the story of the king

The narration of ‘the King and the Maid’ as the first anecdote of Rumi's Masnavi after the section of Ney Name is one of the most serious stories of this poem and the most basic ideas of the poet are included in it. The high importance of this anecdote has caused many Masnavi scholars to interpret the meanings and explain its symbols. This issue leads to the emergence of multiple and often conflicting views. A group of commentators have considered the story of ‘the king and the maid’ as a symbolic story focusing on its symbols while another group, though emphasizing the importance of the anecdote, considered this kind of symbolism inappropriate to Rumi's taste and ingenuity. Having a correct judgment about such different views requires the use of framed methods of reading literary and artistic texts.  Using Roland Barthes's method, thus, can be helpful. While distinguishing between a ‘readable text’ and ‘written text’, Barthes considered a written text to be a system of different codes that, in conjunction with each other, give rise to multiple meanings. Accordingly, he suggests  analyzing the meaning in the text using the five hermeneutic, action, semantic, symbolic, and cultural codes. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the main discourses reinforced by different semantic levels of the text using a descriptive-analytical method. In this way, a scientific position was reached on resolving conflicts between commentators over the meaning of the symbols and the basic concepts of this story. The results of the study of text cryptography show that the three discourses of ‘sheikh, seeker’, ‘top side, bottom side’ and ‘trust, pride’ are the main discourses of the text and all cryptographies and semantic levels reinforce these discourses. In the context of the meaning of the symbols of the story, the focus on the main dualities of the text shows that this story symbolically represents the connection between the dimensions of human existence. According to Ibn Sina's views on how the soul belongs to the earthly body, the symbols of the anecdote can be interpreted as follows: the king is the symbol of the soul, the maid is the symbol of the body, and the goldsmith is the symbol of the world.

The Study of love and its meaning, not as a philosophical, literary or social concept, but as a multidimensional concept, has stretched different aspects of human life, from the adventure of mysterious creation to the mechanical life in today's world, and it has been in the idea of the scholars of the different nations, from Plato and Avicenna to Simon de Beauvoir and Sternberg. For this reason, we recognize love as a motivating category that made created enthusiasm in different layers of human life, and it has been manifesting at the highest level of human mental experience. Among the works in which a specific concept of love is expressed, we can mention The Symposium of Plato and The King and Slave Girl of Mevlana. Each of these two works has showed the metamorphosis of the concept of love and its types. This paper, relying on the relationship between wisdom and philosophy, studies the truth of love, the types of love, and its functions and requirements in these two works. The most important conclusions of this study are that love in the idea of Plato and Mevlana, has an evolutionary path. The base of Plato and Mevlana’s attitude to love is philosophical, and according to this view they have studied the nature and essence of love, and then they classified the categories of love based on its quality. In the wisdom view to the concept of love, there is a significant relationship between the higher and lower of its types. Mevlana is influenced by ancient Greek philosophy in the story of The King and Slave Girl.

The present paper aims at a different reading of the first story in Masnaviin order to investigate into the reflection of the private life of Rumi and his social relations with important and influential people in his life. Therefore, in addition to approving the various readings and interpretations by prominent Iranian and foreign researchers, the story will be analyzed based on the history of Rumi’s life in this paper. Rumi had been sending away the memories of meeting and living with Shams and the tragic end of this relation to the secret layers of his mind despite severe mental conflicts he had during the long interval between absence of Shams and writing Masnavi. He tried to calm himself by writing sorrowful ghazals. The suppressed memories seem to come from his unconscious and are revealed in the secret layers of the story’s narration. By using replacement”, “integration and “condensation in this story, Rumi reports the most important point of his life and expresses his story with Shams in form of another story, that is King, the slave girl, the goldsmith and divine physician. Therefore, he reconstructs the story by replacing himself with king, Shams with the divine physician, Kimia Khatoon with the slave girl, and Ala’eddin Mohammad with the goldsmith so as to defend his act in relation with Shams. Such secrecy is because he is still afraid of clearly stating his condition and tries to conceal the truth of his state of mind by using such narration techniques.