The Masnavi (Mesnevi)

To test this, I would know a remedy,
Just try to write one chapter of the Quran!” —
Indeed, should angels and spirits themselves try to write it,
They would get stuck at the very first verse.
The Quran’s meaning does not lie clearly on the surface,
Within the manifest lies the hidden This refers to the concept of zahir (the apparent, literal meaning) and batin (the hidden, esoteric meaning) in Islamic theology.,
In this again a third; whoever wishes
To grasp that, his understanding will stand still,
And then a fourth, which only the Prophet
And God, the Incomparable, understands.
And so it goes, one inside the other,
That every word yields a sevenfold meaning.
The fool sees only the exterior of the Quran,
Just as to the Devil, Adam was only a lump of earth In Quranic tradition, Iblis (Satan) refused to bow to Adam because he only saw Adam's physical form made of clay, failing to recognize the divine spirit breathed into him..
The human body and the Quran's outward sense
Are visible—but invisible is the spirit within.

What was it that made this interpretation of the Quran, heightened to the number seven, possible? It was "science." The science of the Middle Ages was—in the Orient even more so than in the West—Greek science. What Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, Plotinus and Philo A list of foundational Greek and Hellenistic philosophers whose works on mathematics, metaphysics, and mysticism deeply influenced Islamic thought. had once taught, now experienced a rich second flowering in Arabic translations on foreign soil. Classical Hellenism was valued in the land of the "barbarians"; meanwhile, in Greece itself—that is, in Byzantium—it was smothered by rampant dogmatism and ritualism, and was thereby also lost to the West for a time.

It is perhaps one of the most difficult and at the same time most important questions of all cultural history, whether Plato, through his doctrine of the existence of a world of ideas and the—

8. Cf. regarding the connection between Islamic and Greek culture: Fr. Rosen, The Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, the Tentmaker original: Die Sinnsprüche Omars, des Zeltmachers, 2nd ed., p. 108 ff.