Moses and the Shepherd

I Want Burning

A revelation came to Moses from God—“Thou hast parted My servant from Me.Didst thou come (as a prophet) to unite, or didst thou come to sever?So far as thou canst, do not set foot in separation: of (all) things the most hateful to Me is divorce.I have bestowed on every one a (special) way of acting: I have given to every one a (peculiar) form of expression.In regard to him it is (worthy of) praise, and in regard to thee it is (worthy of) blame: in regard to him honey, and in regard to thee poison.I am independent of all purity and impurity, of all slothfulness and alacrity (in worshipping Me).I did not ordain (Divine worship) that I might make any profit; nay, but that I might do a kindness to (My) servants.In the Hindoos the idiom of Hind (India) is praiseworthy; in the Sindians the idiom of Sind is praiseworthy.I am not sanctified by their glorification (of Me); ’tis they that become sanctified and pearl-scattering (pure and radiant).I look not at the tongue and the speech; I look at the inward (spirit) and the state (of feeling).I gaze into the heart (to see) whether it be lowly, though the words uttered be not lowly,Because the heart is the substance, speech (only) the accident; so the accident is subservient, the substance is the (real) object.How much (more) of these phrases and conceptions and metaphors? I want burning, burning: become friendly with that burning!Light up a fire of love in thy soul, burn thought and expression entirely (away)!O Moses, they that know the conventions are of one sort, they whose souls and spirits burn are of another sort.”

Masnavi II.1750–1764 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1926

First attested

1278No autograph survives. The oldest witness is the Qoniya manuscript (G), “transcribed in A.H. 677-A.D. 1278”, five years after Rūmī's death. Nicholson's 1926 translation of Book II was not made from it; his 1930 Appendix lists where G differs, and within God's speech it differs once, at v. 1759: “Read the spirit for the inward (spirit)” — so the oldest copy has God look at “the spirit and the state”. The verse is given as Nicholson printed it in 1926.

Claimed

the 1260sasserted by Rūmī's own date at Masnavi II.7, in the proem to Book II: “The date of beginning this gainful (spiritual) traffic was in the year six hundred and sixty-two” — A.H. 662, which ran from November 1263 to October 1264. Book II therefore cannot be earlier, and the proem's first line says the poem had been “delayed for a while” after Book I.

A shepherd prays to God as to a man; Moses rebukes him, and God rebukes Moses: “I want burning, burning.”

Mathnawī II.1720–1791, with Rūmī's application after it; the lines here are God's rebuke, II.1750–1764. Moses hears a shepherd offering to sew God's shoes, comb His head, kill His lice and bring Him milk, and rebukes him for blasphemy: God has no body and no needs. The shepherd says Moses has “burned my soul with repentance”, rends his garment and goes into the desert. A revelation then rebukes Moses for parting God's servant from Him — divorce, in a saying Whinfield marks as “A tradition”, is most hateful to God, who gave each people its own idiom and looks at the heart, not the words. Moses runs after the shepherd with permission to pray as he likes, but the shepherd says he has passed beyond that: Moses' lash made his horse leap beyond the sky. Rūmī ends by telling the reader that any praise of God, however better by comparison, is “even as the unseemly (words) of that shepherd”. Whinfield's 1887 abridgement gives it as Book II, Story VII.