The Mesnavi and The Acts of the Adepts: Translator's Preface

This is the translator's introduction to an 1881 English edition of two texts: Rumi's *Mesnavi* (a vast Persian poem of 26,660 couplets) and El Eflākī's *Acts of the Adepts*, a hagiographic collection of miracle stories about the founders and early leaders of the Mevlevi ("whirling dervish") Sufi order. The introduction traces Rumi's biography from his family's aristocratic origins in Balkh through their flight before Genghis Khan's invasion, his spiritual formation under multiple teachers, and his composition of the *Mesnavi* in six volumes between roughly 1261 and his death in 1273. Eflākī's work, compiled over 43 years (1310–1353) as a disciple's labor of devotion, is organized into ten chapters covering successive leaders of the order and consists entirely of miracles, wonders, and striking events attributed to these holy men. The translator offers a notably skeptical editorial voice, describing the collection as "a rare specimen of what fervid religious enthusiasm can invent or exaggerate, pious credulity can believe, and confiding ignorance accept," and flags that a few anecdotes are "simply and grossly blasphemous" even by Islamic standards. The introduction also contextualizes Mevlevi dervish doctrine — including their use of music, dance, and Gnostic-inflected beliefs about saints as inheritors of prophetic power — for a 19th-century Western reader unfamiliar with Sufi tradition.

The Mesnavi and The Acts of the Adepts: Translator's Preface

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