The oldest complete manuscript of the Mathnawi
Copied by Muhammad ibn Abdallah al-Qunyavi al-Valadi, illuminated by Mukhlis ibn Abdallah al-Hindi (active late thirteenth century) · 1278
In a glass case in the manuscript rooms lies the book for which Rumi is best known, the Mathnawi, in a copy finished in Konya in November or December 1278, only five years after the poet's death. The page usually shown opens with the eighteen couplets that Rumi wrote in his own hand as the beginning of the poem, the famous song of the reed flute that laments its separation from the reed bed. Two columns of clear black script sit inside a frame of gold and blue, with a rectangular headpiece above filled with knotted ornament, and the whole is in the kind of careful, upright hand that scribes of the time used for the Quran.
The Mathnawi runs to about twenty five thousand couplets in six books, dictated by Rumi to his companion Hüsameddin Çelebi over more than ten years and left unfinished at his death. It is a river of stories, parables and sudden flights of teaching, in which a shopkeeper's parrot, a lion and a hare, or a lover knocking at a door become lessons about the soul's longing for God. Persian readers have called it the Quran in Persian. This copy was made by Muhammad son of Abdallah of Konya, a follower of Rumi's son Sultan Veled, and decorated by an illuminator named Mukhlis son of Abdallah, called the Indian; it was checked against the poet's own recitation and is regarded as the most reliable text that survives.
The museum holds several thousand manuscripts, many of them gifts to the lodge over the centuries, and this volume is the heart of the collection. Editions and translations of the Mathnawi in dozens of languages descend from it, and scholars still come here to compare readings. Look closely at the margins and you can see the small marks of later readers, a reminder that this was a working book before it became a treasure.
Did You Know? The copy was completed in 1278, so close to Rumi's death that it could still be corrected by people who had heard him recite the poem.
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