Rumi and Shakespeare

The focus of the story now shifts from the error of the grocer in yielding to his inordinate anger to the attempt of the parrot to understand what had happened to it. It commits an error of conception as grave as the character flaw of the grocer. The parrot assumes that baldness is a sign of sin and that the Sufi master must have committed the same mistake it had committed. From Rumi’s perspective, mystics have reached heights of spirituality that make their behavior difficult for ordinary people to understand, and the latter must avoid using their quotidian metrics to judge the actions of those intoxicated with God. By discerning the countenances of those devoted to ultimate reality and those devoted to this world, the believer gains the potential to recognize the ultimate truth.³

There are two parallel threads in this story. The first is about how a fierce outburst, driven by a loss of self-control and a surrender to rage, can ruin a prosperous and happy life. This indiscipline of the grocer is paralleled in the second thread by the narrow horizon of the parrot, who mistakes an outward similarity for an inner reality. In both the grocer and the parrot, we can see a disastrous, reflexive rush to judgment. Although the story has implications for the internal discipline of the self, it also serves as a warning about one’s relationship with others. A single violent outburst can ruin essential relationships, and an inability to abandon a narcissistic worldview can prevent one from grasping how others might have attained virtues lacking in oneself. One author notes of the episode of the parrot and the bald Sufi, “Rumi satirically shows the way people try to assimilate the Other’s identity with their own. Rumi relates this parable under the veneer of satire to criticize the way people ignore the Other’s true self and how heedlessly they fabricate the Other’s identity.”⁴

Ill-considered, impulsive violence of the sort to which the grocer resorted reveals an undisciplined base self driven by visceral emotions rather than restraint and ethical virtue. Such violence, Rumi is saying, harms not only others but the very soul of the perpetrator. In this way, Rumi’s story resembles Shakespeare’s Othello. A Venetian general of North African (“Moorish”) origin, Othello, marries the high-born Desdemona against her father’s wishes. Othello is sent to Cyprus to ward off an Ottoman naval attack—an attack foiled by a cyclone. In Cyprus, Othello’s false friend, Iago––actually a spiteful rival––whispers in his ear that Desdemona is unfaithful. In furtherance of his diabolical plot, Iago has his wife steal a keepsake from Desdemona, the first gift the Moor ever gave her. When Desdemona cannot find the handkerchief embroidered with strawberries, it angers Othello, who takes it as a sign of her lack of interest in him. Iago gaslights Othello relentlessly, insinuating that another of the officers sent to Cyprus, the Florentine Cassio, is having an affair with Desdemona. Driven to a jealous rage, Othello smothers Desdemona to death with a pillow in their bedroom. When the others come running, Iago’s wife Emilia realizes what has happened and reveals Iago’s plot. Iago, enraged, kills her and then is wounded in a fight by the betrayed Othello. 

Othello now feels the full force of guilt for having slain his innocent wife. He soliloquizes, addressing the corpse of his dead spouse, imagining his own descent into hell:

Where should Othello go?
[He looks toward the bed.]
Now, how dost thou look now? O ill-starred wench,
Pale as thy smock, when we shall meet at compt,
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,
And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl?
Even like thy chastity.—O cursèd, cursèd slave!—
Whip me, you devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulfur,
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
O Desdemona! Dead, Desdemona! Dead! O, O!

Othello’s remorse and grief are even greater than those of Rumi’s greengrocer, who wished his hands had been mangled before he could attack his precious parrot. In the end, Othello commits suicide, his crime having irretrievably ruined his life, whereas the grocer gets a second chance when his parrot recovers its voice on seeing the glabrous head of the Sufi. Rumi’s story is ultimately not a tragedy but a tale of redemption, which can be achieved if one can tell the difference between the attributes of commoners and those of religious virtuosi. It is the accessibility of the divine irruption into daily life that allows for structural comedy in Rumi.

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The supreme importance of self-discipline is also underscored in the story Rumi tells of ¢Alī ibn Abī Ţālib, the son-in-law and first cousin of the Prophet.⁵ In a battle, Rumi writes, ¢Alī engages his enemy in swordplay and bests him, readying his double-pointed sword for the coup de grâce. At that point the pagan, identified in some versions of the story as ¢Amr ibn ¢Abd Wadd, spits in ¢Alī’s face. The Prophet’s cousin throws down his sword and grants quarter. His pagan foe is astonished at this mercy and forbearance. ¢Alī explains that he was fighting for the sake of God and was not at the command of his physical body. “I am,” he says, “the Lion of God, not the Lion of Passion.”⁶ He says that he was not a straw blowing in the wind but a solid mountain of self-discipline (ĥilm) and patience (śabr). He explains that since his enemy spit in his face and angered him, something other than God had intruded into his motivations, and therefore he had no choice but to sheathe his sword. He says that a man who is a slave to his passions is worse than an actual slave, since the latter can be manumitted but the former will die in bitterness.

Rumi depicts ¢Alī as the perfect mystic master, one who escapes the hold of base passions. As in the case of the Prophet Muhammad, he is the freeman, the son of the freeman, having entirely avoided the condition of bondage. In such a state of liberty, ¢Alī says, anger could not bind him. He left human attributes behind, such that only the divine qualities were present. He is invited to a godly station: “Come in, since you have been made free by the grace of God, for his mercy has taken precedence over his wrath.”⁷ Just as God in Islam is the All-Merciful, a primary attribute, so must believers exemplify this quality.

