‘Allah’ and ‘Here Am I’
The Call Was the Answer
Masnavi III.189–197 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1930One night a certain man was crying “Allah!” till his lips were growing sweet with praise of Him.The Devil said, “Prithee, O garrulous one, where is the (response) ‘Here am I’ to all this ‘Allah’?Not a single response is coming from the Throne: how long will you cry ‘Allah’ with grim face?”He became broken-hearted and laid down his head (to sleep): in a dream he saw Khaḍir amidst the verdure.He (Khaḍir) said, “Hark, you have held back from praising God: how is it that you repent of having called unto Him?”He said, “No ‘Here am I’ is coming to me in response, hence I fear that I may be (a reprobate who is) driven away from the Door.”He (Khaḍir) said, “(God saith), That ‘Allah’ of thine is My ‘Here am I,’ and that supplication and grief and ardour of thine is My messenger (to thee).Thy shifts and attempts to find a means (of gaining access to Me) were (in reality) My drawing (thee towards Me), and released thy feet (from the bonds of worldliness).Thy fear and love are the noose to catch My favour: beneath every ‘O Lord’ (of thine) is many a ‘Here am I’ (from Me).”
- First attested
- 1278The text is Mathnawī III.189–197. No autograph survives. The oldest witness is the Qoniya (Konya) manuscript, which Nicholson designated G and describes as “transcribed in A.H. 677-A.D. 1278”, five years after Rūmī died. His 1930 edition follows G only from Book III, v. 2836; for the earlier part he printed an Appendix of every change G's readings would require in the English of Books I, II and III (vv. 1-2835), and it lists none for these lines. Every English phrase quoted here is Nicholson's, from his 1930 translation.
- Claimed
- the 1260sasserted by Book III carries no internal date. Its proem asks Ḥusām al-Dīn to “bring (into verse and writing) this Third Book” (III.1, Nicholson 1930), so it was begun after Book II, whose proem dates that book's beginning to “the year six hundred and sixty-two” (II.7, Nicholson 1926) — A.H. 662, a year that began in 1263 and ended in 1264. Rūmī died on 17 December 1273.
Nicholson's footnote to the heading gives the Arabic behind “Here am I”: labbayka, the word of the Talbiyah, which pilgrims recite over and over once they put on the iḥrām. Rūmī turns the pilgrim's cry around: God speaks it to the man, and the man's own “Allah” is it.
Nicholson 1930, vol. IV p. 14, footnote 2 to the heading before III.189; “Talbiyah”, Wikipedia.
The Devil mocks a man's unanswered cry of “Allah”; in a dream Khaḍir tells him the cry was God's answer.
Mathnawī III.189–197, under Rūmī's heading “Showing that the supplicant's invocation of God is essentially the same thing as God's response to him”. A man cries “Allah!” one night till his lips grow sweet. The Devil asks where the answering “Here am I” is: no response comes from the Throne. Broken-hearted, the man sleeps, and in a dream sees Khaḍir amidst the verdure, who brings God's word — that “Allah” of thine is My “Here am I”. Nicholson's footnote gives the Arabic, labbayka. The passage follows God's command to Moses, in the heading before III.180, to call on Him “with a mouth with which thou hast not sinned”, and is followed by Pharaoh, given the empire of the world but never grief, “lest he should moan unto God” (III.200–202).
Light
It consoles anyone who has prayed into silence: the fear of being “driven away from the Door” is answered by the claim that the longing itself is the reply already arriving.
Shadow
The waking objection gets no waking answer — the Devil's question is settled in a dream — and the next lines make the power to pray an allotment: the fool is “not permitted to cry ‘O Lord’”, and Pharaoh was given everything but the grief that would have made him call (III.198–202).
