The Falcon and the Owls

About The Falcon and the Owls

The Falcon and the Owls appears in Book II of the Masnavi-yi Ma'navi, around line 1131 of Nicholson's edition, though Rumi returns to the falcon image repeatedly across all six books. A royal falcon — a bird trained on the king's hand, used to hunting in the king's presence, fed from the king's glove — has wandered or fallen from the royal court into a ruined place where owls live. The owls, whose world is the ruin and whose food is the small prey of broken walls, know nothing of the king or the court. When the falcon begins to speak of where she has come from — of a white hand that feeds her, of a golden bell at her leg, of hunting under the sky at the side of a sovereign — the owls accuse her of lying.

They say: you are speaking of things that do not exist. There is no king. There is no hand. There is no bell. There is only this ruin and what lives here. Your stories are fantasies. Your insistence on them is an insult to our world. They go further: you must be mad, or worse, a spy. They threaten her. Some of them hold her captive. She is small among them, outnumbered, and the owls' communal conviction that their ruin is the only real place is an environment in which her memory of the king grows fragile.

Rumi's interpretation is unambiguous and he makes it direct. The falcon is the soul. The king is God. The ruin is the world as the soul experiences it when it has forgotten its origin, and the owls are the voices — internal and external — that treat the memory of the real as delusion. The parable names a specific spiritual condition: the state of the soul that knows, or half-knows, that it came from somewhere else, and that finds itself among a majority who insist the elsewhere does not exist.

This image — the royal bird among lesser birds — was already a classical Sufi figure before Rumi. Attar uses a version of it in the Mantiq al-Tayr. Earlier Persian and Arabic Sufi writers deployed the falcon to name the soul's high origin. Rumi takes the figure and develops it into a full narrative in which the falcon's trial is not only her exile but the owls' active attack on her memory. The danger in Rumi's telling is not just that the soul has fallen; it is that the soul may come to believe the owls and forget the king entirely.

In Book II's context, the parable sits among teachings about dhikr — remembrance — and its necessity for the traveler. Rumi is making dhikr a remedy against the owls. The soul that has fallen cannot rely on the ruin to confirm what it came from. It must remember on its own strength, against the ambient disconfirmation, and keep remembering until the king's voice reaches it through whatever channel the king chooses.

The parable is one of Rumi's most portable because it names a condition that is not rare. Many people walk through lives in which what they know to be real is denied by everyone around them. The religious person in a secular crowd, the contemplative in a competitive career, the ayurvedic patient in a biomedical clinic, the person who has had an undeniable experience of something larger and who cannot find anyone who will take it seriously — all are falcons among owls. The parable's teaching is that the owls' disbelief is not evidence, and the falcon's memory is not delusion. The ruin is a real place, but it is not the only place.

Original Text

Translation

O high-thoughted white falcon of the king,
why dost thou make festival in ruins?

Thou wert the king's prey, bound to his foot:
how camest thou into the midst of the owl-infested place?

The owl has made thee sit in her ruin
that she may slander thy messenger to thee.

The owl is saying, 'This is a crooked-minded one:
our king is not; our kingdom is here, and the bond of life is here.

She was born in the ruin and in the ruin she lives;
she has no thought of the King of kings nor of the palace.'

Speak then of that story of wonder,
that the falcon's nature may escape from itself and go forth.

Although there is no way for us from that side,
for the bird there is one path from those paths.

Hey, falcon, come back! Look at the King's hand,
and at the golden bell by your leg,
the bell you have forgotten how to hear.

The owls shriek, 'A liar, a liar!' —
but the falcon's ear is keener than theirs
and finds the bell at last.

Commentary

Rumi's use of the falcon is precise. Medieval Persian and Turkish courts kept trained hunting hawks and falcons. The birds were trained from young, fed by the king's own hand, given bells at the leg so their whereabouts could be heard. A royal falcon was distinguished from a wild falcon by this trained relationship with the sovereign. The imagery in the parable draws on these real details. The bell is a real bell. The king's hand is a real hand. The falcon knows these things from lived experience, not from theory.

