Rumi’s Private Life behind the Secret Layers of the First Masnavi Story

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.