How Rumi Works

November 30, 2007

I have been growing more and more enchanted with Rumi. His Masnavi in the new translation by Jawid Mojaddedi (Oxford World's Classics) taught pretty easily, and I think he will become a standard part of my Islam class. One of the stories I taught this year was "How a Hare Killed a Tyrannical Lion". Rumi signals an explicit source for this tale: "Look up this tale in Kalila and Dimna/ And find the page to which this part is similar". (I could do without the rhyming couplets.) The book Kalila and Dimna was a book of animal fables aimed at instructing princes in wisdom. It was therefore a secular book and the stories could be expected to map onto the domain of kingship.

Rumi lifts the story from its prose source and adapts it to a form made up of rhyming couplets. The complete fable is there, but in Rumi's hand it has been split up into several parts.. as shown above. These parts could be reassembled and read in a straightforward manner, moving from left to right.. following the yellow arrows. But the pleasure of reading Rumi is in watching him take a section of the story and develop a spiritual insight out of it.. and then return to where he left off in the story. The sections of spiritual insight hang like pendants from the various parts of the fable.

From what we know of the composition of the Masnavi, Rumi composed it orally as his disciple Hosamoddin copied down his words. This text could of course be edited later and tweaked in various ways, but the central movements of the text have a fluid and off-hand feel to them.. reflecting oral composition. Rumi begins by telling a well known tale, but then he recognizes a spiritual truth and veers away from the tale. These expansions on the tale are what I label spiritual insights, and they are the most remarkable sections of the Masnavi.

Crucial to understanding these spiritual insights is to realize that Rumi is not building a coherent allegory. That is, he is not beginning with an elaborate model that says: lion=self, hare=spiritual person, etc.. That would lead to a much less fluid form than what we actually find in the Masnavi. As Rumi moves from section to section of the fable he feels free to develop a spiritual insight that reinterprets the various actors in the fable. In the tale of "How a Hare Killed a Tyrannical Lion" the lion begins as a positive character arguing in favor of spiritual exertion.. then as the story shifts in its interest to the hare and its response to the lion, the lion becomes a tyrant and finally a representative of the self. There is no single spiritual value assigned to the lion. Rumi is utilizing the fable to make various spiritual points. This shifting symbolic register makes Rumi hard to follow at times, but they also are his particular triumph.

Rumi also narrates inset tales that are illustrative of his spiritual insights.. and both the insight and the tale are held in suspension within the main fable. In the tale of "How a Hare Killed a Tyrannical Lion" Rumi tells a version of the tale that we know as the Appointment in Samarra. This adds nothing to the fable itself, but helps to further develop the spiritual insight that Rumi is making. This tales-within-tales format is reminiscent of the 1,001 Nights, which also packs in layers of stories.. without coordinating them for any spiritual points or morals.