The Boys and their Teacher

About The Boys and their Teacher

The Boys and their Teacher appears in Book III of the Masnavi-yi Ma'navi (Spiritual Couplets), spanning verses 1521 through approximately 1613. Rumi composed the Masnavi between 1260 and 1273 CE in Konya, dictating the work to his student and scribe Husam al-Din Chelebi. Book III is one of the most psychologically astute volumes in the six-book cycle, and this parable sits at its center as a study in the mechanics of delusion.

The setup is comic. A group of schoolboys, exhausted by their lessons and desperate for a holiday, hatch a plan. The cleverest among them proposes that each boy, one by one, should greet the teacher with a look of concern and say: 'Master, you look unwell today. Your color has changed. Are you feeling alright?' The first student says it. The teacher waves it off. The second says the same. A flicker of doubt. The third. The fourth. The fifth. By the time thirty boys have delivered the same message, the teacher is convinced he's gravely ill. He storms home, furious at his wife for not noticing his 'condition,' rejects the mirror she offers to prove he looks fine, takes to his bed, and begins moaning. The boys follow him home and then engineer a second trick: they recite their Quran lessons at full volume, then the clever boy suggests the noise must be worsening the master's headache. The teacher agrees and sends them all home. When the boys' mothers come the next morning to investigate, they find the teacher genuinely bedridden, sweating under blankets, head bandaged, groaning softly. He tells them he was too busy teaching to notice his own sickness and that his students, bless them, were the ones who spotted it.

The story follows immediately after the parable of the Man who Prayed to be Fed without Work (Story VII) in Whinfield's arrangement. This sequencing is not accidental. Story VII teaches that grace does not bypass effort. Story VIII teaches that perception can bypass reality. Together, they form a paired warning: do not expect God to do your work for you, and do not let other people do your thinking for you.

Within the Masnavi's larger architecture, Rumi uses the parable to launch a digression on the nature of wahm (imagination, vain fancy) and its power over the rational mind. He draws a parallel to Pharaoh, who was made spiritually ill by the flattery and worship of his subjects: people kept telling him he was a god until he believed it. He then introduces the Hadith of the Prophet: 'If ye pretend to be sick beside me, ye will become sick' — meaning that performance of a state produces the state itself. The parable is also the occasion for Rumi to weigh in on a major theological debate of his era: the Mu'tazilite position that all human beings are born with equal intellectual capacity versus the Sunni position that innate capacities vary. Rumi sides with the Sunnis, using the clever boy who devised the plan as evidence that some minds simply see farther than others.

Nicholson's critical edition (1925-1940) places the story's core section at III:1521-1613 and provides extensive notes on the theological context. Whinfield's earlier abridged translation (1898) treats it as Story VIII of Book III and summarizes the narrative with commentary. The parable has received less popular attention than some of Rumi's more lyrical stories, but among scholars of Sufi psychology it is recognized as one of the sharpest analyses of social conditioning in pre-modern literature.

Original Text

Translation

The schoolboys suffered pain from the master,
from weariness and (hard) study.

They took counsel together to delay the work,
so that the teacher might fall into distress.

One, the cleverest of them all, devised the plan
that he should say, 'Master, how are you so pale?

May it be well with you! Your colour is changed:
this is the effect either of bad air or of a fever.

At this he will begin to fancy a little that he is ill:
do you too, brother, help me in like manner.

Then that fancy of his will increase a little,
for by a fancy a sensible man is driven mad.

After us let the third and the fourth and the fifth
show sympathy and sorrow likewise,

So that, when with one consent thirty boys
successively tell this story, it may find lodgement in his mind.'

They agreed, in firm covenant,
that no fellow should alter the words.

The boy came in and said to the master, 'Salaam!
May it be well with you! Your face is yellow in colour.'

The master said, 'There is no illness in me:
go and sit down and don't talk nonsense.'

He denied it, but the dust of evil imagination
struck a little in his heart unawares.

Another came in and said the same:
the imagination was somewhat increased by this.

And so it went on until his imagination gained strength,
and he remained in great wonder at his own state.

The master became faint with imagination and fear;
he sprang up and was dragging his cloak along,

His wife said, 'O sir, there is nothing wrong with thee:
'tis only thy vain unreal imagination and opinion.'

