Later admirers gave the Masnavi the honorific title Quran in the Persian tongue, a claim that says more about the poem's standing than about any formal equivalence, but the phrase captures how central the work became to devotional and literary life across the Persianate world, from Anatolia through Iran to South Asia. It stands as the founding literary monument of the Mevlevi order, the Sufi lineage that grew up around Rumi in Konya and became known in the West for the practice of the whirling ceremony, and the poem has generated an enormous commentary tradition in Persian, Ottoman Turkish and other languages across the centuries since its composition.
Unlike Ibn Arabi's more technical metaphysical prose, the Masnavi reaches readers with little formal training in Islamic philosophy, which is part of why it has remained continuously read and recited well beyond specialist Sufi circles, functioning simultaneously as devotional literature, moral instruction and, for many readers, simply as great poetry. English translations, beginning with Reynold Nicholson's scholarly edition in the early twentieth century, brought the work to a wide Western readership, though popular paraphrase translations since have sometimes stripped away the explicitly Islamic and Quranic framework the original poem constantly assumes.