The Song of the Reed
Love, separation, return — the doctrine of Rūmī, drawn from the first eighteen verses of the Mathnawī.
Listen to the ney
The Mathnawī — twenty-five thousand couplets, six books, nearly a century of teaching condensed — opens on eighteen verses that contain, in seed, all the rest. Rūmī chose them. They are not verses of polite introduction: they are a placing into presence. Before any doctrine, there is a lament — that of a musical instrument, and of what that instrument symbolises.
بِشْنَوْ اَزْ نَیْ چُونْ حِکَایَتْ مِیکُنَدْ
اَزْ جُدَائِیهَا شِکَایَتْ مِیکُنَدْ
کَزْ نَیِسْتَانْ تَا مَرَا بُبْرِیدِهاَنْدْ
اَزْ نَفِیرَمْ مَرْدْ وَ زَنْ نَالِیدِهاَنْدْ Mathnawī, book I, verses 1-2 — Persian text
Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale —
it complains of the separations:
"Ever since they cut me from the reed bed,
my wailing has made men and women weep." Mathnawī, book I, verses 1-2
A reed (nay, نَایْ) has been cut from a field of reeds (neyestān, نَیِسْتَان). It has been hollowed, pierced, turned into a flute. When one breathes into this flute, what one hears is not a melody — it is a lament. The reed weeps at having been separated from the mother-reed. And this lament, says Rūmī, makes those who hear it weep — because they too, without always knowing it, are cut reeds.
The nay is not a decorative image. For Rūmī, it is you, it is us: every human soul has been drawn out of an Origin towards which it never ceases to moan, even when it no longer knows where its sorrow comes from.
Mawlānā — "our master"
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad (جَلَالُ الدِّين مُحَمَّد) — surnamed Rūmī (the "Roman," because he settled in Konya, in the former Byzantine territory called Rūm), and above all Mawlānā (مَوْلَانَا, "our master") by his disciples — was born in Balkh, in Khurāsān (present-day Afghanistan), on 30 September 1207.
His father Bahā' al-Dīn Walad was a recognised scholar, himself a Sufi. In 1219, fleeing the Mongol invasion, the family crossed Persia, Arabia and Syria, and finally settled in Konya (present-day Turkey). There Bahā' received the prestigious title of sulṭān al-ʿulamāʾ (سُلْطَانُ العُلَمَاء, "king of scholars"). At his death, Jalāl al-Dīn, then 24 years old, succeeded him in his religious functions. For ten years he studied, taught, led prayers, gave legal opinions. He was a respected muftī, deeply learned, but still outside himself.
The encounter that changes everything
At the age of thirty-seven, in 1244, Rūmī met in a street of Konya a wandering dervish come from Tabrīz: Shams al-Dīn (شَمْس الدِّين, "Sun of the Religion"). An enigmatic figure, overwhelming, without school and without following. What passed between them — it will never be known exactly — changed Rūmī forever. His son Sulṭān Walad summed it up thus:
He no longer ceased for an instant to listen to music and to dance:
never did he rest, neither by day nor by night.
He had been a muftī: he became a poet.
He had been an ascetic: he was made drunk with Love.
And it was not the wine of the grape — the illumined soul
drinks only the wine of the Light. Sulṭān Walad, on the transformation of Rūmī
Shams soon disappeared — assassinated, it is said, by jealous disciples. Rūmī, broken, but also burned to the bone by the encounter, began to compose. The Dīwān sprang forth first, ghazals of ardent love dedicated to Shams. Then the Mathnawī, twenty thousand verses recited to his disciple Ḥusām al-Dīn over more than ten years. At his death, on 17 December 1273 in Konya, Christians, Jews and Muslims followed his funeral procession together. The way that bears his name, the Mevleviyya, was born in his wake — the way of the whirling dervishes.
Exile as the structure of the soul
Let us return to the ney. Why does Rūmī open his work on this image?