This matters because Rumi is making a specific theological claim about the soul. The soul does not imagine its origin. It remembers it. The Qur'anic doctrine of the primordial covenant — alastu bi-rabbikum, 'Am I not your Lord?' (Qur'an 7:172), to which all souls answered bala, 'yes' — holds that every human soul, before birth, gave direct testimony to God's sovereignty. The falcon's knowledge of the king is this pre-existent knowledge. It is not speculation. It is memory that the body's life and the ruin's environment have gradually obscured.

The owls are not evil. They are not devils. Rumi treats them as creatures doing what their nature inclines them to do. An owl lives in ruins. An owl's food is small. An owl's sight is tuned to low light. None of this is wrong. What is wrong is the owls' insistence that their world is the only world. They take their capacity as the measure of reality. They are, in Rumi's picture, a species whose error is not malice but metaphysical provincialism. They know what they know and they cannot imagine there is more.

The danger they pose to the falcon is specific. It is not that they will eat her; they are not predators. It is that they will convince her. Their collective voice, their shared assumption, their ambient confidence in the absence of a king — this is the weapon. The falcon, alone, hears herself outnumbered. Her memory of the king starts to feel like a dream she had once. The owls call her stories crooked-minded. They suggest she is a liar. Not the direct attack — the steady pressure of their ordinary life, in which no king has ever been mentioned and no one needs a king to go on living.

This is Rumi's diagnosis of the condition many souls live in. The world is not, in most cases, openly opposing the soul's memory of its origin. The world is simply running on without reference to it. Work, food, illness, taxes, relationships, news — the fabric of ordinary existence — can be traversed end to end without ever bumping into any feature that would confirm the king. A person who knows, somehow, that there is a king, comes to feel her knowing is idiosyncratic. Perhaps mistaken. Perhaps a cultural artifact. Perhaps a form of wishful thinking. The owls do not have to argue with her. They only have to go on living.

What is the falcon's remedy in the parable? Rumi gives it in the lines beginning speak then of that story of wonder. The falcon must remember aloud. Not silently, not passively, but by telling the story. The Sufi technical name is dhikr — remembrance — and Rumi is placing it at the center of the parable's teaching. The falcon must rehearse the bell, the hand, the hunt, the king. Her memory, if it is not spoken and acted on, will be worn thin by the owls' environment. Her memory, if it is spoken and acted on, becomes a living line back to the king.

Rumi is careful about what this rehearsal is not. It is not nostalgia. It is not wishful thinking. It is not performance for the owls, who cannot be persuaded. The dhikr is for the falcon herself, to keep her nervous system oriented toward a reality the owls' environment does not confirm. The Sufi orders developed long traditions of dhikr — the repetition of the divine names, the litanies of la ilaha illa Allah, the rhythmic breath-work, the silent repetition during ordinary tasks — precisely because the environment is what it is. The dhikr is the counterweight.

There is a second element the parable names: there is one path from those paths — for the bird there is one path. The falcon can fly. The owls cannot. This is not a claim of superiority; it is a structural fact. The soul has a capacity the ordinary environment does not. It can rise. It can catch the king's call from higher air. It can, when all else has failed, take wing. The Sufi tradition treats this flight as mi'raj — the ascension, modeled on the Prophet's night journey — which every soul can in some degree undertake. The flight is not escape from the world; it is vertical motion within it, by which the king's reality becomes audible again even while the body remains in the ruin.

The parable carries implicit counsel for the serious practitioner. Live, at least some of the time, in the field of the king. This can be a morning prayer, a daily sitting practice, a retreat, a circle of fellow falcons, a liturgy, a pilgrimage. It does not matter what form it takes. What matters is that the soul, in some hours of every day, be in an environment that confirms the king rather than ignores him. A falcon who has not been near the hand for a long time forgets the hand. A falcon who feels the hand weekly does not lose the memory, even when she must return to the ruin between visits.

The parable also names a hazard in the path of reform or argument. The falcon cannot persuade the owls. They are not her audience. Her task is not to convert the ruin into a palace; the ruin will continue to be a ruin. Her task is to remember where she came from, to wait for the king's call, and to be ready to fly when she hears it. A practitioner who spends her energy arguing with the ambient secular world is, in Rumi's reading, wasting on the owls what she needs for the king. This is not withdrawal from the world. It is precision about where the work is.

