An interactive talk by Alan Williams on Rumi’s mystical masterpiece.

The Heart of the Masnavi

Alan Williams says:

Book Three of Rumi’s Masnavi, which will be published in a few weeks’ time, is generally regarded as his most profound. It can be regarded as its heart, where Rumi does not mince his words. In this talk I shall discuss the perplexities and challenges of what some say is ‘beyond the reader’s comprehension’ (this is not my view). Book Three is what some might call, in Gurdjieff’s terms, the ‘mi-fa’ interval of the whole work, namely the crux of difficulties. This crux is our human fear of bodily mortality, and its underlying causes. Rumi is not obsessed with death, but he puts it into a greater perspective as part of the cycle of existence and non-existence.

Alan Williams is Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at The University of Manchester. He is the author of books, articles and essays on Middle and Classical Persian religious texts. Among the Persian texts he has published are two volumes of Rumi’s Masnavi (2020) in an ongoing series of six for IB Tauris, London. Alan is a Fellow and Trustee of the British Institute of Persian Studies, a Trustee of the E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust, which publishes Nicholson’s Masnavi, and he is also a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He lives in Buxton, Derbyshire and has three adult children and four grandchildren. His experience of Beshara predates Swyre Farm, Gloucestershire in the 1970s. He has given many talks to Beshara around the country, several times at Chisholme, and most recently at this venue in 2023.

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