'Begone,' said he; 'may neither you nor your mirror be saved!
You are always engaged in hatred and malice and sin.'

'Lay my bed at once, that I may lie down,
for my head is sore.'

She prepared his bed, and the master fell down upon it:
sighs and moans were arising from him.

The clever boy said, 'O good fellows,
recite the lesson and make your voices loud.'

The master said, 'He is speaking the truth: depart.
My headache is worse: go out of the house!'

They bowed and said, 'O honoured sir,
may illness and danger be far from you!'

Then they bounded off to their homes,
like birds in desire of grain.

Commentary

This is one of the most psychologically precise stories in the entire Masnavi. Rumi is not telling a fable about naughty children. He is dissecting a mechanism — the mechanism by which external consensus manufactures internal experience. The teacher was not sick. He became sick. Not through a virus, not through bad air, but through the accumulated weight of other people's words. Rumi identified, seven centuries before social psychology existed as a discipline, the exact process that Solomon Asch would demonstrate in his conformity experiments in 1951.

The Clever Boy (The Architect of Wahm)

The story begins with the cleverest boy, the one whose plan the others follow. Rumi pauses to note this: 'the counsel of that boy prevailed over all; his intellect went in front of the flock.' He uses this to launch a theological digression — the Mu'tazilites claim all minds are born equal, while the Sunnis hold that innate capacities differ. Rumi sides with the Sunnis. But the deeper point is not about theology. It's about influence architecture.

The clever boy understands something the others don't: that reality is negotiable. Not physical reality — the teacher's body is fine — but perceived reality. The boy grasps that if enough voices say the same thing, the target will begin to experience what they describe. He doesn't need to make the teacher sick. He needs to make the teacher believe he's sick. And he knows that belief, once installed, will produce its own symptoms.

This is the boy as social engineer. In Sufi terms, he represents the whispering of the nafs when it conspires with external voices. The nafs al-ammara (the commanding self) does not operate alone. It recruits. It finds allies. It constructs a chorus. When you're doubting yourself, it's rarely one voice saying you can't. It's the accumulated echo of every voice that ever said something similar, amplified by the nafs into a wall of certainty.

The Architecture of the Trick

The boy's plan has a precise structure: each student says the same thing, one at a time, so the cumulative effect builds gradually. He specifies: 'At this he will begin to fancy a little that he is ill: do you too, brother, help me in like manner. Then that fancy of his will increase a little, for by a fancy a sensible man is driven mad.' Rumi uses the word wahm here — imagination, vain fancy, false perception. Wahm in Islamic philosophy occupies a specific place in the hierarchy of cognitive faculties. It sits below reason ('aql) but exerts enormous power over it, because wahm operates through feeling rather than logic.

The boy understands that wahm works through accumulation, not force. One student saying 'you look pale' is noise. Two students is a coincidence. Three is a pattern. By thirty, it's a fact. Rumi gives us the number: 'when with one consent thirty boys successively tell this story, it may find lodgement in his mind.' The word 'lodgement' (moustaqarr, a place of settling) is precise. The false idea doesn't just visit. It moves in.

This maps to what psychologists now call the illusory truth effect: repeated exposure to a statement increases the likelihood of believing it, regardless of its truth value. The mechanism is pre-rational. It bypasses the teacher's judgment — which initially rejected the claim — and installs itself at a deeper level. Rumi saw this. He built the entire parable around it.

The Teacher's Collapse

Watch the teacher's progression. The first boy says he looks sick. The teacher says: 'There is no illness in me. Go and sit down and don't talk nonsense.' Clear. Certain. Dismissive. But Rumi adds: 'He denied it, but the dust of evil imagination struck a little in his heart unawares.' That word 'unawares' is the key. The teacher doesn't know the seed has been planted. His conscious mind rejected the claim. His unconscious absorbed it.

By the second boy, the wahm 'was somewhat increased.' By the time the process completes, 'his imagination gained strength, and he remained in great wonder at his own state.' The teacher is now observing himself through the lens the boys installed. He's checking his own body for symptoms that weren't there an hour ago. And because the body responds to belief — Rumi knows this, and cites the Hadith 'if ye pretend to be sick beside me, ye will become sick' — the symptoms begin to appear. The psychosomatic loop closes.

