by Brad Gooch
Rumi’s imagination was filled with the kings and princes of Shahname, its fathers and sons. In his lyric poems, the mythic fourth king of the world, Jamshid, again “sets the world on fire,” and he evokes the evil Zahhak, snakes coiled on each shoulder:
Anywhere you find anger, you will also see pride
If you’re happy with these snakes, turn into Zahhak
Rumi was most smitten with Rostam, son of Zal, who excelled, Hercules-like, at completing seven labors while riding his mighty steed Rakhsh. (In the tragedy at the heart of the poem, a reversal of Oedipus Rex, Rostam unknowingly kills his son in battle.) Rostam was to become his epitome of the spiritual hero, comparable to Joseph, or Ali:
When the perfume of your grace arrives
All Zals become Rostams, ready for battle
These heroes from Rumi’s boyhood became familiar presences scattered throughout his work. Yet he was never nostalgic. He looked back on his childhood in Khorasan as a stage of development in learning to see through surface to meaning. To be a boy was to ask literal questions, about how two jackals could speak, or how a moon could fill an elephant with fear. As a man, his subject became “meanings inside,” and mature heroism:
The hero gives a wooden sword to his son
Until he learns to use a real battle sword
Human love is a wooden sword
Until he learns to battle hurt with mercy.
Between 1210 and 1212, Baha Valad finally resolved to leave Vakhsh. His motives might have been political. The cities and towns of Transoxania were forever being sequestered and reclaimed in shifting territorial allegiances, mostly between the Khwarazmshah and other dynasties, such as the Ghurids, from a central province in Afghanistan. The king of Ghur ruled in Vakhsh during at least part of the stay of his family; when this king came to town in 1204 to settle a policy dispute with a minor vizier, Baha Valad remained neutral, invoking uncertainty about the ultimate will of God.
Yet Baha Valad did not need an excuse to abandon Vakhsh. Near the end of his family’s stay in the town, he worked through his ambivalence about making a move westward. He worried about leaving friends and securing a stable living situation for his mother. Taking into account his age and chronic diabetes, he wrote: “It occurred to me: I am sick and am in no state to travel, for I have always stayed in a fixed place. What should I do?” Eventually he felt as if he received direction through prayer, and grew resolved: “God gave the inspiration: ‘If you want to travel and to gain endurance, begin to go, little by little, in heat and in cold, every day, and then return home, until you get used to it!’”
Baha Valad did lead his family out of Khorasan in half steps. Their first destination was Samarkand, one of the enviable three cities on his wish list. After their departure from Vakhsh, or later from Samarkand, or perhaps both, they halted in Balkh. Yet clearly when they left humble Vakhsh, traveling “little by little,” the family of Baha Valad, and certainly their youngest son, Rumi, did not know they were embarked on a perpetual journey with no fixed conclusion that would last nearly two decades and constitute a grand, if not always voluntary, tour of the vital Muslim civilizations of the Middle East.
CHAPTER 2
Samarkand
WHILE still a boy no more than six years old, Rumi, around the year 1212, traveled with his family to Samarkand. Located only 150 miles northwest of Vakhsh, in modern-day Uzbekistan, this most fabled capital of Central Asia would have been reached most directly by his father’s caravan crossing the Zarafshan mountain range into a region ruled by the Karakhanids, one of the Turkic dynasties in the region vying for its control. In Rumi’s later poems, such Turk warriors were often romantically frozen in time, nomadic on the steppes, and riding wild horses, as in one of his Ramadan poems:
Inside this month is a hidden moon
Hidden like a Turk inside the tent of fasting
Yet by the time Baha Valad and his family arrived in Samarkand, their new Turk rulers, like many such roving clans, had long ago abandoned their ancient, shamanic practices for more urbane and cosmopolitan lives while adopting, as well, the Sunni Islam of their subjects.
