Twenty Five Thousand Couplets, Composed for One Disciple

The Masnavi, also transliterated Mathnawi, is Jalal al-Din Rumi's six book Persian poem of roughly twenty five thousand rhyming couplets, composed across the final twelve or so years of his life at the request of his close disciple Husam al-Din Chalabi, who is said to have written down the verses as Rumi spoke them. It teaches almost entirely through story, weaving folk tales, animal fables, Quranic episodes and anecdotes of prophets and fools into an argument about the soul's separation from and longing for God, so that a reader learns Rumi's theology less by following an explicit system than by absorbing the moral of one story after another.

The poem opens with the famous image of a reed cut from its reed bed, crying out in longing to be rejoined to its source, a figure for the human soul's exile from God that sets the tone for everything that follows across the six books. Because it teaches through narrative rather than argument, the Masnavi has always been read as much for its stories individually as for any single doctrine extracted from the whole, and generations of readers across the Persian speaking world have grown up with its tales long before encountering it as a work of formal Sufi metaphysics.