by Brad Gooch
According to Baha Valad’s diaries, he was living with his family in Vakhsh, on the banks of the Vakhsh River, in present-day Tajikistan, when Rumi was born on September 30, 1207. Both vital water source and geographical marker for this somewhat obscure town, the Vakhsh River flowed down from the Pamir Mountains—dubbed the “Roof of the World” by the Persians—replenished by glaciers, then cut its way nearly five hundred miles southward to disappear into the broader river whose name it vaguely echoed, the Oxus. The Oxus served as a vast natural divide in Central Asia, now the border between Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan, or, in Rumi’s time, between Transoxania, “the lands beyond the Oxus,” and Greater Khorasan, the eastern half of the old Persian Empire.
Vakhsh was a modest one-mosque town, memorable for its stone bridge spanning a deep gorge of the river. The entire valley remained true to its description by one Muslim geographer as “very fertile, and famous for its fine horses and sumpter beasts; having many great towns on the banks of its numerous streams, where corn lands and fruit orchards gave abundant crops.” Its soft green fields were filled with willow and mulberry trees, and irises and crocuses in spring. Beyond Vakhsh to the mountainous north and east, in the direction of China, were trade routes, where caravans descended bringing slaves to market, as well as musk, the aroma of male deer, a coveted ingredient in perfume, synonymous in Rumi’s poetry with spiritual awakening—“your sweet scent.”
When asked in future travels about their origins, Rumi’s family tended to say they were “from Balkh,” the capital of the Balkh region—of which Vakhsh was an outpost—on the southern shore of the Oxus River, in modern-day Afghanistan—and so the phrase “al-Balkhi” became yet another tag attached to Rumi. This better-known city helped fix them on the map, as Balkh, known by the Arabs as “Mother of Cities,” was one of four capitals of Khorasan, its round central town with over two dozen mosques fortified by triple-gated walls, its markets stocked with oranges, lilies, and sugarcane. Living in Vakhsh between 1204 and 1210, Baha Valad still claimed ties to this metropolis, as Rumi’s great-grandfather led Friday prayers and gave the official sermon in one of its largest mosques.
Rumi matured into the boldest of believers in the oneness of the “religion of lovers,” and few areas could have offered as nurturing (if regularly violent) an experience of religious diversity as Central Asia in these early years of the thirteenth century. Fittingly, he came of age on the edge of several cultures, several languages, and many living faiths. As he insisted, “If he is Turk or Tajik, I am close to him.” In the vicinity of Balkh, for instance, were the ruins of a Zoroastrian fire temple, its priests known as Magi, which had itself been converted from a Buddhist monastery. (Zoroastrianism was the imperial religion of the Persians before the Arab Muslim invasions of the seventh century.) Rumi noticed, a bit subversively, in a later poem, the quality of divinity to transcend divisions, when he wrote, “Why is divine light glowing in this Magi Temple?”
The adult Rumi liked to tell his students of a mystic Sufi of Balkh so used to bolting upright at the call to prayer that on his deathbed, when he heard the chant wailed from the minaret, he stood. Recurring in his poems, too, was Ebrahim ebn Adham, the so-called “Buddha of Balkh,” an eighth-century Muslim prince who earned his epithet by giving up his kingdom for a life of poverty, and traveling off toward Mecca and Syria:
Joyful Prince ebn Adham rode his horse away
Turning that day into a great king of justice
The rising smoke of Zoroastrian holy fires, Buddhist renunciation, and the colorful mystics of Balkh all show up faintly in Rumi’s later poetry, like a palimpsest of his childhood in Central Asia, registering the different influences he assimilated naturally.
Rumi looked to his father with the admiring and idealizing eyes of a young boy, and strikingly continued to exhibit that attitude well into adulthood. Baha Valad was the single most important influence on his son during the first half of his life, not only emotionally, but spiritually and intellectually, as well. As a little boy, Rumi would watch as his father stood and repeated over and over, “Allah, Allah, Allah,” as he himself would pray as a grown man, in a loud voice, during the long nights, his head resting against a wall. He so devotedly studied and recopied his father’s personal meditations—written during their time in Vakhsh—that he was able to recite large prose swathes by heart.
