Ayāz and His Sheepskin

What Ayāz Kept Locked Away

O Ayáz, what is this love of yours for your old shoes,Which resembles the love of a lover for his mistress?You have made these old shoes your object of devotion,Just as Majnun made an idol of his Laila!You have bound the affection of your soul to them,And hung them up in your secret chamber.How long will you say orisons to this old pair of shoes?And breathe your oft-told secrets into inanimate ears?Like the Arab lover to the house of his dead mistress,You address to them long invocations of love.Of what great Asaf were your shoes the house?Is your old garment, think you, the coat of Yusuf?Like a Christian who confesses to a priestHis past year’s sins of fornication, fraud, and deceit;In order that the priest may absolve him of those sins;He thinks the priest’s absolution the same as God’s!That priest is unable to condemn or to absolve;—But faith and love are a mighty enchantment!
Masnavi V · tr. E. H. Whinfield, 1887

Earliest record: 1278Masnavi V.3251–3259 in Nicholson's numbering, inside the story of Maḥmūd and Ayāz that opens at V.1857. No autograph survives. The earliest complete manuscript, the Konya copy, was finished in December 1278, five years after Rūmī's death; Nicholson judged the Qoniya MS., dated 677 A.H., the most authoritative text of the poem, and his printed text from Book III, v. 2836 onward follows it. The English quoted here rests on something later: Whinfield made his translation from the Bulaq edition of 1268 A.H., keying his section pages to the Lucknow edition of 1282 A.H., and it is quoted from the London printing of 1887 (Trübner & Co.).
Said to date from: the 1270sasserted by Nicholson, in the Introduction to his translation of Books V and VI (dated Cambridge, 19 April 1933), places both books in the years when Rūmī was nearing seventy; Whinfield gives Rūmī's dates as born at Balkh in 604 A.H. (1207) and died at Qonia in 672 A.H. (1273), and Book VI breaks off unfinished. The 1270s decade is this entry's reading of those two statements: no manuscript from Rūmī's lifetime survives to date the book.

The question is a feint: Rūmī's heading to V.3251 says Maḥmūd asked it to make Ayāz speak. Ayāz answered at V.2113, a reply Whinfield's abridgement leaves out.

Masnavi V.2113–2115 and the heading before V.3251, in Nicholson's numbering (his translation of Books V–VI, 1934, checked at masnavi.net; paraphrased, not quoted); Whinfield 1887, Book V, Story VIII, pp. 245–247, and Story VIII continued, pp. 261–262.

Sultan Maḥmūd asks his favourite why he visits a pair of old shoes the way a lover visits his beloved.

More context

In Masnavi Book V, Ayāz, favourite of Sultan Maḥmūd of Ghazni, keeps in a locked chamber the clothes he wore before the king raised him. They are Whinfield's “old shoes and the ragged dress”, a sheepskin jacket and rustic shoes in Nicholson's numbered version. He visits them daily so as not to grow proud. Envious courtiers, suspecting he hides coin stolen from the treasury or wine, break in at night and find only these. The tale opens at V.1857 in Nicholson's numbering and, as Whinfield notes, returns at intervals to the end of the book. The lines here are the king's address at V.3251–3259; Rūmī's heading says he asked on purpose, to make Ayāz speak. Whinfield tells the story in prose, citing the Qurʾān's “Let man reflect out of what he was created”, and translates this address in verse.

Light

Humility as a practice, not a sermon: a man at the height of favour revisits his old clothes daily.

Shadow

The king likens Ayāz to a Christian confessing to a powerless priest, praising one reverence by casting another as credulous.

Sources6 sources

Primary source

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī; trans. and abridged E. H. Whinfield, Masnavi i Ma'navi: The Spiritual Couplets of Maulána Jalálu-'d-Dín Muhammad i Rúmí, translated and abridged (Trübner's Oriental Series; London: Trübner & Co.), 1887, Book V, Story VIII, "Mahmud and Ayáz", pp. 245–247 (prose summary and note); Story VIII continued, pp. 261–262, section headed "Love and faith are a mighty spell" — the eighteen lines quoted hereThe verse_text, verbatim; Whinfield's summary of the story (the locked chamber, the courtiers' suspicion of coin stolen from the treasury or wine, the night search that finds only the old shoes and the ragged dress); his citation of Koran lxxxvi. 5; his note that the story "is continued at intervals till the end of the book"; and his note that "All the latter part of this story is a parable of the last judgment." His Introduction states his method: "abstracts of the principal stories and a literal translation, line by line, of the principal doctrinal morals" — which is why the tale is prose and the address is verse.
O Ayáz, what is this love of yours for your old shoes, / Which resembles the love of a lover for his mistress?
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī; trans. Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí, vol. VI: translation of Books V and VI (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series); Introduction dated Cambridge, 19 April 1933, 1934, Book V: the story's opening heading and V.1857; the heading before V.1918; V.2113–2115; the heading before V.3251 and V.3251–3259That Whinfield's eighteen lines render V.3251–3259; that the tale opens at V.1857 with Ayāz hanging up his sheepskin jacket and rustic shoes; that Rūmī's heading before V.3251 says the king asked on purpose, to induce Ayāz to speak; that at V.2113 Ayāz answers that apart from the king's gift he is nothing but those shoes and that jacket; and that V.2114–2115 cite the saying that whoever knows himself knows God and gloss the shoes as the seed and the jacket as the blood. Read for line numbers and headings only and paraphrased: this translation is still in US copyright, so none of its English is quoted in this entry.

Scholarship

Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí, vol. IV: translation of Books III and IV (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series), 1930, Introduction, dated Cambridge, April 1930Nicholson's judgement that the Qoniya MS. (G), dated 677 A.H., is the most authoritative text of the poem, and that his printed text from Book III, v. 2836 is founded on it; and his estimate of Whinfield — some 2000 of the roughly 17,500 verses of Books III–VI translated in the abridged version, good in general but seldom precise enough for obscure passages. That is why the line numbers in this entry are Nicholson's and the English is Whinfield's.
Good as his renderings are from a general point of view, I cannot say that I owe much to them, since they are seldom precise enough to afford help in dealing with obscure and doubtful passages.