Masnavi I Ma'navi

The Masnavi is a vast poem, and it opens with neither God nor doctrine. It opens with an order to listen: "Hearken to the reed-flute, how it complains."

The flute is the ney, the reed pipe still played at Sufi gatherings. Before it was an instrument it was a living reed, standing in wet ground among thousands of others. Someone cut it, dried it and bored holes through it. In Whinfield's line it says, "Ever since they tore me from my osier bed, my plaintive notes have moved men and women to tears."

Keep that order of events in mind. The music does not come before the wound, and it does not come in spite of it. The song is the sound of the cutting, carried out on breath.

Listen to what the reed actually complains of. Not pain, not injustice. Distance. "He who abides far away from his home is ever longing for the day he shall return."

Even the holes that make it playable belong to the lament. The reed says, "I burst my breast, striving to give vent to sighs." The openings a player's fingers cover are the places where its grief broke through. Without them it would be a sealed stick and make no sound at all.

So the complaint is not a fault in the instrument. The complaint is what the instrument is. A reed that had never left the bank would be greener and quieter, and nobody at any feast would ever have wept because of it.

Here is the strangest detail in the opening. The flute plays at every gathering, "in concert with them that rejoice and them that weep." It is the same sound at the wedding and at the funeral, and everyone who hears it is sure it is playing their story.

"Each interprets my notes in harmony with his own feelings, but not one fathoms the secrets of my heart." The bride's mother hears joy with a thread of loss in it. The widower hears his wife. Both are moved, and both have missed what was said.

Rumi does not put the secret somewhere else. It is right there in the notes; it is simply not manifest to the sensual eye and ear. He compares it to the soul in a body: never veiled from it, and yet "no man hath ever seen a soul."

In the Prologue, why does everyone weep at the flute and still miss its meaning?

• The listeners are too absorbed in the feast to attend to the music
• The secret lies outside the music, in commentaries only scholars read
• The flute plays one tune for the joyful and another for the grieving
• Each hears his own feelings, and the secret is hidden from the outward ear✓Correct answer

The reed plays one sound "in concert with them that rejoice and them that weep," and each listener hears his own story in it. Its secret is in the notes themselves, but like a soul in a body it cannot be seen with the sensual eye and ear.

The easiest way to hear this opening is as a song about heartbreak. The flute is "the confidant of all unhappy lovers," and it tells "the story of Majnun's love toils" — Majnun, the lover of Arabic and Persian legend who went mad for Laila. Read quickly, the reed is someone who lost someone.

Whinfield blocks that reading with a footnote on the very first mention of love: "Love signifies the strong attraction that draws all creatures back to reunion with their Creator."

That is the key the Sufi tradition hands you. The reed is the soul. The reed-bed is where the soul came from, which is God. Majnun is in the poem because human heartbreak is the nearest thing most of us have felt to that pull. A lover's story is the flute's language, not its subject.

Then comes a line that sounds almost like a threat: "This plaint of the flute is fire, not mere air. Let him who lacks this fire be accounted dead!"

Notice who gets called dead. Not the grieving, not the restless, not the one who cannot settle into ordinary satisfactions. The dead one is the person who feels no pull at all, who has made himself at home in exile and no longer notices he was ever cut.

The same fire is why Rumi calls the flute both "a poison and an antidote." The longing burns, and it is also the thing that keeps the soul turned toward home. Take away the ache and you take away the life — which is the opposite of what we usually want done with an ache.