M6:2517 — یا عدوی قاهری در قصد ماست / یا بلایی مهلکی از غیب خاست

Translation: Either a conquering enemy has designs on us, / or a deadly calamity has arisen from the Unseen.

Meaning: Seeing the messenger's frantic arrival, the townspeople panic, speculating that either a powerful enemy is approaching or a devastating, unforeseen disaster is about to strike.

This couplet marks the climax of Rumi's depiction of the psychology of a city on the verge of hearing dreadful news. The messenger, the court jester, has ridden with such haste that two horses have perished on the way, and he arrives at the king's court covered in dust and utterly frantic. This untimely, disheveled entrance immediately sparks whispers (fach-fachi) and apprehension (wahm) among the courtiers, a panic that then spreads to the entire city. Here, Rumi is not merely telling a story; he is performing an autopsy on terror.

Faced with this ambiguity, the people's minds gravitate toward two fundamental fears that have haunted human history. First, the 'conquering enemy' (aduvv-i qāhirī), which is the external, tangible, and known threat. In that era, the possibility of a surprise invasion was ever-present, and such swift messengers were the bearers of the first intelligence. This is a rational, historical fear.

Second is the 'deadly calamity from the Unseen' (balā-yi muhlikī az ghayb). This is the fear of the unknown—of an earthquake, a plague, or a divine punishment that lies beyond human control and prediction. If the first is the fear of the 'other,' the second is the fear of the invisible and of fate. By juxtaposing these two, Rumi covers the entire spectrum of human anxiety: from what we know and dread, to what we do not know, which inspires an even greater terror.

The essential point, however, is revealed in the subsequent verses: 'Every heart went in a different direction out of imagination' (har dilī rafta ba sūyī az khayāl) and 'Each one was divining based on their own analogy' (har kasī fālī hamī-zad az qiyās). Rumi shows us that the commotion and distress are not products of the news itself, but are born from the people's own 'imagination' and 'analogy.' The city knows nothing yet, but in its mind, it has already constructed the worst-case scenarios and is living through them. The story is, in fact, an allegory for how human beings become prisoners of their own thoughts and speculations, enduring a suffering that has not yet materialized in reality. Terror, before it arrives from the outside, arises from within us.

Key takeaways

• Mass panic is often rooted in imagination and speculation, not in the reality of an event.
• Humanity's fundamental fears fall into two categories: the known enemy and the unknown, unseen calamity.
• Within a simple narrative, Rumi masterfully portrays crowd psychology and the destructive power of rumor.
• Our reaction to ambiguous news says more about our own inner anxieties than it does about the news itself.