The Masnavi (Spiritual Couplets)
Rumi's epic masterwork: six books of rhymed couplets containing mystical stories, parables, Sufi philosophy, and digressions so rich they contain worlds within worlds. Where the Divan is lyric intensity, the Masnavi is the great long poem of Islamic mysticism. The reed flute's lament for the reed bed is its most famous image, and one of the most beautiful in all of world literature.
Six books, twenty-five thousand couplets, stories nested inside stories that interrupt other stories; almost nobody reads it through, including many who recommend it. English offers a hard choice: scholarly versions thick with apparatus, or popular paraphrases that quietly strip the Islam out of a poem its own tradition calls the Quran in Persian. The rhyme dies in translation either way.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