The battle between ¢Alī and the pagan unbeliever is depicted as an allegory of the internal struggle of believers to overcome their own worst instincts. Rumi even identifies ¢Alī with the pagan, rejecting outward binary distinctions, having ¢Alī address his fallen foe: “You are I and I am you, my dear friend. You were ¢Alī, so how could I kill ¢Alī?”⁸ He maintains that the man’s sin, in attempting to strike down the Prophet’s son-in-law, had fortunate consequences, since it led to ¢Alī pardoning him. It has been pointed out that the Qur’anic notion of reconciliation or peacemaking (śulĥ) left a profound imprint on Rumi’s works. Here he writes, “Because of the Messenger of the Truth, they became one soul; / Otherwise each one would have been an absolute enemy [to the other].” This passage has been related to Qur’an 8:63, which speaks of how God brought the hearts of the believers together in Medina across tribal divisions.⁹

In Shakespeare, the theme of generosity toward enemies is central to The Tempest. Prospero is the former duke of Milan, who was deposed in a plot by his treacherous brother Antonio. Prospero and his daughter Miranda have been exiled to a small, barren island in the Mediterranean between Italy and Tunisia. The defeated and abject Prospero has only one advantage: He was able to bring along with him in his banishment some books of magic. A (presumably Muslim) witch, Sycorax, had been banished to the same island by the dey of Algiers for casting powerful spells. She brought with her a son, Caliban, whom she had borne to a mortal. Caliban is orphaned when she dies. At some point Sycorax had imprisoned a spirit, Ariel, in a tree. Prospero makes Caliban his servant, and he releases and gains the services of Ariel.

Prospero sees a chance for restitution when his double-crossing brother, Duke Antonio, accompanies King Alonso and Prince Ferdinand of Naples on a state visit to Tunisia. They pass by Prospero’s deserted island on their return. Prospero casts a spell to summon a violent storm, which beaches their vessel on his island, stranding its noble passengers. Various adventures ensue, including a plot by Caliban and the lesser courtiers of Alonso to kill Prospero and a budding love affair between Alonso’s son Ferdinand and Prospero’s daughter Miranda. In the end, Prospero assembles them all. He says to his treacherous brother Antonio, “For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive / Thy rankest fault, all of them, and require / My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know / Thou must restore.” Prospero does not so much forgive his brother as rectify him, using his magic to undo the latter’s crime. Still, no further vengeance seems envisioned, and we do not hear Antonio’s reaction or get any insight into whether he is contrite. Alonso agrees to reinstate Prospero in his dukedom. Prospero also amnesties Caliban and the plotters, saying to the half-witch: “Go, sirrah, to my cell. / Take with you your companions. As you look / To have my pardon, trim it handsomely.” Here again, he does not so much forgive them as compel the undoing of their plot. Prospero and King Alonso bless the union of Prince Ferdinand and Miranda. When Alonso begins musing on the past, Prospero dissuades him, “There, sir, stop. / Let us not burden our remembrances with / a heaviness that’s gone.” 

¢Alī’s reprieve for ¢Amr ibn ¢Abd Wadd has two grounds, according to Rumi. The first is ¢Alī’s reluctance to risk striking out in personal anger as opposed to fighting solely for the sake of God (to defend the embryonic Muslim community at Medina from pagan predations). The second is the unity of humankind: since ¢Alī and his enemy are identical, ¢Alī cannot kill ¢Alī. Although the story is set in late antique Medina, the conflict of believer and pagan roiled Rumi’s own later world, with the Mongol invasions that chased his family from Balkh to Anatolia; one wonders if he is here working through the resultant contradictions. 

Likewise, throughout The Tempest, Shakespeare depicts Prospero as acting from noble motives: he desires only justice, only a restoration to his dukedom. This is a positive aspiration, very different from any dark desire for revenge. When he is assured that King Alonso will put him back on his throne, he is satisfied with putting Antonio, who after all is part of him by virtue of being his brother, back in his place. Likewise, the prospective nuptials of Miranda and Ferdinand symbolize the unification of former enemies, since Alonso had allied with the usurper Antonio. It has been observed that The Tempest suggests that the best hope lies in a new beginning “disclosed by love.”¹⁰

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Rumi’s grocer and Shakespeare’s Othello have the same tragic flaw: impetuous anger that they direct at the most important thing in their lives, destroying it. The figure of the itinerant Sufi mystic revivifies the grocer’s parrot, even if the parrot cannot fully comprehend the achievements of the spiritual prodigy and therefore relates to him superficially. In Shakespeare’s bleak humanism, a complete fall from grace can occur through crimes that create existential alienation; Othello cannot find a way back from his jealous rage and foul murder. For Rumi, tragedy can be given a comedic—that is, a happy—ending if the soul of the protagonist is open to recognizing the absolute truth (al-ĥaqq) visible in the countenances of accomplished mystics. Although they are on a humanistic and not a religious plane, Prospero’s motives for granting amnesty to his enemies parallel those of ¢Alī as depicted in Rumi’s tale, insofar as neither sought revenge out of base motives, preferring reconciliation on principle as long as justice prevailed. 

In both authors, self and other set up existential contradictions and struggles, leading to injustices that seem insurmountable. And both authors sometimes admit the tragic dimensions of human life, as in the story of Othello or in the distinction Rumi makes between the champions of the absolute truth and the adorers of this world. Both writers, however, hold out hope for a peaceful end to conflict, whether through the high ethics of ¢Alī and his ability to see himself in the other or through the coercive pardons granted by Prospero.