Abstract
The importance and position of Masnavi in stating mystical subjects and the audience's attention to it brought about commentary writing on this important poetry and gradually began ...
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The importance and position of Masnavi in stating mystical subjects and the audience's attention to it brought about commentary writing on this important poetry and gradually began to spread as a literary-mystical movement in different times and regions. Each of Masnavi commentaries has been written with different structure and approach to describe Rumi's poems. Although these commentaries have literary and mystical benefits, there are also significant shortcomings. Among the most important shortcomings is the commentators' lack of attention to Rumi's spiritual disposition. The most important thing about Rumi's mystical disposition is that he is one of the elders of the first mystical tradition. Therefore, his views are totally different than those of Ibn Arabi who is a Sufi from the second tradition. Accordingly, the adoption of principles and themes of the second tradition to explain Rumi's' views is not a right approach. In this article, we study and analyze Masnavi’s commentaries using a new method and provide novel findings in this domain. To this end, we have investigated the most important commentaries from their commencement up to today in terms of their attention to Rumi's mystical disposition. Our findings reveal that almost all commentaries on Masnavi have committed the slip, attributing Rumi's mystical disposition to the second mystical tradition. Of course, these commentaries are different in how and how much to apply the principles and issues of the second tradition for commenting on Masnavi.