Problems with Allegorical Interpretations 

There are, however, several issues with these types of interpretations:

• First, the allegorical details of the story are very unstable. For example, at the beginning of the story the king appears to represent the human soul or the sufi aspirant but by the end he seems to represent God or the Perfect Man.  Which is it? 

• Second, due to the fact that there is no direct evidence in the text to support one allegorical reading over another, every reader is able to come up with his or her own allegorical interpretation. But how can we tell which of these interpretations is the correct one?

• Third, such allegorical readings do not actually solve strange aspects of the story such as the king’s sudden love for the divine physician or the unsettling murder of the goldsmith. Instead they turn these aspects of the story into a sign for something else–such as “asceticism”–that no longer threaten the reader’s interpretative stance toward the tale, and worse yet, they use concepts found outside the Masnavi to make these assertions.

• Fourth, allegorical readings are unable to answer the question as to why Rumi chose this particular tale–a love story–for his allegory rather than another, or why he chose to use these particular elements rather than others. After all, if Rumi’s intention was to lay out an introductory allegory pointing to “the human condition” or aspects of “the spiritual path” why would he choose such a threatening one, with unsettling elements that cause his readers to so lose focus on the story’s meaning that the narrator feels the need to spend the entire last section of the story defending the characters’ actions? This question is especially important considering the fact that there are several other allegorical stories in the Masnavi that could have been used to represent “the human condition” or the “Sufi path”. For example, “The Story of the Generous Caliph” of Book One, or “The Story of the Prince to Whom the True Kingdom Displayed Itself” of Book Four, could both be wonderful allegorical tales of the human state or the Sufi path but do not contain any of the unsettling elements of “The King and the Slave Girl”. Additionally, aspects of the tale could have been changed to make it less disturbing, such as making the goldsmith out to be a morally repulsive individual deserving of death–in the same manner that the old witch in “The Story of the Prince to Whom the True Kingdom Displayed Itself” was deserving of death for her actions–or having the goldsmith die as the consequence of some bad action of his own. Allegorical readings, however, are not equipped to explain why Rumi chose to include disturbing elements in his tale.

• Fifth, if Rumi had intended the story to be read allegorically, one would expect the narrator to offer or point to some sort of allegorical explanation for the story as he does in other Masnavi narratives. This is especially true since the narrator spends an entire section defending the story against those readers who didn’t like it. Wouldn’t the easiest defense have been that the story is not supposed to be taken literally in the first place? Instead of using such a justification, however, what’s interesting about the narrator’s explanation is that he appears to take the story literally himself. Instead of replying that the death of the goldsmith isn’t wrong because he only represents the attractions of the world, the narrator discusses the death as the killing of an actual human character without recourse to allegory. The fact that the narrator does not provide an allegorical meaning for the story, therefore, suggests that the narrator didn’t want the main interpretation of the story to be an allegorical one. 

How Should This Strange Story Be Understood Then?

Rather than avoiding the disturbing and threatening elements of the tale by allegorizing them away, a more satisfying reading of the story should be able to turn these threats into essential elements of the interpretation.

It should also be able to answer the question as to why this particular narrative, and these particular narrative elements, and not other seemingly less threatening ones, are used.

Lastly, it should use elements and concepts from within the story in order to make its interpretation, rather than relying on external concepts that find no direct support within the Masnavi itself.

In order to supply such a reading, therefore, I will investigate the specific function that this narrative plays in the Masnavi as a whole. In other words I will seek to discover why Rumi has placed this particular story at the opening of the Masnavi.