Ibn al-‘Arabi's companion, Badr al-Habashi, and that of Hilal in Rumi's story from the Masnavī is intriguing, to say the least, notwithstanding Bausani's remarks that “the importance of the influence of Ibn ‘Arabi on him (Rumi) has been perhaps exaggerated.” See Bausani's article, “Djalal al-Din Rumi” in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, vol. 2, ed. C. E. Bosworth et al. (London and Leiden: Luzac and Co. and E. J. Brill, 1965).

44. This theme is also the focus of a section in Ibn al-‘Arabi's Mawāqi‘al-nujūm. See Chodkiewicz, An Ocean Without Shore, 103-4.

45. Renard, All the King's Falcons, 7.