The Masnavi, Book Six

’Until effaced no one can actually
Enter the Court of Holy Majesty.
What is the meaning of the heavenly ascension?
Non-being: the mystics’ law school and religion.’

Rumi is the greatest mystic poet to have written in Persian, and The Masnavi is his masterpiece. Divided into six books and consisting of some 26,000 verses, the poem was designed to convey teachings about divine love and unity to the disciples of the Sufi order that he founded, best known today as the Whirling Dervishes. Like the earlier books, Book Six interweaves amusing stories with homilies and lyrical flights. The longest of all the six volumes at nearly 5,000 verses, its themes focus on self-annihilation in God and the oneness experienced at the end of the Sufi path by the realized mystic. Rumi is believed to have completed it shortly before his death on 17 December 1273.

This is the first ever verse translation into English of the entirety of Book Six of Rumi’s The Masnavi. It follows the original by presenting Rumi’s most mature mystical teachings in simple and attractive rhyming couplets.

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Jalal al-Din Rumi

Jawid Mojaddedi is Professor of Religion at Rutgers University. Born in Afghanistan, he was a 2014-15 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellow and a 2020-21 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. His translation of The Masnavi: Book One (OUP, 2004) was awarded the Lois Roth Prize by the American Institute of Iranian Studies. His previous books include Beyond Dogma: Rumi’s Teachings on Friendship with God and Early Sufi Theories (OUP, 2012) and The Biographical Tradition in Sufism (2001).