"Rūmī i Distributing Sweetmeats," from a Turkish translation of Tarjuma-i Thawāqib-i manāqib (A Translation of Stars of the Legend)

This single-folio painting depicting a scene from the life of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207-1273 A.D./ 604-672 A.H.), was excised from a late 16th-century manuscript and pasted onto papers of a later date. It may have once belonged to an illustrated manuscript, now in the collection of the Morgan Library and Museum, of Tarjuma-i Thawāqib-i manāqib (A Translation of Stars of the Legend). The Morgan manuscript is a Turkish translation ordered in 1590 by the Ottoman Sultan Murad III (r. 1574-1595) of a 1540 abridged version of the life of Rūmī, originally written in the 14th century by the dervish Shams al-Dīn Aḥmad, known as Aflākī (d. 1360 A.D./ 761 A.H.). The Morgan manuscript was produced in Baghdad and is one of only two extant illustrated manuscripts of Tarjuma-i Thawāqib-i manāqib ordered by Sultan Murad III. The other is located at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul.

This painting depicts a scene in which a woman gave Rūmī a bowl of sweetmeats and asked the famous Sufi mystic to pray for and bless her husband who was then on a pilgrimage to Mecca. As depicted in this manuscript painting, Rūmī distributed the sweetmeats to his disciplines. Miraculously, the bowl remained full. According to Aflākī, Rūmī then took the bowl to the roof and when he returned empty-handed, he explained that he had given the bowl to the woman's husband. When the man returned from Mecca, he returned with bowl. He explained to his wife that an arm projected itself into his tent and handed him the bowl. Upon realizing what had occured, the man and his wife went to Rūmī, who said, "God had merely made use of his hand as the instrument wherewith to make manifest His power."