The Mesnavi and The Acts of the Adepts: The Book of the M...

This is an excerpt from a 19th-century English verse translation (1881) of Rumi's *Masnavi*, the 13th-century Persian Sufi allegorical poem, rendered here in rhyming couplets. The passage tells the story of a prince who falls in love with a handmaid who then falls gravely ill; after conventional physicians fail her, a divinely-sent healer arrives and diagnoses the true cause of her illness not as a physical ailment but as a suppressed longing — she is heartsick for someone she loves. The healer's method is gentle psychological inquiry: clearing the room, taking her pulse while asking about her hometown and former companions, and reading her emotional reactions to locate the hidden object of her desire. Woven throughout the narrative are characteristically Sufi digressions on the nature of love — its capacity to transcend bodily suffering, its resistance to verbal description, and its function as a force that draws the soul toward the divine. The poem makes the distinctive claim that love cannot be adequately explained by any intellect or language, only by love itself, and uses the metaphor of the sun (which can only be understood by looking directly at it) to argue that divine reality similarly exceeds representation. The work sits firmly in the Persian mystical literary tradition, using a romantic story as a vehicle for theological and spiritual instruction about humility before God, the dangers of presumption, and the soul's longing for reunion with its divine source.

The Mesnavi and The Acts of the Adepts: The Book of the M...

Related pages View as graph →