The Dīvān-e Shams-e Tabrīzī

Signed With Another Man's Name

First attested
14th centuryFourteenth-century manuscripts. The poems belong to Rumi's lifetime, but they were gathered by his students after he died in 1273, and no copy from his own lifetime is known. Forūzānfar built his text from manuscripts made within a hundred years of that death; the best known is the two-volume Dīvān-i Kabīr at the Mevlâna Museum in Konya, nos. 68–69, copied by the Mevlevi scribe Ḥasan b. ʿUthmān and finished in 1368.

The 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.

Rumi's collected lyric poetry, named for the dervish Shams — a third of it signed with his name, not Rumi's.

Rumi's lyric verse, collected after his death in 1273 and distinct from the Masnavī, the teaching poem he dictated to Ḥusām al-Dīn: ghazals made to be sung. Forūzānfar edited it in ten volumes at Tehran, 1957–1967, from manuscripts copied within a century of that death; Franklin Lewis counts 3,229 ghazals and qasidas there, almost 35,000 lines, besides stanzaic poems and nearly two thousand quatrains attributed to him. In the closing couplet where a Persian poet names himself, Rumi names Shams-i Tabrīzī, who reached Konya in 1244 and vanished in 1248. Chittick finds that name in almost a third of the ghazals and most of the rest unsigned, a few carrying a disciple's; Lewis reads most of the remainder as khāmūsh, silence. Nicholson denied in 1898 that the name was a takhalluṣ, though his footnote allowed it in a mystical sense.

Light

Rumi gives away the one line a Persian poet keeps for himself. And the book is still handled as music: Franklin Lewis reports that Turkish editions group the ghazals by metre, following Mevlevi practice, while Iranian ones alphabetise by the last letter of each line.

Shadow

Nicholson warned in 1898 that the Dīvān has no textus receptus: the manuscripts differ in the number and order of the couplets inside each ghazal, and of the ghazals themselves. Seven of his forty-eight selections are missing from the earliest copies, on Ibrahim Gamard's count.

Sources and verification7 sources · 17 links

Primary source

  • Reynold A. Nicholson (editor and translator), Selected Poems from the Dīvāni Shamsi Tabrīz, 1898, Cambridge University Press; Introduction. Forty-eight ghazals with the Persian facing the EnglishNicholson states that the Dīvān was never attributed to Shams, who probably died before it was complete, and then asks why his name appears on the title-page and at the end of most of the odes. Here, he says, is no question of takhalluṣ, forgery, or composition holding up to ridicule the imagined author — though a footnote allows that in a certain mystical sense Shams-i Tabrīz may be regarded as a takhalluṣ, Jalāl al-Dīn asserting the identity of subject and object, Shams standing for the divine Beloved. He also states that there is no textus receptus: the manuscripts differ not only in the number and order of the beyts in each ghazal but in the number and order of the ghazals themselves, and several spurious pieces are certainly included.
  • Badīʿ al-Zamān Forūzānfar (editor), Kolliyāt-e Shams, yā Dīvān-e Kabīr, 1957, 10 vols, University of Tehran Press, 1336–1346 sh. / 1957–1967; ghazals in vols 1–7 (nos. 1–3,229), quatrains in vol. 8 (nos. 1–1,983), concordance in vols 9–10The critical edition, built from manuscripts copied within a hundred years of Rumi's death, and the numbering Persianists cite. Its own title announces what the collection holds: qasidas, ghazals, fragments, tarjīʿ-bands and molammaʿāt — macaronic poems — in Persian and Arabic.
  • Moḥammad-ʿAlī Movaḥḥed (editor), Maqālāt-e Shams-e Tabrīzī, 1990, 2 vols, Tehran; the first volume 1977, the second 1990 — the dates as Chittick gives them in his introductionThe standard edition of Shams's discourses — the book that carries Shams's words, as against the Dīvān, which carries only his name.
  • Shams-i Tabrīzī; translated, introduced and annotated by William C. Chittick, Me and Rumi: The Autobiography of Shams-i Tabrizi, 2004, Fons Vitae, Louisville; ISBN 1-887752-52-8; selections from Moḥammad-ʿAlī Movaḥḥed's edition of the Maqālāt, with a foreword by Annemarie SchimmelShams's own words survive in prose, not verse: the Maqālāt, notes taken down by one or more of Rumi's circle while Shams was speaking and never edited into final form. Chittick's introduction states that although the collection bears Shams's name no one has ever thought him its author; that the Dīvān is called after him because Rumi signs almost one-third of the 3,200 ghazals with his name, leaving most of the rest unsigned, a few signed with other names such as those of his disciples Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn and Ḥusām al-Dīn; and that a quick glance at the text might lead someone to think Shams himself the author, because his name occurs so often in the last lines.

Scholarship

  • Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rumi, 2008, revised edition, Oneworld, Oxford; the corpus figures at p. 314Lewis's count, made from Forūzānfar's edition: 3,229 ghazals and qasidas totalling almost 35,000 lines, not counting several hundred lines of stanzaic poems and nearly two thousand quatrains attributed to Rumi. Lewis also records that Forūzānfar's 1957 text rests on manuscripts written within a hundred years of Rumi's death, that Rumi signs off MOST of his own ghazals as either khāmūsh (Silence) or Shams-i Tabrīzī, and that modern Iranian editions order the poems alphabetically by the last letter of each line — a convention he dates to the sixteenth century — while Turkish editions follow the practice of the Mevlevi Order and group them by metre.

