SOURCE: A. J. Arberry, in an introduction to Tales from the Masnavi, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1961, pp. 11-20.

In this excerpt, Arberry examines the prosody and poetic style of the Masnavi and discusses how Rumi was influenced by his predecessors.

The use of the parable in religious teaching has of course a very long history, and Rumi broke no new ground when he decided to lighten the weight of his doctrinal exposition by introducing tales and fables to which he gave an allegorical twist. He was especially indebted, as he freely acknowledges in the course of his poem, to two earlier Persian poets, Sana'i of Ghazna and Farid al-Din 'Attar of Nishapur. More will be said presently of these authors, Rumi's immediate models; but they themselves, though original writers within the boundaries of Persian poetical literature, were not original in an absolute sense. Persian authors, many of...