Ayāz and His Sheepskin
What Ayāz Kept Locked Away
Masnavi V · tr. E. H. Whinfield, 1887O 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!
- First attested
- 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.).
- Claimed
- 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 on purpose, to make Ayāz speak. At V.2113, answering the king's praise, Ayāz had already said that without the king's gift he is only those shoes and that jacket; V.2115 glosses them as seed and blood. Whinfield's abridgement leaves that reply 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.
Masnavi Book V. Ayāz, favourite of Sultan Maḥmūd of Ghazni, keeps in a locked chamber the clothes he wore before the king raised him — Whinfield's “old shoes and the ragged dress”, a sheepskin jacket and rustic shoes in Nicholson's numbered version — and 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 gets a practice rather than a sermon: a man at the height of favour keeps the clothes of his poverty and goes back to them every day. And the lines give the king's question its full voice — orisons to an old pair of shoes, secrets breathed into inanimate ears — before granting that faith and love are a mighty enchantment.
Shadow
The king's figure for Ayāz's devotion is a Christian confessing to a priest who can neither condemn nor absolve, so the praise of one reverence is built on another faith cast as credulous. And the tale measures a servant's worth by his loyalty to the king who raised him.
