The Masnavi

A vast poem in six books and roughly twenty-five thousand rhyming couplets, composed in Persian by Rumi in Konya and, according to tradition, dictated to his disciple Ḥusām al-Dīn Chalabī. It begins with the lament of the reed flute torn from its reed bed, an image of the soul longing to return to its origin. Rather than setting out a system, it moves through hundreds of stories, fables and Qur'anic episodes, breaking off to comment and digress and nesting one tale within another. Among the best known are the elephant in a dark house, which people who touch it describe as a pipe, a fan or a pillar, a lesson in the partiality of knowledge; and Moses rebuking a shepherd for his naive prayer, only to be rebuked by God in turn. Its themes are love, the illusions of the self, the limits of reason, and the presence of the divine in ordinary life.

It is the masterpiece of Persian Sufi literature, and behind its stories lies a serious philosophy of love, knowledge and the self that popular quotations rarely convey.