This too shall pass

Despite its ubiquity under Rumi's name online, we found no basis for this attribution in any of his documented works — not the Masnavi, the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, nor Fihi Ma Fihi — and it belongs to a broad pattern of uplifting aphorisms fastened to Rumi with no textual anchor. The saying is instead a traditional Persian and Jewish proverb (Persian "in niz bogzarad"), and its earliest documented literary home is the ring-fable of a king humbled by the words, recorded by the 12th-century Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur and echoed in Sanai — Rumi's forerunners, not Rumi himself. Its entry into English is equally well traced: Edward FitzGerald retold the fable as "Solomon's Seal" in his 1852 collection Polonius, rendering the line "This too will pass away," and Abraham Lincoln cemented it in American memory in his September 30, 1859 address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, crediting an unnamed "Eastern monarch." Because a specific, older, and better-documented origin can be named, the credit to Rumi is not merely unproven but points elsewhere. We therefore record it as misattributed, with the note that the true lineage is a centuries-old proverb, not the work of any single author.