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

This is an excerpt from the *Masnavi* (Mesnavi) of the 13th-century Persian Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi, presented here in James Redhouse's 1881 English verse translation — a didactic spiritual poem in the classical Islamic mystical tradition that uses narrative parables to convey theological and ethical teaching. The central story follows a merchant's caged parrot who asks his owner to deliver a message of longing to wild parrots in India; when one wild parrot drops dead upon hearing the caged bird's lament, the poet interprets this as an allegory for the soul's captivity in the material world and its yearning for reunion with the divine. Woven around the narrative are extended digressions on the destructive power of careless speech (compared to fire-sparks among cotton), the necessity of silence and patient listening before presuming to teach, and the spiritual distinction between the "perfect man" (saint or mystic) whose very blasphemy surpasses ordinary faith, and the "imperfect" man whose wisdom is mere ignorance. Rumi makes the striking claim that honest, legitimately earned food nourishes spiritual insight while food obtained through greed corrupts the soul and breeds hatred — a concrete materialist dimension to his otherwise transcendent mysticism. The translation renders the poem in rhyming couplets with an archaic, somewhat awkward English diction that preserves the parable structure but loses much of the Persian prosodic elegance; readers seeking Rumi's imagery and ideas will find them intact, but should expect a Victorian rendering rather than a fluid literary experience.

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

Related pages View as graph →