This is ghaflah in action: heedlessness, the state of being asleep to what's happening to your own mind. The teacher is a learned man. He teaches the Quran. He has knowledge. But knowledge does not protect against wahm when wahm enters through repetition rather than argument. The teacher's 'aql (reason) was bypassed, not defeated. Nobody argued him into believing he was sick. They simply repeated it until his body agreed.

The Wife and the Rejected Mirror

The wife's role in the story is crucial. She represents the voice of clarity — the one person who tells the truth. 'O sir, there is nothing wrong with thee: 'tis only thy vain unreal imagination and opinion.' She even offers a mirror. Look at yourself. See the evidence. The teacher refuses. He calls her a strumpet. He accuses her of hatred and malice. He demands she make his bed.

This is the moment Rumi is most interested in. The teacher has a way out. The mirror exists. The truth is available. And he not only rejects it — he attacks the person offering it. Why? Because by this point, his identity has reorganized around the illness. To accept the mirror would mean admitting he was fooled by children. It would mean his own perception was unreliable. The nafs cannot tolerate that. It would rather be sick than be wrong.

Rumi draws the parallel to Pharaoh. People kept bowing to Pharaoh and calling him lord and god until he believed it. The flattery of his subjects produced the same effect as the boys' false concern: a repeated external message that overwrote internal reality. Pharaoh didn't decide to believe he was divine through careful reasoning. The belief was installed through endless repetition of the same gesture. Rumi says: 'the prostration of the people — women, children, and men — struck the heart of Pharaoh and made him ill.' The illness is spiritual: the delusion of grandeur. But the mechanism is identical to the teacher's delusion of sickness.

The Second Trick

The boys' first trick gets the teacher into bed. The second trick gets them out of school. Having followed the teacher home, they're still trapped — reciting their lessons in his house. The clever boy has them raise their voices, then tells the teacher that the noise must be making his headache worse. The teacher, now fully committed to his imagined illness, agrees and sends them all away.

This second trick reveals something about the self-reinforcing nature of false belief. Once the teacher accepted the first lie (that he was sick), he became vulnerable to any claim consistent with that lie. 'Your headache will get worse from the noise' — he doesn't question this because it fits the story he's already living. Each lie that's accepted makes the next lie easier to install. The first falsehood is the hardest. After that, the architecture maintains itself.

In Sufi terms, this is how samskaric patterns (what the Sufis call nafsani habits) calcify. One false identification leads to a chain of false identifications, each supporting the others, until the entire structure feels like reality. Breaking free requires what the wife offered and the teacher refused: a mirror. Self-observation. The willingness to see what is, rather than what you've been told.

The Mothers and the Morning After

Rumi doesn't end the story with the boys' escape. He adds a morning-after scene. The mothers, suspicious, visit the teacher the next day. They find him genuinely bedridden: 'perspiring on account of the great number of coverlets, his head bandaged and his face enveloped in the quilt.' He is moaning softly. The mothers begin crying 'La hawl' (there is no power save God's). The teacher tells them: 'I also was not aware of it; the boys made me aware of it. I did not notice it, through being busy with discourse.'

This is the final twist. The teacher now has a story that explains everything. He was so absorbed in teaching that he didn't notice his own illness. The boys, innocently, were the ones who saw it first. The false narrative is now complete, internally consistent, and self-sustaining. The teacher believes it. The mothers, seeing his genuine symptoms, believe it. The lie has become the truth — not because it was true, but because enough people acted as though it were.

Rumi cites the example of the women of Egypt who cut their hands while staring at Joseph's beauty: 'consciousness departed from them on account of their preoccupation.' And of warriors in battle who fight on after losing a hand, unaware of the wound until the adrenaline fades. His point: the mind's engagement with one reality can make it blind to another. The teacher's engagement with his imagined illness makes him blind to his health. Preoccupation is a form of ghaflah.

The Universal Teaching

Strip away the thirteenth-century setting and the teaching is stark. You are being told things about yourself — by culture, by media, by your social circle, by the voice inside your own head — that may have no basis in reality. But if enough sources repeat the same message, your body and mind will conform to it. You'll produce symptoms. You'll reject the mirror. You'll attack the person who tells you the truth. And you'll construct a narrative that makes the whole delusion feel inevitable.