Yet Baha Valad was more complex than the figure idolized by his son, and, as his diaries revealed, more transparently human. Tall, big boned, and strong, he was a compelling, argumentative figure, full of great spiritual longing and honest outpourings, but also susceptible to tremendous pride and ambition. Rumi once told his students a story of Baha Valad, so rapt at the set time for prayer that he had forgotten to turn his prayer rug to Mecca. Two of his pupils paid him the ultimate respect of continuing to face his back rather than turning their own rugs in the proper direction. Adoringly, Rumi concluded that his pious father had been “the light of God.” His father did inspire such feelings, but for some, especially during his years in Vakhsh, he could also arouse dismissive ire.
Baha Valad’s main work was as an occasional preacher, as well as a Sunni jurist, grounded in the moderate Hanafi School of law that allowed for personal reasoning in decision making. Popular in Central Asia, the Hanafi approach was followed by his family, and eventually by Rumi. As Baha Valad was not the main preacher at the mosque, he did not deliver the Friday sermons, as his more celebrated grandfather had in Balkh. Instead he spoke on weekdays and taught a circle of young men to whom he was committed for spiritual direction. He was strict and insisted on fasting, proper washing before the daily ritual prayers, and tithing for the poor. When a group of local Sufis slept in the sanctuary to be closer to God, Baha Valad lectured them the next day on the commonsensical virtues of a good night’s rest at home rather than pursuing such bliss. Sufism was the mystical branch of Islam, and while Baha Valad was close to the Sufis in many of his spiritual practices, teachings, and writings, he was not publicly identified simply as a Sufi and could be more insistent on keeping to religious rules and regulations.
Each morning Baha Valad sat in the mosque, flattered by the respectful salams of the worshipers. He passed some of the rest of his day walking the streets, engaging with the townspeople. He advised the town clown to become a vegetable peddler, so that he might live a more honest life and become pure and sincere. He spoke with a local astrologer about the limits of his predictions, and with a silk weaver about the power of the Islamic prophets. He spent enough time in the bazaar to be able to tell yellow Baghdad glass from crimson Samarkand and the round crystal flasks of Bukhara; or to consider the merits of violet-root with sugar over crushed birdlime for a stomachache. He watched as villagers picked mulberry leaves to feed their silkworms to make cocoons.
The current events and issues of Central Asia all filtered through Baha Valad’s alert, theological intelligence as he sifted for morals and lessons. Temple statues of Hindu deities—dragons, snakes, scorpions—fascinated him as he wondered if a graphic illustration of a thief with his head stuck in the mouth of a fiery dragon, or a traitor eaten by a snake, frightened Hindus enough to prevent them from practicing vices. He was disturbed to learn of an ancient clitoridectomy initiation practiced on women in Muslim Turkic tribes in the Khotan region of China, though his horror over the ceremony mostly concerned the scandal of uncovered women, public lovemaking, and wine drinking.
Baha Valad possessed a healthy sexual appetite, both a delight and a challenge. Waking up one dawn to the sound of a barking dog, his eyes fell on his wife “Bibi Alavi,” perhaps a pet name for Rumi’s mother, and, aroused by her, he wondered, “This arousal was also caused by God. So why did I have a feeling of torment and distraction?” Another wife put him in mind of the virgins of paradise: “Maybe like the morning I had a sensation when I was embracing the daughter of Judge Sharaf, and kissing her lips, and joyfully holding her. I saw that her skirt was rolling up, like a little girl’s. She
kept saying, ‘Oh, God!’ The same God who at that moment made my spirit happy.” He reconciled any conflict over being distracted from God by feminine sensuality, unusually, when he wrote, “Embrace God, and God will hug you to his bosom, and kiss you.”
Yet Baha Valad was pained by the limits of small-town life, and beneath the pleasures of the daily round he chafed at his rank. He experienced Vakhsh as an exile. His conviction of his importance in the spiritual scheme of things did not match his post at a minor mosque. “I began to wonder, why Vakhsh?” he vented in his journal. “Others are in Samarkand, or Baghdad, or Balkh, or other glorious cities. I’m stuck in this bare, boring, and forgotten corner!” And he confessed misgivings that he knew revealed a lack of a deep faith: “Sometimes I feel as if I’m a king without a kingdom, a judge without authority, a man of position without a position, and a wealthy man without any money.”
