How does this Ḥanafī Mufti-poet understand grief in Seljuk Konya vis-a-vis his training in Aleppo and his discipleship under Shams Tabriz?
In the first lines of Mawlānā Rūmī's Mathnawī, he burnishes a metaphor of a reed-flute: 'since I was cut from the reed-bed, men and women have wept with me in lament.' Mawlānā Rūmī begins his six-volume mathnawī with grief, anguish, separation, collective mourning, and a blazing desire to return home. This short lecture will seek to unravel the implications and symbols of grief that Mawlānā deploys in his poetry, drawing from the Quran, aḥādīth, and sufis as vast as Bayazīd Bistāmī and Ibrāhīm Adham.