Rumi's prescription is implicit in the parable's structure. The wife is the mirror. Meditation, self-inquiry, honest friendship — these are the mirrors. The teacher's error was not that he heard the boys. It was that he refused the mirror. The practice is not to insulate yourself from all external input. That's impossible. The practice is to maintain a relationship with the mirror — with some source of accurate feedback that you trust more than the chorus.

In the Satyori framework, this maps to the REVEAL stage: the point where you stop believing everything your conditioning tells you and start examining the evidence. The teacher never reached REVEAL. He stayed in the pre-BEGIN state of unconscious reactivity, buffeted by whatever the last voice told him. The wife offered REVEAL — look in the mirror — and he refused it. The parable is a warning: the mirror is always available. The question is whether you'll look.

Themes

The Power of Collective Suggestion. The parable's central mechanism is tawatur — the repeated, unanimous report that overwhelms individual judgment. Rumi specifies thirty boys delivering the same message. The number matters. One voice is an opinion. Thirty voices are a reality. The teacher's aql (reason) rejected the first claim outright but had no defense against the cumulative pressure. This is the architecture of propaganda, groupthink, and cultural conditioning: not a single dramatic lie but a steady drip of the same narrative from multiple sources until the target internalizes it. The Sufi path trains the seeker to recognize this mechanism and develop immunity to it through dhikr (remembrance) and muraqaba (self-watching).

Wahm: Imagination as a Destructive Force. Rumi uses the Arabic-Persian term wahm throughout the story. In Islamic philosophy, wahm is the estimative faculty — the part of the mind that makes snap judgments about threat and safety based on feeling rather than evidence. It sits below reason but often overpowers it. The teacher's wahm, once activated by repetition, produced genuine physiological symptoms: pallor, weakness, headache. The body followed where imagination led. Rumi illustrates this with the image of walking on a high wall: on the ground, you walk confidently on a half-cubit path, but on a wall two cubits wide, imagination makes you stagger and fall. The danger is not in the width of the path. The danger is in the wahm.

The Rejected Mirror. The wife offers the teacher a mirror — direct, unmediated evidence of his own state. He refuses it and attacks her character. This theme recurs throughout the Masnavi: truth is available, but the nafs would rather maintain its narrative than confront the evidence. In contemplative practice, the mirror is awareness itself — the capacity to observe one's own mental states without identification. The teacher's refusal is a portrait of what happens when the ego's investment in its story exceeds its commitment to reality.

The Self-Reinforcing Nature of False Belief. Once the teacher accepted the first false premise (that he was ill), every subsequent input was filtered through it. The noise of the boys' recitation became evidence of his headache. His wife's concern became evidence of her malice. The coverlets on the bed became evidence of his fever. Each element of his environment was recruited into the delusion. Rumi demonstrates how a single misidentification, once accepted, restructures the entire perceptual field. Breaking this cycle requires what the Sufis call tawba — a radical turning, a willingness to question the foundational premise.

Innate Capacity and the Role of Intelligence. Rumi uses the clever boy to argue that intellectual capacities vary from birth. The boy who devised the plan saw what the others couldn't: the vulnerability of the teacher's mind to repeated suggestion. Rumi connects this to the Prophetic saying 'the excellence of men is hidden in the tongue' — meaning that what a person says reveals the quality of their understanding. This isn't elitism. It's Rumi's observation that awakening requires a certain kind of seeing, and not everyone arrives at it at the same time or through the same path.

Significance

The Boys and their Teacher holds a unique place among Rumi's parables because it addresses a mechanism rather than a metaphysical principle. Most Masnavi stories teach about the relationship between the soul and God, between the seeker and the path, between love and annihilation. This story teaches about the relationship between the individual mind and the collective voice. It is Rumi's social psychology, his analysis of how groups shape individual perception, and it is startlingly modern in its precision.

The parable anticipates by seven centuries the findings of twentieth-century conformity research. Solomon Asch's 1951 experiments demonstrated that approximately 75% of participants would give an obviously wrong answer to a simple perceptual task when confederates unanimously gave that wrong answer first. The mechanism Asch identified — normative social influence overriding individual perception — is exactly what Rumi describes. The teacher knew he wasn't sick. But when thirty boys unanimously said he was, his perception reorganized to match the consensus. Asch's participants knew the lines were different lengths. But when seven confederates said otherwise, the participants doubted their own eyes.

