SOURCE: Davis, Dick. “Narrative and Doctrine in the first story of Rumi's Mathnawi.” Journal of Semitic Studies, Supplement 12 (2000): 93-104.

In the following essay, Davis examines the first story of the Mathnawi and suggests that the interruptions and interpolations within the story undermine the entire structure of explication, leaving the reader with a poem that simultaneously demands and resists interpretation, subverts allegorical meanings as soon as it establishes them, and remains stubbornly grounded in human experience even as it attempts transcendence.

I first read medieval Persian in Tehran, in the early 1970s, under the tutelage of my friend, later my PhD adviser, Norman Calder. We began, hubristically enough, with the first book of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī's (d. 1273) Mathnawī, which Norman guided me through with exemplary kindness, patience, enthusiasm and erudition. Now, almost thirty years later, I look back with deep nostalgia and pleasure on those...