Samarkand was certainly the grandest, busiest, and most eclectic city the boy had yet witnessed, even more so than Balkh because of its crucial location at the crossing of several important trade routes, bringing traders and their curious goods from farther away. Samarkand was also at a poetic crossroads, one of the cities where innovative poems were first composed and sung a couple centuries earlier in the Persian his family spoke, rather than a more ancient, classical form. Samarkand tasted and sounded sweet to the young Rumi, though he would also experience within its walls some of the dark tumult released by the historical forces into which his family was now unwittingly traveling.
The first glimpse of Samarkand for any caravan crossing the Zarafshan River and making its way through surrounding peach orchards and tall cypress trees, irrigated by numerous canals, was the impressive Sharestan, the old district, commanding the highest ground above the city bulwarks—built in clay in pre-Muslim times. Circular in the Persian manner, and protected by a round wall, Sharestan could only be entered through one of the four royal gates: the China Gate to the east, with its many terraced steps, led down to the river. Visible everywhere were lead pipes on stone supports carrying water to most of the homes and the markets. Arcing overhead was the expansive pale blue sky described by one Syrian traveler, with a memory perhaps tinted by nostalgia, as “perpetually clear.”
Rumi’s family likely settled in a more modest but popular neighborhood nestled below the promontory, along the riverbank—flooded sometimes in spring, when mountain snows thawed, just south of the Kish or “Great Gate.” This newer, almost suburban area was protected by its own seven-mile, semicircular wall, which was pierced by eight gates. Here were clustered most of the wood and clay brick houses of an estimated hundred thousand families, so many with gardens that a guard looking down from the fortress of the Citadel might not see any buildings at all, just brick minarets and a forest of trees. Cutting through the district were flagstone streets converging onto the great marketplace Ras al-Taq, in the square that connected the neighborhood to the old city of Sharestan.
Fifty years later Rumi would faintly evoke this largely merchant neighborhood in the opening story of the first book of the Masnavi—the tale of the goldsmith of Samarkand, told not simply as a spiritual parable, but also with a feel for the texture of its setting, the sense of place that comes from being a resident rather than a mere visitor. The story turns on a pretty slave girl adored by a much older king. As she remains so wan and unresponsive to his advances, the king dispatches his trusted physician to diagnose the problem. Cleverly, the royal physician, taking her pulse, asks leading questions until a quickening occurs at the mention of “sweet” Samarkand, and of her own abduction from her beloved there:
Her pulse was beating normally and evenly
Until he asked about Samarkand, sweet as sugar,
Her pulse quickened, her face turned red and white
She had been carried off from a man of Samarkand, a goldsmith.
As the physician uncovered the secret of her illness
The source of all that pain and misery
He asked, “Where is his street, and which way?”
She answered, “By the bridge, at Ghatafar Street.”
Ghatafar quarter, with its small bridge, was located in the market district near Kish Gate, fitting for a goldsmith. And the couplet offers a rarity in Rumi’s verse: an address.
The casting of his main character as an artisan was not apt for just the neighborhood of Ghatafar, but for all Samarkand, where commerce was king. Rumi would later include lots of imagery of bazaars piled high with products, drawn mostly from Konya—he was taken by the bazaar as a symbol of the seductions of material life, sensuous, though finally evanescent. Yet during the time his family visited Samarkand, the immense square of Ras al-Taq, just steps away, offered exposure to shopkeepers and ar
tisans more lavish than anything he might ever again have known.
Throughout the city, but especially near its chief bazaar, two thousand stations were set up for obtaining iced water, kept chilled in tiled fountains, copper cisterns, or clay jugs. In spite of some of the stricter rules of Islam against representation, lifelike statues of animals had once been arranged about the square as a folly, as recorded by one tenth-century geographer: “Astonishing figures are cut out of cypresses of horses, oxen, camels, and wild beasts; they stand opposite the other, as though surveying each other and on the eve of engaging in a struggle or combat.” Still milling in Ras al-Taq in the evenings, by oil lamplight, were storytellers, snake charmers, and backgammon players.