Within the Masnavi's structure, the story also functions as a warning about spiritual authority. The teacher is the authority figure. He has knowledge. He teaches the Quran. And yet he is completely vulnerable to manipulation by those below him in the hierarchy. Rumi's implicit teaching: authority does not confer immunity to delusion. If anything, the authority figure's need to appear consistent and credible makes them more susceptible. The teacher cannot admit he was fooled because that admission would undermine his position. So he doubles down. This dynamic plays out in every institution where leaders are surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear.

The Hadith Rumi cites — 'if ye pretend to be sick beside me, ye will become sick' — gives the parable its theological anchor. This is a Prophetic teaching about the relationship between performance and reality. What you perform, you become. What you pretend, you manifest. The boys pretended concern. The teacher manifested illness. The pretense crossed the boundary between fiction and fact. For Rumi, this is not metaphor. It is the literal mechanism by which wahm operates. The body does not distinguish between a real threat and a vividly imagined one. The mind does not distinguish between a truth and a lie that has been repeated enough times. This teaching has direct implications for anyone engaged in spiritual practice: be careful what narratives you repeat to yourself, because you will become them.

The parable's relevance to contemporary life is immediate and unsettling. Mass media, social media, political messaging, and cultural norms all operate through the same mechanism the boys used: repeated, unanimous messaging from multiple sources that gradually overwrites individual perception. Rumi's teaching is not to reject all external input — that leads to isolation and paranoia. His teaching is to maintain an unbreakable relationship with the mirror: with self-observation, with honest feedback, with the kind of awareness that can recognize when a belief has been installed rather than arrived at through direct experience.

Connections

Plato's Allegory of the Cave. The parallel to the Cave allegory from Republic Book VII is striking. Plato's prisoners are chained facing a wall, watching shadows cast by objects behind them. They develop an entire system of knowledge based on these shadows — naming them, predicting their movements, competing for accuracy. When one prisoner is freed and sees the real objects, the experience is disorienting and painful. When he returns to tell the others, they don't believe him. They think he's gone mad. Rumi's teacher is a prisoner of the cave the boys built for him. The wife is the freed prisoner returning with truth. The teacher's response — attacking her, refusing the mirror — mirrors the cave prisoners' hostility toward the one who comes back with a different reality. Both Plato and Rumi identify the same problem: consensus can construct a false reality so convincing that the people living inside it will fight to preserve it. The difference is that Plato locates the cave in epistemology (the nature of knowledge), while Rumi locates it in the nafs (the nature of the ego). For Plato, liberation comes through philosophical reason. For Rumi, it comes through dhikr, muraqaba, and the grace of a murshid who can show you the mirror you're refusing to look at.

The Asch Conformity Experiments. In 1951, social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments at Swarthmore College. Participants were shown a line and asked to match its length against three comparison lines — a task with an obvious correct answer. But each participant was placed in a group of confederates who unanimously gave the wrong answer. Under this pressure, roughly 37% of responses conformed to the group's incorrect judgment, and 75% of participants conformed at least once. The mechanism is identical to Rumi's story: when the group unanimously asserts something false, the individual's perception destabilizes. Asch found that even a single dissenter dramatically reduced conformity. Rumi's parable teaches the same thing in reverse: the wife is the dissenter, the single voice of truth, and the teacher ignores her. The parable implicitly argues that maintaining contact with even one truthful voice is the difference between seeing clearly and drowning in wahm.

Hindu Maya and the Veil of Avidya. In Hindu philosophy, maya is the power that makes the unreal appear real. Shankara's Advaita Vedanta teaches that the empirical world is an appearance (vivarta) superimposed on Brahman, the sole reality, through avidya (ignorance). The teacher's illness is a miniature maya: something unreal that appears and functions as real because the perceiver's awareness is clouded. The boys are not external agents of maya — they are more like the conditions that trigger avidya into operation. The veil was already possible; the boys simply activated it. In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali lists avidya as the root klesha (affliction, 2.4-2.5): 'Avidya is seeing the impermanent as permanent, the impure as pure, the painful as pleasant, and the not-self as self.' The teacher sees illness where there is health. The mechanism differs from the Sufi framework — Rumi emphasizes the external trigger (the boys' words) while Patanjali emphasizes the internal predisposition (the kleshas) — but the result is the same: a false perception that the perceiver treats as real.

