Islam · Poetry

Poem · Sufism · 1278

The Chickpea to the Cook

The Cook Was Boiled First

A chickpea leaps from the pot and the housewife beats it back — Nicholson read her as master, it as disciple.

What it meansThe chickpea leaps from the pot and is beaten back, and the cook's answer is the teaching: I was green once and drank water, and I was cooked too. The disciple's suffering is not administered from outside the process — the one applying it has been through it.

Book · Sufism · 14th century

The Dīvān-e Shams-e Tabrīzī

Signed With Another Man's Name

Rumi's collected lyric poetry, named for the dervish Shams — a third of it signed with his name, not Rumi's.

SignificanceRumi signed the poems with the name of the man he had lost. In Sufi terms that is fanāʾ — the self annihilated in the beloved until it cannot sign for itself — and the tradition reads the collection's title as doctrine rather than dedication.

The FindingThe Dīvān is Rumi's, not Shams's: in the closing couplet where a Persian poet signs his own name, Rumi wrote his vanished friend's — almost a third of the ghazals, on William Chittick's count — and elsewhere a disciple's, never his own.