Where this claim originates

  • Ibrahim Gamard, About the Odes/Ghazals, and the Ghazals–Foruzanfar Concordance (Dar al-Masnavi), dar-al-masnavi.org, consulted September 2026Gamard, setting Nicholson's 1898 selection against Forūzānfar's text, finds seven of the forty-eight — Nicholson's numbers IV, VIII, XII, XVII, XXXI, XXXIII and XLIV — absent from the earliest manuscripts and no longer regarded by scholars as Rumi's; he also calculates that the ghazals are 61 per cent of the poems in Forūzānfar's edition and 78 per cent of its verses, and that the authentic total is certainly somewhat below 3,229. A translator's reference site, not peer-reviewed scholarship.

Further reading

  • A. J. Arberry (translator), Mystical Poems of Rumi, 1968, First Selection, poems 1–200, University of Chicago Press, 1968; Second Selection, poems 201–400, prepared by Hasan Javadi, Bibliotheca Persica, 1979; corrected one-volume edition with preface and notes by Franklin Lewis, University of Chicago Press, 2009Four hundred ghazals in English made from Forūzānfar's critical text — where a reader can meet the Dīvān without going through a version made from somebody else's English.

Linked entries

  • Set againstThe Song of the ReedAttested

    The reed song opens the Masnavī, the teaching poem Rumi dictated to Ḥusām al-Dīn Chalabī in his last years; the Dīvān is the other half of his verse — lyric, sung, and largely earlier.

  • Attributed toRūmīAttested

    The poems are Rumi's, not Shams's. The book carries Shams-i Tabrīzī's name because Rumi put it in the closing couplet where a Persian poet puts his own, and because his students collected the poems under it after he died in 1273.

  • Transmitted intoOut Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and RightdoingAttested

    The lines most quoted as Rumi in English are Coleman Barks's version of one of this collection's quatrains — and the quatrains are the part Franklin Lewis is careful to call attributed to him.

  • Set againstFīhi Mā FīhiAttested

    Two books Rumi did not assemble. The Dīvān carries another man's name by his own choice; the Discourses carry nobody's, and some older manuscripts title them al-Asrār al-Jalāliyya instead.

  • IncludesOut Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and RightdoingAttested

    The quatrain behind the English is one of the rubāʿiyāt gathered into the Dīvān, numbered 395 in volume eight of Furūzānfar's edition of 1963.

  • Received fromThe Tomb at KonyaAttested

    The walnut sarcophagus carved for the grave in 1274 was inscribed with one of his own ghazals — 911 in Furūzānfar's numbering — which opens on the day of his death and tells the mourners not to weep.

  • Set againstThe MasnaviAttested

    Rūmī's two bodies of verse: the lyric odes that carry Shams's name, and this teaching poem whose preface names Ḥusām al-Dīn, at whose request it was written.

  • IncludesNeither Christian nor JewDisputed

    Ode XXXI of Nicholson's forty-eight selections, with seven of its twelve couplets in the Tabriz edition of the Dīvān; Gamard reports it missing from the text Furūzānfar built from the earliest manuscripts.

  • IncludesEvery Form You SeeDisputed

    Ode XII of Nicholson's forty-eight selections from the Dīvān; on Gamard's report it is not in the text Furūzānfar built from the earliest manuscripts.

  • IncludesSeek Him in the PlacelessAttested

    Ode XX of Nicholson's forty-eight selections from the Dīvān, in the Tabriz edition at p. 171 by his own table.

  • IncludesUp, O Ye LoversAttested

    Ode XXXVI of Nicholson's forty-eight selections, seventeen couplets long; these are its first six, and by his table the Tabriz edition prints it at p. 45.

  • IncludesWhy Does Not the Soul Take WingAttested

    Ode XXIX of Nicholson's forty-eight selections, fifteen couplets long; the Tabriz edition prints it at p. 38 by his table.

  • IncludesThe Man of GodDisputed

    Ode VIII of Nicholson's forty-eight selections, found by him in the Lakhnau edition of the Dīvān but not in the Tabriz edition, and on Gamard's report not in the earliest manuscripts.

  • IncludesOn the Day of My DeathAttested

    Ode XXIV of Nicholson's forty-eight selections, nine couplets, in the Tabriz edition at p. 171 and the Lakhnau at p. 93 by his table.

  • IncludesEvery Moment the Voice of LoveAttested

    Ode IX of Nicholson's forty-eight selections, twenty couplets, in the Tabriz edition at p. 143 and the Lakhnau at p. 41 by his table.

  • IncludesWhen the Names Were NotDisputed

    Ode XVII of Nicholson's forty-eight selections, in neither the Tabriz nor the Lakhnau edition by his own table, and on Gamard's report not in the earliest manuscripts of the Dīvān.

  • IncludesShow Thy FaceAttested

    Ode XVI of Nicholson's forty-eight selections, twenty-five couplets on the refrain “is my desire”, in the Tabriz edition at p. 146 by his table.

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