The Lover and the Night Patrol
A Blessing on the Watchman
Masnavi IV.53–65 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1930God had made the night-patrol the means, so that in fear of him he (the lover) should run into the orchard by nightAnd should see the beloved one searching with a lantern for a ring in the rivulet of the orchard.Therefore at that moment, from the delight (which he experienced), he conjoined praise of God with prayers for the night-patrol,Saying, “I caused loss to the night-patrol by fleeing (from him): scatter o’er him twenty times as much silver and gold.Set him free from policing: make him glad even as I am glad.Keep him blest in this world and in that world, deliver him from policing and currishness—Though it is the nature of that policeman, O God, that he always desires the people to be afflicted.”If news come that the king has imposed a fine upon the Moslems, he (the policeman) waxes big and exultant;And if news come that the king has shown mercy and has generously taken off that (penalty) from the Moslems,A mournfulness falls upon his soul thereat: the policeman hath a hundred such depravities.He (the lover) was bringing the policeman into the prayer (of benediction), because such solace had come to him from the policeman.He (the policeman) was poison to all (others), but to him (he was) the antidote: the policeman was the means of uniting that longing lover (with the object of his desire).Hence there is no absolute evil in the world: evil is relative. Know this (truth) also.
- First attested
- 1278No autograph survives. The oldest witness is the Qoniya manuscript (G), dated 677 A.H. = A.D. 1278, which Nicholson judged “the most authoritative text of the Mathnawi”; he wrote in April 1930 that his text “from Book III, v. 2836, to the end of Book IV is founded on that ancient and admirable MS.”, so both halves of this tale, III.4749–4810 and IV.40–65, stand in the stretch he edited from the oldest copy.
The tale straddles two books. Book III breaks off at III.4810, “If you wish (to read) the rest of this tale, seek (it), O my brother, in the Fourth Book”, and when IV.40–41 resumes it the lover's years of tribulation have become eight, where III.4780 had said seven.
Mathnawī III.4780, III.4810 and IV.40–41, in Nicholson's translation of Books III and IV (1930)
Fleeing the night-patrol, a lover runs into an orchard, finds his beloved there, and prays for the watchman.
Rūmī begins the tale at Mathnawī III.4749: a youth madly in love with a woman whom no messenger, letter or bird can reach. After a long digression he returns to it at III.4780, after seven years of seeking, and at III.4804 the lover, in fear of the night-patrol, springs into an orchard by night, finds his beloved there, and cries, “O God, have mercy on the night-patrol!” Book III then breaks off, telling the reader to seek the rest of the tale in the Fourth Book (III.4810). After Book IV's prose preface and its opening address to Ḥusām al-Dīn, the story resumes at IV.40. The passage here is IV.53–65: the beloved searching with a lantern for a ring in the orchard's stream, the lover's prayer for the policeman, and the conclusion that evil is relative.
Light
It lets a reader bless the thing that frightened them: the lover owes his union to the man he ran from, and asks that the watchman be paid twenty times over and set free from his trade.
Shadow
The blessing does not redeem the watchman. In the same breath he is one who “always desires the people to be afflicted” and grieves when the king remits a fine on the Moslems (IV.59–62): evil made relative for the lover stays evil for everyone else.