The ending of the parable is the falcon hearing her bell. This is the moment of recovered memory — the moment at which the real returns to immediate perception, no longer filtered through doubt. The bell is a sensory confirmation. It is not an argument. The falcon does not convince herself by logic that the king is real; she hears the bell, and the hearing is its own testimony. Rumi's theology places this kind of recovery at the center of the Sufi path. The proofs of God that the soul requires are not philosophical; they are direct. The dhikr, the retreat, the service, the honesty — all prepare the soul to hear, when the bell rings, that it is the bell.

For the Satyori reader, the parable maps onto BEGIN with unusual clarity. BEGIN is the level at which the soul first recognizes it is a soul — not a body, not a set of circumstances, not a role, but something that has come from somewhere and is going somewhere. The parable of the falcon is a picture of BEGIN under ambient pressure. The first task of the path is not to solve the ruin. It is to remember, against the ruin, that the ruin is not home.

The parable does not offer a timeline for the return. Some falcons are picked up by the king's hand after brief exile. Others live among the owls for decades before the bell rings. Rumi does not promise speed. What he promises is that the memory, once it has begun to stir, is not a dream, and that the king is looking for his birds even when they cannot find him. The waiting is part of the path. The faithfulness of the memory during the wait is itself a form of communication with the king.

Themes

The soul's amnesia. Rumi's consistent picture of the fallen human condition: the soul knows, or half-knows, that it came from somewhere else, and lives in an environment that does not confirm the elsewhere. The falcon's forgetfulness is not a moral failing but a structural effect of the ruin.

Dhikr as counterweight. The central Sufi practice for keeping the soul's memory alive against ambient disconfirmation. Rumi places dhikr at the center of the parable's remedy: speak the story, repeat the names, keep the king in the nervous system through active rehearsal.

The primordial covenant (alastu). The Qur'anic doctrine that every soul testified to God's sovereignty before birth. The falcon's knowledge of the king is this pre-existent knowledge — memory, not speculation. See Sufism for more on alastu.

The metaphysical provincialism of the owls. The owls are not evil; they are limited. They take their capacity for the measure of reality. Rumi is not condemning them, but naming the error: assuming that what one's life has not contained does not exist.

Flight as capacity. The soul has a capacity the ordinary environment does not — the capacity to rise. Rumi's doctrine of mi'raj, ascension, is implicit in the parable. The bird has one path from its position that the owls do not have.

BEGIN and the first remembering. The parable's closest match in the Satyori 9 Levels is BEGIN — the level at which the soul first recognizes it is a soul. BEGIN's work is not solving the ruin but remembering, against the ruin, that the ruin is not home.

Significance

The falcon among owls is one of Rumi's most frequently anthologized images. Attar had used similar material in the Mantiq al-Tayr, and the royal-bird figure is widespread in Persian Sufi poetry, but Rumi's extended narrative development — including the owls' active attack on the falcon's memory — gave the image new dramatic force. Later Persian, Turkish, and Urdu Sufi poets allude to the parable frequently. Iqbal's early twentieth-century poetry uses the falcon (shahin) as a central symbol of the soul's self-remembering, in direct lineage from Rumi's treatment.

Nicholson in his commentary treats the parable as a central teaching on the necessity of dhikr for any soul in the ordinary world. Schimmel, across her work, returns to the falcon image as one of Rumi's clearest statements on the fallenness and recovery of the soul. Chittick cites the parable in his exposition of the Sufi doctrine of remembrance. Franklin Lewis places the parable in the wider context of Rumi's teaching about the conditions under which spiritual work can proceed.

The parable has had substantial influence outside Sufi contexts. Christian contemplatives have found in it a close parallel to the Parable of the Prodigal Son, in which the son, far from the father's house, must remember where he came from in order to return. Neoplatonic traditions read it as a version of the soul's descent and return. Twentieth-century Persian and Turkish poetry, including the work of Iqbal, Shahriar, and later writers, keeps the image alive.

