of all the Mohammedan writers, none bears such distinct traces of
Christian influence as Jalaluddin Rumi, the greatest of the Sufi poets,
who is to this day much studied in Persia, Turkey and India. In the
first book of his _Masnavi_ he has a strange story of a vizier who
persuaded his king, a Jewish persecutor of the Christians, to mutilate
him. He then went to the Christians and said, "See what I have suffered
for your religion." After gaining their confidence and being chosen
their guide, he wrote epistles in different directions to the chief
Christians, contradicting each other, maintaining in one that man is
saved by grace, and in another that salvation rests upon works, &c. Thus
he brought their religion into inextricable confusion. This is evidently
aimed at St. Paul, and it is a curious fact that Jalaluddin Rumi spent
most of his life at Iconium, where some traditions of the apostle's
teaching must have lingered. Other allusions to the Gospel narrative in
the _Masnavi_ are found in the mention of John the Baptist leaping in
his mother's womb, of Christ walking on the water, &c., none of which
occur in the Koran. Isolated verses of Jalaluddin's clearly show a
Christian origin:

I am the sweet-smiling Jesus,
And the world is alive by Me.

I am the sunlight falling from above,
Yet never severed from the Sun I love.

It will be seen that Jalaluddin gives our Lord a much higher rank than
is accorded to Him in the Koran, which says, "And who could hinder God
if He chose to destroy Mary and her son together?"

A strange echo of the Gospel narrative is found in the story of the
celebrated Sufi, Mansur-al-Hallaj, who was put to death at Bagdad, 919
A.D., for exclaiming while in a state of mystic ecstacy, "I am
the Truth." Shortly before he died he cried out, "My Friend (God) is not
guilty of injuring me; He gives me to drink what as Master of the feast
He drinks Himself" (Whinfield, preface to the _Masnavi_).
Notwithstanding the apparent blasphemy of Mansur's exclamation, he has
always been the object of eulogy by Mohammedan poets. Even the orthodox
Afghan poet, Abdurrahman, says of him:

Every man who is crucified like Mansur,
After death his cross becomes a fruit-bearing tree.

Many of the favourite Sufi phrases, "The Perfect Man," "The new
creation," "The return to God," have a Christian sound, and the modern
Babi movement which has so profoundly influenced Persian life and
thought o