Buddhist Collective Delusion and Sammoha. Buddhist psychology uses the term moha (delusion) as one of the three root poisons, alongside greed and hatred. When moha operates collectively, it creates shared misconceptions that entire communities treat as reality. The Pali Canon describes how wrong view (miccha-ditthi) can spread through a community when teachers propagate it and students accept it without investigation. The Kalama Sutta (AN 3.65) is the Buddha's direct counter to the mechanism Rumi describes: 'Do not go by repeated hearing, do not go by tradition, do not go by what has been handed down... When you yourselves know: these things are unwholesome, these things are blameable, these things are censured by the wise — then abandon them.' The Buddha is warning against exactly what the teacher fell prey to: accepting a claim because it was repeated by many, rather than testing it against direct experience. Both Rumi and the Buddha locate the antidote in the same place: personal investigation, unmediated awareness, the courage to trust your own mirror over the chorus.

Sufi Ghaflah and the Sleep of the Heart. Within Rumi's own tradition, the teacher's condition is a textbook case of ghaflah — spiritual heedlessness, the sleep of the heart. Ghaflah in Sufi teaching is not simple forgetfulness. It is an active state of not-seeing, a turning away from reality that the nafs maintains to protect its current self-image. The Quran warns repeatedly against ghaflah: 'They have hearts with which they do not understand, eyes with which they do not see, ears with which they do not hear. They are like cattle — nay, more misguided' (7:179). The teacher has eyes, but once wahm takes hold, his eyes serve the delusion rather than the truth. He looks at his wife and sees a liar. He feels his body and senses illness. The Sufi remedy for ghaflah is dhikr — the constant remembrance of God that keeps the heart awake. The Sufi stations (maqamat) are a progressive awakening from ghaflah, each station requiring the seeker to see something they previously refused to see. The teacher never enters this process. He remains asleep, and the boys' trick succeeds because sleepers do not know they are sleeping.

Modern Propaganda Theory and Manufacturing Consent. Rumi's parable describes, in miniature, the process that Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky analyzed in Manufacturing Consent (1988): the creation of a shared belief through the coordinated repetition of a message across multiple channels. The boys function as synchronized media outlets, each delivering the same narrative independently, creating the appearance of organic consensus. The teacher — like the public in Herman and Chomsky's model — cannot distinguish between genuine widespread observation and manufactured agreement. The boys' 'firm covenant that no fellow should alter the words' is the maintenance of narrative discipline. Rumi saw, in a thirteenth-century schoolroom, the same information architecture that drives modern persuasion campaigns. The antidote he offers is also the same one media literacy advocates propose: maintain a source of feedback (the mirror, the wife, the critical faculty) that is independent of the consensus being manufactured.

Further Reading

The Mathnawi of Jalalu'ddin Rumi, Translation of Books III and IV by Reynold A. Nicholson (1934). The scholarly standard for Book III, containing the complete Nicholson translation of the Boys and their Teacher with extensive textual notes and commentary on the theological digressions.

The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi by William C. Chittick (1983). Thematic study of Rumi's teaching organized around his own categories, including detailed analysis of wahm (imagination), nafs, and the psychology of self-deception that the parable illustrates.

Rumi: Past and Present, East and West by Franklin D. Lewis (2000). The definitive biography covering Rumi's life, the Masnavi's composition history, and the intellectual context in Konya that shaped stories like the Boys and their Teacher.

The Masnavi, Book Three by Jalal al-Din Rumi, translated by Jawid Mojaddedi (2013). A modern verse translation of the complete Book III in the Oxford World's Classics series, with scholarly introduction contextualizing each story within Rumi's pedagogical framework.

The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi by Annemarie Schimmel (1978). Comprehensive study of Rumi's imagery and rhetorical strategies, including his use of everyday scenarios — schoolrooms, kitchens, marketplaces — to deliver psychological and spiritual teaching.

The Rumi Collection edited by Kabir Helminski (1998). An anthology drawn from the Masnavi and Divan organized by theme, useful for tracing Rumi's treatment of imagination, self-deception, and social pressure across his entire body of work.