Baha Valad backed up his sense of destiny with a grand title that he attached to his signature—“Sultan al-Olama,” or “King of the Clerics.” Supposedly this title came to at least one of his friends and students in a dream. In this shared dream, a radiant old man stood on a hill and called out “King of the Clerics!” to Baha Valad, inviting him to make his true status known to the whole world. A eunuch servant from Merv told him of a similar dream of his exaltation, and of crowds shouting in acclamation. And a Turk dreamed of him leading hundreds in Friday prayer. Yet when Baha Valad used his lofty title to sign a fatwa, or legal ruling by a religious scholar on questions of Islamic jurisprudence, the judge of Vakhsh dismissively crossed it out.
Baha Valad had a number of exalted enemies, if only in his own mind. One was Khwarazmshah, the ruler of much of Khorasan after his conquests of 1204. Baha Valad labeled him a religious “deviant,” an insult that might have explained his unimportant post in Vakhsh, if expressed publicly. Even more heated was his dislike of the king’s favorite preacher, Fakhroddin Razi of Herat, whose preaching the king so loved that he stationed a representative in regal gold cap and belt, as a seal of approval, at the foot of any pulpit where Razi appeared. Baha Valad did not hide his envy when a friend described being present when Razi, known for bringing his congregation to tears, spoke with barely enough room for the many listeners who entered to hear him, all bearing candles.
Yet Baha Valad’s aversion was not only a matter of petty jealousy. Known by the title “Chief of the Skeptics,” Razi used his defense of reason and science, which made him a famous scholar, as well, in a vendetta directed against Sufis and other mystics. To convince Khwarazmshah, Razi once staged an elaborate hoax. He dressed the king’s stablemen in Sufi robes, surrounded with extras posing as disciples. When the king solicited their spiritual advice, Razi exposed his prank, illustrating the potential for charlatanism in such claims. The lesson stuck, as Khwarazmshah ordered a leading Sufi drowned in the Oxus a decade later—an obvious threat to men such as Rumi’s father.
When he later wished to personify reckless use of power, Rumi, in poems and talks, reached back to Khwarazmshah and, as the very symbol of intellect befuddled by logic rather than love, Razi—the two men his father classified as “useless” philosophers, comparing them to locusts. Some consolation to both father and son was Razi’s change of heart as he neared death, in 1209. The skeptic had dramatically reproached himself for devoting his life to logical sciences that did not lead to truth. In a deathbed “Testament,” Razi admitted that he had studied philosophical methods, “But I have not found in them either satisfaction or comfort to equal which I have found in reading the Quran.” Rumi made a vignette of this deathbed scene from his childhood in Book IV of his Masnavi:
That philosopher on the day of his death
Saw intellect as a tree with no fruit or leaves
Baha Valad was hardly averse to conflict and spent hours, and piled up hundreds of manuscript pages, settling such scores. (If his son had not heard rants against Razi as a boy, he could have relived them by reading later.) Yet he also had a remarkably soft core, a delicacy of sentiment, as he expressed musings, prayers, and dreams, which revealed hints of an extraordinary spirit. He loved music and visualized his prayers as songs played singly by a small, stringed, violin-like rabab, tambourine, and flute, and then by all three. Awaking one morning, he imagined himself as a tree beginning to branch with eyesight, to flower with feelings, to bear fruit with prayer, and to touch the skies with language. Cutting a loaf of bread, he retraced in his mind its cycle from wheat to grist to oven. He recorded a dream of learning the secret language of a flock of large white flying birds.
This journal was Baha Valad’s most durable gift to his son. After his father’s death, when Rumi was in his mid-twenties, he was emboldened to listen for internal guidance by the divine messages included in the manuscript, such as Baha Valad’s record of fears of failure, revealed by the voice of God to be in fact a test of his fortitude. As he had transcribed into his journal: “God inspired me with this thought: ‘If you are with Me, I will be your companion. You won’t be in any one place—not Vakhsh, nor Baghdad, nor Samarkand. You won’t be with anyone, nor will you be outwardly adorned.’”
