Signs of Forethought and Conscious Composition in Masnavi

Is art created consciously or unconsciously? This question always sparks controversies amongst artists, researchers, philosophers, and psychologists. Nonetheless, as an intricate phenomenon, art demands both consciousness and unconsciousness to come into existence, and manifest attributes of both realms. Poetry is the most prominent artistic form of the ancient world, and to our predecessors, thinkers, Sufis, and poets were educators. Therefore, the vast portion of the ancient literature is didactic, and poetry has been used as a rhetorical devise to effectively convey the poets’ beliefs and instructions to the audience or the readers. Needless to say, didactics requires forethought and conscious thoughts of the educators on what they aim to teach. Masnavi</em> is amongst the greatest Sufist didactic texts. Surprisingly, some believe that Masnavi</em> comes from a free stream of consciousness and, as a result, they describe Masnavi</em> as a chaotic, disorganized and opaque work. Chaotically, he delivers an ordinary tale by means of a chain of semantic and sentimental blocks (Abdul-Hakim, 1977). And sometimes researchers have doubts and offer contradictory observations; … Rumi has surrendered himself to inspiration to see where it gets him. However, this does not imply that Rumi does not engage his conscious thoughts. As he has mastered several levels of knowledge simultaneously, ‘no task stops Him from doing other tasks’. The proof is that he returns to speech whenever he wants (Zekavati Gharehguzlu, 2007).