Because it says, in four verses, what Sufi metaphysics takes hundreds of pages to set out: the exilic structure of the human soul. Every human existence begins with a separation. Before you were born here below, says the Quranic tradition, you were there — in the divine Presence. At verse 7:172, God gathers the descendants of Adam in pre-existential eternity and asks them:
أَلَسْتُ بِرَبِّكُمْ Alastu bi-rabbikum — "Am I not your Lord?" (Quran 7:172)
And the souls, all together, answer: balā (بَلَى), "yes." This yes is the primordial covenant (mīthāq, مِيثَاق) that every soul pronounced before being brought forth here below. The descent into the body, birth, forgetting — all this is the cutting of the reed. You were there, you are here, and you no longer have memory of it.
Nostalgia as a clue
But something in you remembers. It is nostalgia — that muffled sadness, that lack without an object, that dissatisfaction which nothing here below ever wholly fills. All human happinesses leave a taste of the incomplete, because none brings one back to the mother-reed. Rūmī, in the verses that follow, says it plainly:
Whoever remains far from his source
longs for the moment when he will be united with it again.
[...] I have moaned in every gathering,
I have kept company with the wretched and the happy alike;
everyone, from his own vision, thought himself my friend —
but none sought the secrets I carry within. Mathnawī, book I, verses 4 & 6-7
The lament of the reed is paradoxically the organ of return. What makes you suffer from being far away is precisely what keeps you bound. Without the cutting, no song; without the song, no path of return.
The fire that consumes all but the Beloved
How does one return to the Origin? The Mathnawī, the Dīwān, the Discourses of Rūmī all answer with a single voice: through love. But love, in Arabic and in Persian, is not said in a single word. Rūmī distinguishes two registers of it:
Love as lasting affection, deep attachment. It is the broadest word: it is used also for human, paternal, fraternal love. God Himself bears the Name al-Wadūd (the Loving). It is the ordinary weft of the spiritual relation.
Love that is passionate, burning, devouring. Sunni theology hesitated to attribute it to God — too intense, too carnal. Rūmī passes beyond this. For him, ʿishq is the very attribute of Reality, the cosmic fire that moves all things.
The ʿishq is not a sentiment that one cultivates; it is a fire that catches and consumes. Rūmī writes:
Love is that flame which, when it blazes up,
consumes everything but the Beloved. Mathnawī, book V, verse 588
And further on:
This is love: to fly towards the heavens,
to tear away, at every instant, a hundred veils. Dīwān (after Chittick)
And again, in a formula that says everything:
Hail, O Love that brings us a precious gain —
you are the physician of all our ills,
the remedy of our pride and our vanity,
our Plato and our Galen. Mathnawī, book I, verses 22-24
Love is therefore at once the cause of the separation (the ney weeps because it loves that from which it is cut) and the remedy for the separation (love alone can lead back to the mother-reed). This is why Rūmī never separates suffering from the way: the suffering of love is already the return seeking itself.
The lover and the gnostic are one
A great part of Sufi literature distinguishes two accomplished human types:
For Ibn ʿArabī, knowledge takes precedence — love leads to knowledge, and knowledge contains love as one of its modes. Rūmī reverses the emphasis. For him, love is knowledge: neither separate, nor set in hierarchy. R. A. Nicholson, the great English translator of the Mathnawī, observed that Rūmī draws no distinction between the gnostic (ʿārif) and the lover (ʿāshiq): for him, knowledge and love are inseparable and co-equivalent aspects of one and the same reality.
This inseparability Rūmī states himself, almost technically, in these verses that Chittick places at the heart of his study:
Through love, the dregs become clear;
through love, the pains become a healing;
through love, the dead becomes living.
This love, moreover, is the fruit of knowledge:
who ever sat, on such a throne, in ignorance?
A deficient knowledge engenders love —
but only love for that which is without life. Mathnawī, book II, verses 1530-1533
Without knowledge, love goes astray upon idols. Without love, knowledge remains cold, mental, without transformative power. The two do not oppose each other — they are the two wings of a single bird.