Samarkand products carried mystique. Looms spun red and silver cloth, as well as brocades and raw silk. Coppersmiths hammered gigantic brass pots. Craftsmen fashioned stirrups, harnesses, and goblets. Farmers grew walnuts and hazelnuts. Famous worldwide was Samarkand silk paper, originally a product of China. Handmade from the bark of mulberry trees, the smooth paper—dyed in many colors, using henna, rosewater, or saffron—had a sheen almost tactile in the sheets scattered throughout Rumi’s poems, as he exclaimed: “Spread out the paper and break the pen. The wine-server has arrived!”
Still being sung in Ras al-Taq Square when Rumi was growing up were the odes of Rudaki, lovingly recorded on those sheets of fine Samarkand paper. This tenth-century innovator in “New Persian” poetry, the language and style in which Rumi would write all his works, was born in a small village near Samarkand. Rudaki became one of the first to write poetry in Modern Persian, its alphabet in phonetic Arabic script—very close to contemporary Farsi—rather than ancient Pahlavi Middle Persian ideograms. He had begun by versifying tales from Kalile and Demne and went on to compose in all genres used by Persian poets from then on. Rudaki was said to have invented the robai quatrain form based on a jingle he heard chanted by children as they were rolling walnuts down the streets of Bukhara—the nearby twin city of Samarkand, famous for its library, and twinned by Rumi in his poetry, too:
Sugar comes from Samarkand, but his lips
Found sweetness in Bukhara, so he stayed
Rudaki’s lyrics remained humming in Rumi’s mind throughout his life, like the songs of childhood. Sometimes he borrowed lines directly, taking a half line from Rudaki’s elegy about a friend for his own elegy for the mystic poet Sanai: “The death of a great man is no small matter.” The most famous of Rudaki’s poems was a ballad composed to convince the king to return home to his court in Bukhara after summering in Herat, lured by a wide variety of grapes for fine wine. As the story went, by the last strum of Rudaki’s lyre, the king had already mounted his horse for the return trip. “Now stirs the scent of the Muliyan brook,” Rudaki sang, “the memory of dear friends.” Rumi adapted the line, giving a more romantic and spiritual sense to its longing for home and companions:
Now stirs the scent of garden and gardener
Now stirs the scent of the beloved friend
Not all of Rumi’s memories of Samarkand, though, were filled with melodic odes and lively marketplaces. Soon after his family’s arrival, still around 1212, he had his first brush with a frightening siege, by none other than his father’s nemesis, the Khwarazmshah, who felt ready and powerful enough to annex this most attractive of the capitals of Central Asia. Using as his excuse the supposed mistreatment of his daughter, one of the wives of the Karakhanid ruler, he massed soldiers at the city walls and conducted an aggressive three-day siege. This was Rumi’s earliest recorded memory, and he relived the events years later, in a talk to students, dwelling on the plight of a lady he remembered watching, and interpreting the scene, in retrospect, with more than a boy’s maturity:
We were in Samarkand and Khwarazmshah had surrounded the city, with his soldiers in ranks. In that neighborhood, there was an extremely beautiful lady, without compare in the entire city. I kept hearing her say, “Oh God, how could you let me fall into the hands of tyrants? I know you would never permit such a thing, I trust you.” They looted the city, and were taking everyone captive, including the lady’s maids, but nothing happened to her. Even though she was very beautiful, no one even looked at her. So you should know that whoever trusts in God will be safe from all harm.
The onslaught was relentless enough for Khawarazmshah to emerge as the new ruler of Samarkand and fierce enough for him to live on in Rumi’s poetry for his weaponry and violence: “The word is an arrow, and the tongue the bow of the Khwarazmians.” Any victory for Khwarazmshah marked a setback for Baha Valad. Yet no record exists of the family fleeing Samarkand, or even leaving soon afterward. This change of power at the top was assimilated by a city well used to such shakeups. Life went on, and in some ways the city became even more lustrous, as Khwarazmshah memorialized his victory by building a cathedral mosque and a lofty edifice of a palace.
