The Man of God

A King Beneath the Darvish-Cloak

The man of God is drunken without wine,The man of God is full without meat.The man of God is distraught and bewildered,The man of God has no food or sleep.The man of God is a king ’neath darvish-cloak,The man of God is a treasure in a ruin.The man of God is not of air and earth,The man of God is not of fire and water.The man of God is a boundless sea,The man of God rains pearls without a cloud.The man of God hath hundred moons and skies,The man of God hath hundred suns.The man of God is made wise by the Truth,The man of God is not learned from book.The man of God is beyond infidelity and religion,To the man of God right and wrong are alike.The man of God has ridden away from Not-being,The man of God is gloriously attended.The man of God is concealed, Shamsi Dīn;The man of God do thou seek and find!

Dīvān-e Shams, ode VIII · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1898
First attested
1441The oldest witness Nicholson names is V, the Vienna manuscript dated 4th Muḥarram 845 A.H. (May 1441). He printed the ode from the Leyden manuscript (L), dated 851 A.H.; the foot of the Persian on p. 28 reads “L Lakh. V”, and his Appendix III gives it in the Lakhnau edition (p. 28) and as no. 22 of Rosenzweig's Auswahl (Vienna, 1838), with no Tabriz-edition reference. Ibrahim Gamard lists it among seven of Nicholson's forty-eight odes that “are no longer considered authentic Rumi poems” and are not in the earliest manuscripts.

For the “king ’neath darvish-cloak” Nicholson's note gives two parallels: Ḥāfiẓ on the poor who obey Love, “Unbelted monarchs, crownless kings are they”, and, from a poem by Abū ’l ʿAtāhiya to which Professor Bevan drew his attention: “If thou seekest the most noble of all mankind, Behold a king in beggar's garb!”

Nicholson, Selected Poems (1898), note on VIII. 3, p. 219, citing Ḥāfiẓ (I. 366. 6) and Abū ’l ʿAtāhiya in the Transactions of the Ninth Congress of Orientalists, Vol. II, p. 114

Twenty lines on one phrase, “The man of God”: drunk without wine, a king in a darvish-cloak, beyond religion.

Ode VIII, ten couplets, printed here whole; nineteen of its twenty lines open on “The man of God”. The man of God — “the perfect Sūfī”, Nicholson's note says — is drunken without wine and full without meat, a king beneath a darvish-cloak and a treasure in a ruin; he is not made of the four elements; he is a boundless sea that rains pearls without a cloud; he is made wise by the Truth, not by books; he is beyond infidelity and religion, and right and wrong are alike to him; he is hidden, and the last couplet, naming Shamsi Dīn, bids the reader seek and find him. Nicholson printed it as Rūmī's from the Leyden manuscript (L), finding it also in the Lakhnau edition, the Vienna copy (V) and Rosenzweig's Auswahl; but Ibrahim Gamard's Dar al-Masnavi pages list it among seven of his forty-eight odes that “are no longer considered authentic Rumi poems” and are not in the earliest manuscripts.

Light

One repeated subject turns a list into an incantation, and the portrait it builds is of freedom from need — wine, meat, sleep, books, even the four elements — rather than of a rank to be claimed: the king wears a darvish-cloak and the treasure lies in a ruin.

Shadow

“To the man of God right and wrong are alike” is the line Nicholson glosses as the Ṣūfī adept being above law: whatever he does proceeds directly from God. Speaking of the Ṣūfī Master, his introduction (p. xxi) warns of the mischievous effect, on vulgar and uneducated minds, of theories that condone and glorify a Master's very crimes, though he acquits Rūmī of that extravagance. And Ibrahim Gamard lists this ode among seven of Nicholson's that are no longer considered authentic Rumi poems.

Sources and verification4 sources · 4 links

Primary source

Scholarship

  • Reynold A. Nicholson, Selected Poems from the Dīvāni Shamsi Tabrīz, notes to ode VIII, 1898, pp. 219–222The man of God as the perfect Ṣūfī (couplet 1), the tradition on fasting and the Abū ’l ʿAtāhiya parallel (couplets 1 and 3), the four elements and breaking “through to the Oneness” (couplet 4), learning (couplet 7), the Truth independent of outward forms and the adept above law (couplet 8), the 4000 hidden saints of the Kashf al-Maḥjūb as reported by Jāmī (couplet 10), and the ḥadīth “he who seeks earnestly shall find”.

    Fasting is the food of God whereby he revives the bodies of the sincere.

Where this claim originates

Further reading

Linked entries

  • Attributed toRūmīDisputed

    Nicholson printed it as Rūmī's from the Leyden manuscript, and it was already no. 22 in Rosenzweig's 1838 Auswahl; Ibrahim Gamard lists it among seven of Nicholson's odes that are no longer considered authentic Rumi poems and not in the earliest manuscripts.

  • Part ofThe Dīvān-e Shams-e TabrīzīDisputed

    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.

  • Derives fromReynold A. NicholsonAttested

    The English is Nicholson's 1898 prose, one line to each half-couplet, nineteen of the twenty lines beginning “The man of God”.

  • Set againstNeither Christian nor JewAttested

    The man of God “is not of air and earth”; in ode XXXI the speaker is not of earth, water, air or fire, and Nicholson's note on XXXI. 3 points back to this ode (cf. VIII. 4); both are among the seven odes Gamard lists as no longer considered authentic.

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