Law, Way, Truth — the alchemy of return
How, concretely, does the return come about? Rūmī takes up a classical articulation of Sufism — three degrees of deepening of the same religious reality:
Sharīʿah. The outer norms of religious life: prayer, fasting, justice, law. The learning of the theory.
Ṭarīqah. The inner walking under the direction of a master: the practice of dhikr, the examination of the soul, slow transformation. The practice.
Ḥaqīqah. The effective realisation: the separation is consumed, the soul finds itself in its Origin. The transmutation.
In the preface to book V of the Mathnawī, Rūmī uses for this the alchemical image — the favourite image of the Sufis of Konya:
The Law is like a candle that shows the way: unless you have this candle in hand, no walking is possible. Once you have entered upon the road, your walking is the Way. When you have reached the end of the journey, that is the Truth. [...] The Law is like the theoretical study of alchemy with a master or in a book; the Way is like the use of the chemical substances and the rubbing of copper against the philosophers' stone; the Truth is like the transmutation of copper into gold. Mathnawī, preface to book V
Three degrees, but a single movement. The Law is not abandoned: it is passed through. The theorist of alchemy who has never touched the matter has transformed nothing. But the alchemist without theory has nothing to transform. The Law without the Way is a dead letter; the Way without the Law is a going astray.
Rūmī never says that the Law is surpassed. He says that one passes through it. The true Sufi is also a practising Muslim — but the reverse is not true.
A single voice, three mouths
Rūmī left three major works, which are three modulations of the same speech.
25,000 couplets in six books. Recited orally to his disciple Ḥusām al-Dīn over more than a decade. It blends tales, parables, doctrinal digressions, psychological traits. Surnamed "the Quran in Persian" — not because it would claim revealed status, but because it contains, as a watermark, all the wisdom of intellectual and spiritual Islam.
Forty thousand verses — a collection of ghazals (lyric poems) composed in the state of ecstasy, often during the ritual dance (samāʿ, سَمَاع). Dedicated to Shams of Tabrīz. Pure lyric, intense, without concession to didactic doctrine. Here Rūmī is wholly the lover.
Discourses in prose — literally "in it is what is in it." Conversations, sermons, dialogues set down by his disciples. Here Rūmī answers questions, recounts, clarifies. It is the most everyday face of the master — the one who teaches with a bare voice.
The Mathnawī is the doctrine, the Dīwān is the ecstasy, the Fīhi mā fīhi is the teaching. Together, they form the vastest work of Islamic mysticism — perhaps of the mysticism of the world.
Why Rūmī, today?
Seven centuries after his death, Rūmī is today the most read poet in America. It is a strange cultural phenomenon — a medieval Muslim Persian mystic, translated, retranslated, adapted, sometimes betrayed, but always heard. Why?
Because he says something that neither psychology, nor analytic philosophy, nor wellness spirituality knows how to say: that deep sadness is not an illness to be cured, but a piece of information. That this lack you feel without being able to name it — which neither one more partner, nor one more job, nor one more comfort will fill — is in reality the voice of your origin. That you are a cut reed, and that your song is that very lack.
Rūmī does not say: stop suffering. He says: listen to what your suffering says, and walk in the direction it points to. This direction has a name: love. Not the love of passing affects, but the love that consumes everything but the Beloved — that is, everything but the Real, everything but that which does not pass away.
For those who have attained to union, nothing remains
but the eye of the spirit and the lamp of intuitive faith:
they no longer need indications to guide them,
nor a road to travel. Mathnawī, book IV, verse 2977 and following
But before union, there is the path. And before the path, there is the ney that weeps. And before all, these four verses that open the Mathnawī, and that one rereads one's whole life without exhausting their depth:
"Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale:
it complains of the separations."
The books read for this entry
To go further on the site:
- To imitate or to realise — the other entry drawn from Chittick, on the two kinds of knowledge.
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr — who calls Rūmī "the supreme troubadour of beauty."
- Love (maḥabbah, ʿishq) — the way of ardent love.
- The samāʿ — the ritual dance of the Mevlevis, a direct inheritance of Rūmī.
- The Mevleviyya — the brotherhood born in his wake.