Browsing by Subject "Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Maulana, 1207-1273 -- Criticism and interpretation"

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    Reading Rumi: The Collapse of the Real, the Imaginal, and the Literary in Jalal al-Din Rumi's Masnavi i-Ma'navi
    (2015) Palmer, Lindsey; Velji, Jamel A.
    Maulana Jalaluddin Balkhi (1207-1273), known by most Western readers by the name Rumi, was a mystical poet who wrote two major works, the Masnavi i-Ma’navi (“Rhyming Couplets of Profound Spiritual Meaning”; also called the Mathnawi) and the Diwan-i Shams-i Tabrizi. He also wrote (or dictated) three smaller works the Fihi ma fihi (“In it is what is in it”), Majalis-i sab’ah (“Seven Sessions”), and a short collection of 145 personal letters that he wrote to princes and noblemen, the Makatib. The most famous of these works and the most extensively studied by modern scholars is the Masnavi. In general, scholars agree that the Masnavi lacks any overarching structure, and thus they focus on reading for specific themes, ideas, and images, instead complete stories or the work as a whole. A recent book, Rumi’s Mystical Design: Reading the Mathnawi, Book One (2009) by Seyed Ghahreman Safavi and Simon Weightman, identifies an organizational structure that orders every level of text. This thesis proposes to read the Masnavi in a new way using Safavi and Weightman’s theory of organization by parallelism and chiasmus. I identify several modalities through which the Masnavi enacts the Sufi Path and, through this, invites readers to transform themselves through a relationship with the text. I compare the openings of each of the Masnavi’s six books, charting a progression on the Sufi Path and varying levels of union between the lover and the Beloved through narrative development, metaphor(s), and performative literary elements. I then apply my method reading the Masnavi to two Persian miniature paintings, “Dancing Dervishes” and “A Prince Enthroned” in order to understand how artists re-create and re-imagine the Rumi and the Masnavi by visualizing its journey, teaching, and imagery.