In contemporary spiritual writing — especially in the work of modern Sufi teachers like Kabir Helminski, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, and others — the falcon among owls is cited to describe the condition of the contemplative practitioner in secular or materialist environments. The parable's diagnosis has not aged. The ruin is still a ruin. The owls still shriek. The practice of rehearsing the bell is still the central work.

Connections

The Prodigal Son (Christian). Luke 15:11-32. The son who left his father's house, squandered his inheritance, and 'came to himself' while feeding pigs far from home. The moment of coming to himself is the moment of remembering where he came from — the same moment the falcon undergoes. Both parables treat the soul's recovery as an act of memory, not of argument.

The Pearl of Great Price (Gnostic). The Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl, preserved in the Acts of Thomas, tells of a prince sent from the east to Egypt to retrieve a pearl, who falls asleep and forgets his mission, until a letter from his father reaches him and he awakens. The structural parallel to the falcon is almost exact. Both are recovery-through-remembering narratives of the soul's descent into amnesia.

Jiva and the Forgetting of Brahman (Advaita). Advaita Vedanta teaches that the individual soul (jiva) is, in its deepest reality, identical with the universal self (Brahman), but that this identity has been forgotten under the influence of avidya (ignorance). The falcon's forgetting and the jiva's forgetting are structurally the same. The recovery is also the same: Sankara's atma vichara (self-inquiry) is the intellectual form of what dhikr accomplishes devotionally. Yoga and Vedanta preserve this.

Anamnesis (Platonic). In Plato's Meno and Phaedo, knowledge is treated as remembering — the soul having known before birth and needing only the right prompts to recover what it already knows. The structural similarity to Rumi's parable is not accidental; Plato's anamnesis influenced Islamic philosophy directly through Avicenna and the Arabic Neoplatonic tradition, and Rumi inherited these structures.

Dhikr and the Practice of Remembrance. The central Sufi practice. The Qur'an (Sura al-Ahzab 33:41) commands fadhkuru Allaha dhikran kathira — 'remember God with much remembrance.' Every Sufi order has developed distinctive dhikr practices, from the silent heart-dhikr of the Naqshbandi to the loud circle-dhikr of the Qadiri and Shadhili traditions. Rumi's own tradition, the Mevlevi, combines whirling movement with the dhikr of the divine names.

Sati and the Buddhist Path of Mindfulness. Buddhist sati (mindfulness) — the root sense of which is 'remembering' — bears structural similarity to dhikr. The practitioner remembers, moment by moment, what is present in experience, against the ordinary drift of unconscious living. The falcon's remembering of the bell is a Sufi picture of what the mindful Buddhist is doing across a day.

BEGIN and the Recovery of Origin. In the Satyori 9 Levels, BEGIN is the recognition that one is a soul and that one has come from somewhere. The parable of the falcon is BEGIN's archetype. The work at BEGIN is not problem-solving in the ruin; it is the initial remembering that the ruin is not home. Satyori's teaching on origin aligns with Rumi's.

The Nafs al-Ammara and the Owls' Voice. In Sufi psychology, the nafs al-ammara (the commanding lower self) is the internal version of the owls' voice. It says what the owls say: there is no king, there is no palace, your memory is wishful thinking, stay here. The external environment and the internal nafs work together. The dhikr addresses both.

Further Reading

The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi by Reynold A. Nicholson (Cambridge, 1925-1940, 8 volumes) — Book II contains the Falcon parable and related material at lines 1131ff. Scholarly standard.

The Sufi Path of Knowledge by William C. Chittick (SUNY Press, 1989) — Chittick's major study of Ibn Arabi, essential for the Sufi doctrine of the soul's descent and recovery.

The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi by Annemarie Schimmel (SUNY Press, 1993) — Schimmel on Rumi's bird imagery and the doctrine of the soul.

Ibn Arabi: The Meccan Revelations, translated by Chittick and Morris (Pir Press) — Ibn Arabi's treatment of the primordial covenant and the soul's memory. Deep background for the parable.

The Gnostic Scriptures by Bentley Layton (Yale, 1987) — For the Hymn of the Pearl and related Gnostic material on the soul's descent and recovery.

Mystical Dimensions of Islam by Annemarie Schimmel (University of North Carolina Press, 1975) — Standard survey. Essential on dhikr and its place in Sufi practice.