The Moaning Pillar
Be Not Less Than Wood
Masnavi I.2113–2122 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1926The moaning pillar was complaining of (its) separation from the Prophet, just as rational beings (might do).The Prophet said, “O pillar, what dost thou want?” It said, “My soul is turned to blood because of parting from thee.I was thy support: (now) thou hast run away from me: thou hast devised a place to lean against upon the pulpit.”“Dost thou desire,” said he, “to be made a date-palm, (so that) the people of the East and the West shall gather fruit from thee?Or that He (God) should make thee a cypress in yonder world, so that thou wilt remain everlastingly fresh and flourishing?”It replied, “I desire that whereof the life is enduring for ever.” Hearken, O heedless one! Be not thou less than a piece of wood!He (the Prophet) buried that pillar in the earth, that it may be raised from the dead, like mankind, on the day of Resurrection,That (hence) thou mayst know that every one whom God has called (to Himself) remains disengaged from all the work of this world.Whosoever hath his work and business from God, gains admission there and goes forth from (abandons worldly) work.He that hath no gift (portion) of spiritual mysteries, how should he believe in the complaining of inanimate things?
- First attested
- 1278The text is Masnavi I.2113–2122. The oldest dated copy Nicholson used is the Konya manuscript, his G, "dated 677 a.h." — 1278, five years after Rūmī's death — which he judged in April 1930 "the most authoritative text of the Mathnawí". He translated Book I in 1926, before adopting G, and his 1930 volume lists in an appendix where G differs from that text. It records no reading of G inside this passage; just before it, at I.2112, G gives "the (spiritual) apprehension of (possessed by) stone and wood" for "the friendliness (awareness) of stone and wood". Book I carries no date of its own; Book II opens by dating its own start to A.H. 662 (1263–64), after a delay, so Book I was finished by then.
Bukhārī's Ṣaḥīḥ has the story from Jābir and Ibn ʿUmar: a date-palm trunk, one of those "working as pillars", cries "like a child" or "like a pregnant she-camel" until the Prophet touches or embraces it. None of these reports offers the date-palm or the cypress, or buries it (I.2116–2119).
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, tr. M. Muhsin Khan: vol. 2, bk. 13, no. 41; vol. 4, bk. 56, nos. 783–785 (archive.org, en_sahih_al-bukhari_202003); Nicholson 1926, Masnavi I.2116–2119
A pillar moans when the Prophet leaves it for a new pulpit, and chooses eternal life over life as a palm.
Masnavi I.2113–2160, told inside the tale of the old harper to prove what ʿUmar's dream has just said, that "(Even) wood and stone have understood that voice" (I.2109). Rūmī's heading gives the occasion: the congregation had grown too large to see the Prophet's face, so a pulpit was made, and the pillar he had leaned on complained "just as rational beings (might do)". The Prophet offers it a choice — to be a date-palm whose fruit East and West will gather, or a cypress in the next world — and it chooses "that whereof the life is enduring for ever". He buries it, to be raised at the Resurrection. Rūmī turns on doubters, then adds a second proof: pebbles in Bu Jahl's fist that recite the profession of faith (I.2154–2160). The lines here are I.2113–2122. Whinfield's 1887 abridgment leaves the pillar out.
Light
It gives a piece of wood the purest choice in the tale — fruit for the whole world or evergreen life hereafter — and has it ask only for what lasts; then it turns that choice on the reader: "Be not thou less than a piece of wood!"
Shadow
Rūmī tells it as proof and wields it against doubters: whoever cannot believe that inanimate things complain lacks "spiritual mysteries" and says "Yes" only "for agreement's sake"; "Myriads of conformists and legalists" fall at a single doubt; and "The leg of the syllogisers is of wood" (I.2122–2128).
