A comparative Analysis of Teachings of Four Agreements of Don Miguel Ruis and Masnavi Manvi

People in Iran and all over the world read the works of Miguel Ruiz. Among these works, his Four Agreements has received more attention and has been published more. The unprecedented print run of this book in the stagnant book market of Iran is a serious question to answer too. It has been printed and reprinted for more than twenty times and translated by different Iranian translators. If we recognize the pursuit of the global return to spirituality and the tendency towards modern mysticisms in search of peace of the mind, the main question which is now raised is if there are Islamic mystical equivalents for the items of the Four Agreements. If the answer is yes, why do Persian readers look for these mystical teachings from other sources?

To answer such question the themes of The Four Agreements are compared and contrasted with those in The Masnavi Manavi. To do so, after reviewing briefly the Toltec mysticism and explaining its followers' views towards the man and his world, some of their equivalent counterparts in ‌The Masnavi are introduced.  Ruiz's introduction to his book proposes the totality of his worldview, while each of the four agreements are mentioned in another section of the book whose equivalents in The Masnavi are mentioned therafter, whihch are just a few examples to prove the major claim of the paper.
 Discussion

Considering the specific audience of such works necessitates attention to our civil assets. The Masnavi is superior to ‌the Four Agreements. It is like an ocean in which different precious stones can be found. I includes ethical, mystical, and anthropological issues and pays attention to the mental needs of people to live in this world. Molavi understand the human needs and talks of people's problems and the ways of overcoming them. He is more cognizant of the negative and positive power of language than Ruiz. He shows us how to remove our dilemma of selfishness and false attitudes towards ourselves. He, centuries before Ruiz, has understood the relativity of people's actions. He tells us that undue expectations towards ourselves and others would result in agony and pain. The masnavi's descriptions and explanations are detailed and didactic and  symbolic in nature due to the employment of a literary language. Because ‌the Masnavi tells narratives based on the Islamic mysticism, it may include social themes which are not easy to understand and demand research.

The comparison of the Four agreements with the Masnavi demonstrated that all the themes brought up in the Four Agreements have been raised in the Masnavi in a more comprehensive and careful manner. But what makes people not communicate with the Masnavi and turn to other mystical works is their lack of the required mentality towards mysticism and Molavi's character, his special language, and symbolic expression. Therefore the specialists are requird to elicit the themes out of his narratives and expresss them in a language which is understandable to people.