The Mathnawi of Jalal al-Din Rumi contains about four hundred stories and tales, each with its own theme and events scattered throughout one or more sections of the collection. Our task was to extract ten stories from this vast amount of material. We aimed for these stories to carry moral and educational values. We also stripped the selected stories of their dominant symbolism, converting them from poetic language into prose. In addition, we treated them artistically, so that each story would have an artistic structure containing the elements of the short story.
We made sure the stories were suitable for learners of Arabic at an intermediate level in terms of sentence length, patterns, structures, and linking words, as well as vocabulary.
Each story is followed by exercises that focus on the elements of the story. Hopefully, this will help interested learners understand the artistic structure of the story and aid them in writing a story or a part of it within the limits of their language proficiency.
