The Ruby and the Sun
The Same Words, Two Fates
Masnavi V · tr. E. H. Whinfield, 1887Whether that pure ruby hold itself dear,Or hold the sun dear,There is no difference between the two preferences;On either hand is naught but the light of dawn.But till that stone becomes a ruby it hates itself,For till it becomes one ‘I,’ it is two separate ‘I’s,’For ’tis then darkened and purblind,And darkness is the essential enemy of light.If it then hold itself dear, it is an infidel;Because that self is an opponent of the mighty Sun.Wherefore ’tis unlawful for the stone then to say ‘I,’Because it is entirely in darkness and nothingness.”Pharaoh said, “I am the Truth,” and was laid low.Mansur Hallaj said, “I am the Truth,” and escaped free.Pharaoh’s “I” was followed by the curse of God;Mansur’s “I” was followed by the mercy of God, O beloved!Because Pharaoh was a stone, Mansur a ruby;Pharaoh an enemy of light, Mansur a friend.O prattler, Mansur’s “I am He” was a deep mystic saying,Expressing union with the light, not mere incarnation.
- First attested
- 1278Masnavi V.2029–2038 in Nicholson's numbering, from the passage V.2020–2038 inside the story of Maḥmūd and Ayāz. No autograph survives. The earliest complete manuscript, the Konya copy, was finished in December 1278, five years after Rūmī's death; Nicholson judged the Qoniya MS., dated 677 A.H., the most authoritative text of the poem, and his printed text from Book III, v. 2836 onward follows it. The English quoted here rests on something later: Whinfield made his translation from the Bulaq edition of 1268 A.H., keying his section pages to the Lucknow edition of 1282 A.H., and it is quoted from the London printing of 1887 (Trübner & Co.).
- Claimed
- the 1270sasserted by Nicholson, in the Introduction to his translation of Books V and VI (dated Cambridge, 19 April 1933), places both books in the years when Rūmī was nearing seventy; Whinfield gives Rūmī's dates as born at Balkh in 604 A.H. (1207) and died at Qonia in 672 A.H. (1273), and Book VI breaks off unfinished. The 1270s decade is this entry's reading of those two statements: no manuscript from Rūmī's lifetime survives to date the book.
Rūmī does not rest the defence on Ḥallāj alone. His prose heading to V.2020 sets beside the lover's answer a divine saying: go out to My creatures with My attributes, and whoever sees you sees Me. Nicholson's parenthesis names the one addressed as Bāyazīd. Whinfield's heading reads only “A description of genuine union with God”.
Rūmī's prose heading before Masnavi V.2020 (Nicholson's translation of Books V–VI, 1934, paraphrased, not quoted; the Persian heading, read at masnavi.net, gives the saying without naming Bāyazīd); Whinfield 1887, Book V, Story VIII, p. 247.
Pharaoh and Ḥallāj both said “I am the Truth”; Rūmī calls one a stone and the other a ruby full of sun.
Masnavi Book V, inside the story of Sultan Maḥmūd and Ayāz. At V.2020 in Nicholson's numbering a beloved tests her lover at the morning drink: does he love her more, or himself? He answers that he is lost in her like vinegar in honey — like a stone changed wholly into ruby and filled with the sun, which in loving itself loves the sun. Until then the stone is two “I”s, dark and the enemy of light, and may not say “I”. From there Rūmī turns to Pharaoh and Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj, who said the same words to opposite ends. The lines here are V.2029–2038. Rūmī's prose heading sets beside the lover's answer a divine saying: whoever sees the one sent out with God's attributes sees God. Whinfield's notes cite Shabistarī's Gulshan-i Rāz and record that Ḥallāj was put to death at Baghdad in 309 A.H.
Light
It gives the most dangerous sentence in Sufism a reason rather than a pardon: the same words are blasphemy or truth depending on whether a self is left to say them, and the image of a dark stone turned to ruby, holding nothing but sunlight, makes the difference visible.
Shadow
The test cannot be run from outside: nothing in the words tells stone from ruby, so the passage can shelter any claimant who calls his critics “prattler”. It clears Ḥallāj's saying without a word on his death, which only Whinfield's footnote records.
