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Storytelling Techniques in the Masnavī‐yi Maᶜnavī of Mowlana Jalal al‐Din Rumi: Wayward Narrative or Logical Progression?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Farooq Hamid
Farooq Hamid*
Affiliation:
Pomona College
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Extract

baᶜd az samāᶜ gūyī k-ān shūr-hā kujā shud

yā khud na-būd chizī yā būd va ān fanā shud

Confounded, after the samāᶜ 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 Manavī-yi Maᶜnavī (henceforth Manavī). 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 Manavī, as a whole, seems to have no narrative sequence with its plethora of apparently unconnected and disjointed stories. Moreover, the narrative order of a particular story may be interrupted by other stories, sermons, expositions of Qurᶜanic verses, aḥādīth, stories of prophets (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāᵓ), 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.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Winter 1999 , pp. 27 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1999

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Footnotes

*

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.

References

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

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

3. Riffaterre, Michael Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 131-2Google Scholar, 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 Pelikan, Jaroslav Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 332.Google Scholar

4. 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), 9Google Scholar, 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…”

5. Unless another story from the six-volume Manavī 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 Arberry, A. J. and Renard, John in his All the King's Falcons: Rumi on Prophets and Revelation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994)Google Scholar have done an admirable job. Suffice it to mention that enough interlinkages among the stories of the Manavī exist to fit an ocean in ajar (a rather shameless borrowing of the title of ᶜAbd al-Husain Zarrinkub's work on the Manavī, Baḥr dear Kūza: naqd va tafslr-i qiṣa-ha vā tamsīlāt-i Manavī [Tehran: Intisharat-i ᶜIlmi, 1368/1989])Google Scholar.

6. 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)Google Scholar, 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.

7. See Wellek, Rene and Warren, Austin Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), 73-135Google Scholar, 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.

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

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

10. Dabashi, Hamid “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. Banani, Amin et al., Proceedings of the 11th Giorgio Levi Delia Vida Conference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 112-35.Google Scholar

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

12. Badiᶜ al-Zaman Furuzanfar, Aḥādī-i Manavī, 3d ed., 1361/1982, Amir Kabir (Tehran: Intisharat-i Danishgah-i Tehran, 1334/1955)Google Scholar; and Maᵓākhiẕ-i qiṣaṣ va tamīlāt-i Manavī, 2d ed. (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1347/1968).Google Scholar

13. Jalal al-Din Humaᶜi, Tafsīr-i Manavī-yi Mowlavī: Dāstān-i Qalᶜah-yi Ẕāt aṣ-Ṣuvvar yā Dizh-i Hūsh Rubā (Tehran: Intisharat-i Danishgah-i Tehran, 1349/1970).Google Scholar

14. Muhammad Istiᶜlami, “Dar pāsokh bi-īn pursish ki āyā daftar-i shishom-i Manavī va qiṣṣa-yi Qalᶜah-yi Ẕāt aṣ-Ṣuvvar na-tamām-ast?” in Irān Shenāsī 1, no. 3 (1368/1989): 513Google Scholar, note 1. Prof. Istiᶜlami 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, Manavī, ed. Muhammad Istiᶜlami. 6 vols. (Tehran: Intisharat-i Zavvar, 1375/1996).Google Scholar

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

16. Christoph Bürgel, J. “‘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. Banani, Amin et al., Proceedings of the 11th Giorgio Levi Delia Vida Conference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 44-69.Google Scholar

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

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

19. 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.

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

21. 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.

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

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

24. Ibid., 8-9.

25. Cf. Rahman, Fazlur “Dream, Imagination, and ᶜAlam al-mithāl,” in The Dream and Human Societies, ed. von Grunebaum, G. E. and Caillois, Roger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 419.Google Scholar Also see, the introduction to Humaᵓi's Tafsīr-i Manavī-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 vaḥī.

26. 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.

27. Frye, Words with Power, 9.

28. Istiᶜlami, “Dar pāsokh…” 504-13.

29. 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 Saul Morson, Gary Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 170.Google Scholar

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

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

32. Rumi's Manavī 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 Manavī still awaits a similar treatment. By this token the Manavīs relation to the rest of the Persian poetic canon is confounding as well as worthy of further examination.

33. 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.”

34. 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.

35. 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 Kelber, Werner H. 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.Google Scholar Cf. Kermode, Frank The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 24-25.Google Scholar

36. 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, Robinson, James M. ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990), 126.Google Scholar 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.”

37. 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…”

38. 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. Jowett, B. (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 18-20.Google Scholar

39. Frye, Words with Power, 17.

40. 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 Todorov, Tzvetan Introduction to Poetics, trans. Howard, Richard Theory and History of Literature, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 34—5.Google Scholar In the case of our Manavī, 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.

41. Genette, Gérard Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Lewin, Jane E. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980), 39-40.Google Scholar 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.”

42. Furuzanfar, Maᵓākhiẕ-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-ᶜArabi composed a treatise named Mawāqiᶜ 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-ᶜArabi's work is derived from a Qurᵓanic verse concerning the stipulations of ritual purity in handling the Qurᵓan. This and a host of other themes from the Mawāqᶜ al-nujūm make a prominent appearance in Hilal's story in the Masnavī. On this theme in Mawāqiᶜ al-nujūm see Chodkiewicz, Michel An Ocean Without Shore: Ibn Arabi, the Book, and the Law, trans. Streight, David (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 101-2.Google Scholar The metaphoric coincidence between the name of Ibn al-ᶜArabi'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 ᶜArabi 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. Bosworth, C. E. et al. (London and Leiden: Luzac and Co. and E. J. Brill, 1965).Google Scholar

43. This theme is also the focus of a section in Ibn al-ᶜArabi's Mawāqiᶜ al-nujūm. See Chodkiewicz, An Ocean Without Shore, 103-4.

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