Islam · Death & the Afterlife
Book · Sufism · the 1250s
Fīhi Mā Fīhi
Taken Down, Not Written
Rumi's table talk: seventy-one Persian prose discourses taken down by listeners, read as him thinking aloud.
SignificanceThe title means 'it is what is in it' — a refusal to summarise, attached to a book Rumi did not write. These are his listeners' notes of him talking, so the teaching arrives unarranged, and the tradition values it for exactly that: doctrine caught before it was tidied.
The FindingThe one book of Rumi talking is thin at seventy-one discourses, and thick with statesmen, because — Jawid Mojaddedi argues from the text itself — his own disciples could rarely reach his conversation except when distinguished guests were in the room.
Poem · Sufism · 1278
The Chickpea to the Cook
The Cook Was Boiled First
— Masnavi III.4159–4164 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1930Look at a chickpea in the pot, how it leaps up when it is subjected to the fire.
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.