A Contrastive and Comparative Analysis of Four Commentaries of Masnavi With regard to the Beginning of Third Book

Since 8th century, a number of commentaries have been written on Masnavi and each commentator has explained this valuable book on the basis of his own manner. To know how much the commentators have solved the problems of Masnavi and how much they have been successful in this way, the commentaries of Nicholson, Estelami, Zamani and Shahidi, which are among the most famous ones, have been selected and compared with the beginning of the Third Book of Masnavi. In this essay, the text of Masnavi has been investigated without any kind of interpretations and the attempts of commentators for giving the exact meaning of words and idioms and solving the problems of verses and stanzas have been studied.