The Three Travellers
The Dream He Ate
Masnavi VI · tr. E. H. Whinfield, 1887The Musulman said, “O my friends,My lord, the Prophet Muhammad, appeared to me,And said, ‘The Jew has hurried to the top of Sinai,And plays a game of love with God’s interlocutor;The Christian has been carried by ’Isa, Lord of blissUp to the summit of the fourth heaven;Thou who art left behind and hast endured anguish,Arise quickly and eat the sweetmeats and confections!Those two clever and learned men have ascended,And read their titles of dignity and exaltation;Those two exalted ones have found exalted science,And rivalled the very angels in intellect;O humble and simple and despised one,Arise and eat of the banquet of the divine sweets!”They said to him, “Then you have been gluttonous;Well indeed! you have eaten all the sweets!”He answered, “When my sovereign lord commanded me,Who am I that I should abstain from obeying?Would you, O Jew, resist the commands of MosesIf he bade you do something, either pleasant or not?Would you, O Christian, rebel against ’Isa’s commands,Whether those commands were agreeable or the reverse?How could I rebel against the ‘Glory of the prophets’?Nay, I ate the sweets, and am now happy.”
- First attested
- 1278Masnavi VI.2486–2497 in Nicholson's numbering, from the story of the three travellers, VI.2376–2509. 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.
Whinfield's prose gives the Jew's dream a sentence; Rūmī gives it VI.2427–2449, with Sinai bursting into three pieces and one landing near the Kaʿba at ʿArafāt, then stops to say that many a Jew's end was praiseworthy and that no unbeliever should be looked on with contempt (VI.2450–2452).
Masnavi VI.2427–2452 (Nicholson's translation of Books V–VI, 1934; paraphrased, not quoted); Whinfield 1887, Book VI, Story VII, p. 305.
A Jew, a Christian and a Muslim agree the best dream wins the sweets; the hungry Muslim has eaten them.
Masnavi Book VI.2376–2509 in Nicholson's numbering, told straight after the faqir's treasure as a warning against relying on talent. A Muslim travels with a Jew and a Christian; at an inn a benefactor brings them ḥalwā. The two, already full, want it kept for morning; the Muslim, who has fasted all day, asks to eat or share, is refused with the proverb “The divider is in hell”, and sleeps hungry. At dawn they agree the best dream wins. The Jew tells of Moses and Sinai bursting into three pieces (VI.2427–2449), the Christian of Jesus and the Fourth Heaven; Rūmī breaks in with a camel, an ox and a ram contending for a bunch of grass (VI.2457–2483). The lines here are the Muslim's answer, VI.2486–2497. Whinfield gives the tale in prose and this reply in verse.
Light
The joke lands on credentials. Two travellers compete in visions of the highest heavens while the third, who did as he was told and went to bed hungry, has already eaten, and his companions concede that his dream was “seen by you when awake”.
Shadow
It is a contest among three faiths that the Muslim wins by a trick of obedience, easily told as triumph; the moral in Whinfield's next lines, “Quit excessive speculation and inordinate science”, can be aimed at the other travellers' visions rather than at the reader's own cleverness.
