their lack of insight. So they seek out a shaykh“endowed with insight...
Not by way of the ear, but by inspiration from Reason.”^79 Here, Reason
indicates not our modern rationalism based on senses and logic, but on
internal knowledge. He explains the portrait with which they have fallen in
love:
He said,“This is the portrait of an object of envy to the Pleiades:
this is the picture of the Princess of China.
She is hidden like the spirit and like the embryo:
she is in a secret bower and palace.
Neither man nor woman is admitted to her:
the King has concealed her on account of her fascinations.
The King has a jealousy for her name,
so that not even a birdflies above her roof.”^80
Shaykh Ankaravi interprets the princes as intellect, spirit, and heart. The
Chinese princess is
the virgin of meaning and veiled female of spirit who is the spiritual child of the
Shah of truth’s China in which divine science consists. And the imagining and
forming of that virgin of meaning and divine science is this fortress of form–
which is the world–is the image and form, written on paper or veiled from view, of
the words of the Prophet.^81
The poem thus suggests a gendered ontology of the divine. God, the Shah
of truth, is accessed through his daughter, the female spirit and virgin of
meaning. Unlike the Christian rendition of God, who reveals his son only
to conceal him, this father conceals his daughter as though in a womb,
implying a potential for birth. She is the creator of forms–one of the
names of God–and thus, like Christ, also integral to the singular divinity.
The bird, reminiscent of that brought to life by Christ in the Quran,
underscores the transreligious implications of the passage.
Framing two other stories, the narrative of the three princes returns to
the adventure incited by the shaykh’s revelation. The shaykh chides them
for having preached fortitude to others enduring hardship but failing and
having“gone under thechadorlike cowardly women.”^82 After another
parable, the poem describes how the brothers set out to become true
witnesses by traveling to China. This leads to another story, which echoes
(^79) Rumi, 1934 : 466 (3787–3788). (^80) Rumi, 1934 : 467 (3789–3793). (^81) Holbrook, 1994 : 45.
(^82) Rumi, 1934 : 473 (3901).
The Ambivalent Image 215