Rumi also borrowed material from his father. Baha Valad’s commentary on a passage in the Quran on the four birds God uses to prove to Abraham that He can resurrect the dead is spun in the Masnavi into over a thousand lines on the duck of greed, rooster of lust, peacock of pride, and crow of avarice. Inherited, too, was his bold and confessional voice, an intimate yell. Baha Valad experienced a midlife crisis in Vakhsh, and his articulation of its dark nights remained vibrant: “I will be fifty-five years old on the first day of Ramadan. I’ve heard my life span will be another ten years, since the average life span is sixty to seventy years. When I added up ten years, I found that would amount to 3,600 days. I want to be sure to spend those 3,600 days in the best way . . . remembering the splendor and greatness of God.”
The dominant force in his son’s emotional and even literary development, Baha Valad was not Rumi’s sole influence, though, as the world of Khorasan was rife with stimulation for a boy with an active imagination and an early curiosity about matters spiritual and heroic. Trances and the supernatural were popular elements in the storytelling culture that filtered through Vakhsh and Balkh, both for entertainment, or when shared by wandering holy men, for moral wisdom. Fantastical tales were retold, embroidered, and exchanged among Rumi and his friends. Favorites were stories of good and evil genies, demons and angels, as well as the exploits of legendary kings and princes, judges and warriors. Within earshot, too, were teasing riddles, jokes, and obscene remarks or curses that were particularly colorful. Even as an adult, Rumi could startle by occasionally letting fly with the common Khorasani insult “You brother of a whore!”
The most persistent of these boyhood spells was cast on Rumi by the animal fables of friendship and betrayal collected in the famed tale collection Kalile and Demne named for its vivid pair of squabbling jackals. Dating back at least as far as the ancient Sanskrit Panchatantra, these enchanting tales were translated in the sixth century into Pahlavi Persian, and then into early Modern Persian in the eleventh century by Nasrullah, as “The Fables of Bidpai.” The stories had such force that when the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad conceived an ambitious project to translate the Greek and Persian classics into Arabic, Kalile and Demne was among the first—an edition popular in Rumi’s time.
The Arabic and Persian collections hung on the pretext of a Sassanian emperor hearing rumors of the existence of an ancient book of wisdom for rulers hidden at the court of an Indian king, and dispatching his learned physician to surreptitiously copy down its stories, with the help of a wise sage. The tales often cleverly open up into other tales-within-tales. Animating all the plot trickery is a bestiary of scampering, cognizant species: a hare outwits a lion, luring him to dive into his own reflection in a well; a crow shuttles a mouse, nearly trapped in the nets of a hunter, to the safety of a tortoise pond.
Rumi showed how avidly he absorbed t
hese stories when he revisited them in the last two decades of his life while composing his Masnavi, described by one literary scholar as “a grand Storybook.” Early in Book I, he unrolls its tale of the crafty hare outwitting a powerful and arrogant lion, in nearly five hundred lines of verse, baldly introduced:
Go ask Kalile about that story
And seek out the moral there
In Rumi’s adaptation, the story transforms into a debate on faith and works. In Book II appears the fox from Kalile, tearing down a hollow drum hanging from a tree branch, believing its rattling in the wind is the sound of an edible pig. In Book IV, the three great fish of Kalile—one wise, one clever, one stupid—meet differing outcomes at the hook of the fisherman, with a caveat from Rumi that his storytelling is strategic:
You must have read the story in Kalile
That was the husk, this is the kernel
The cautionary tale of the three fish leads him to meditate on wisdom as a solitary path, as the surviving fish had figured out his escape on his own, through independent thinking.
The other monumental storyline for Persian-speaking adults and children, especially in Khorasan, was set in marble in the epic Shahname, or The Book of Kings, written in the eleventh century by Ferdowsi, in the rhyming-couplet masnavi form that Rumi would use for his own spiritual epic. A mythologized history of the Persians from Creation until the toppling of the Sassanid Dynasty, the poem is set in the land of Rumi’s birth. Like Greece and Troy in the Iliad, the opposing sides in this heroic tale, which is described in the Shahname’s second third, are Turan, in Transoxania, and Iran, already another name for Persia, in Khorasan, with the river Oxus as the divide between the two fighting clans. At a climactic moment, the Iranian king Khosrow rides his black stallion across the Oxus to the amazement of a boatman, who exclaims: “No one has ever seen horsemen in full armor crossing the river in the height of spring!”