The impression left by Samarkand in the poetry of Rumi was certainly warm, tender, and nostalgic—a wide-eyed appreciation shared by many other Persian poets:
Join together the fractured bits of your intellect with love
So you may become as sweet as Samarkand and Damascus
He often talked about his entire homeland as “Khwarazm,” which included Samarkand, now subsumed within Khwarazm, and more than once remarked on its beautiful people:
Someone said, “No one falls in love in Khwarazm: there are so many beauties that as soon as you see one and become infatuated, you see another even more beautiful, and forget about the first.” If you don’t dare fall in love with the beauties of Khwarazm, better fall in love with Khwarazm itself, which has many inner beauties.
He associated both the city and his homeland with this inner beauty, outlasting even the striking beauty of the people on its streets, and holding a quality heartfelt and enduring.
By the time of the siege of Samarkand, six-year-old Rumi was old enough to attend one of the maktabs, or elementary schools, attached to the local mosques. While no sure record exists of Rumi enrolled in any of the maktabs of Samarkand, stories of him as a pupil in learned settings come from Sharafoddin Samarqandi, an eminent citizen of the city, as well as a follower of Baha Valad. Sharaf liked to tell of Rumi as a nine-year-old—three years after the siege of Khwarazmshah—asking tricky questions of the local scholars, but being too polite to contradict his elders when they were mistaken. “He went to exaggerated lengths in respecting the religious scholars,” Sharaf reported. Sharaf’s wife was also devoted to Baha Valad, and first taught Rumi a juvenile version of sama—meditating while listening to poetry and music—though he only went as far as “waving his hands about.”
Whether Rumi’s knowledge of maktab schooling came from Samarkand, Balkh, or elsewhere, the experience of this early education was nearly standard throughout Khwarazm, as the curriculum was controlled through the network of mosques. Most subjects were related back to knowledge needed for better reading the Quran. Here Rumi would have learned the technique for properly intoning the holy book and studied the lives of the prophets, and sayings of caliphs, imams, and companions of the Prophet Mohammad. Many proverbs were set to verse for easy memorizing. Yet language, mathematics, and science were taught, as well. As with Quranic proverbs, Arabic lessons were versified into catchy lines matching Arabic terms with Persian definitions, including vocabulary from astronomy or geography. The popularity of such maktab schools helped explain the high literacy rates of the medieval Islamic world, said to have surpassed medieval Europe.
Like love and religion, school, for Rumi, was blurred into the world according to his father. In the Masnavi, Rumi draws a naturalistic scene of a mother and father quarreling over sending their son to school. The mother wants her child to stay home:
That anxious mother complains to her husband,
“My child has grown thin from going to school.”
The disciplinarian father forces him to school, his tough love identified with the intellect:
Stay away from th
at mother and her worries
A father’s slaps are better than her sweet pastries.
The mother is impulsive, the father, noble reason,
At first, difficult, but finally a hundred times easier.
While still living in the harem with his mother when he began classes, and alert to the world of women—as indicated by his close observation of the plight of their female neighbor during the siege—Rumi aspired mostly to become a man exactly like his father.
Traits of Rumi as a boy in school for the first time among other boys included many of the qualities to be expected, though with some surprises. He was a natural student and focused on his teachers, as might be expected of the son of a serious imam. He was also predictably precocious. The boy whose playmates were convinced he had disappeared to tour other realms with angels stood out in a classroom setting. More surprising was a suggestion from the adult Rumi that he had been a bit of an unwilling student, perhaps even a prankster, and preferred his imaginative realms to the studious.
When he was later teaching his own students, Rumi occasionally summoned his maktab memories for examples of model teachers. Rumi’s father was a disciplinarian and a great believer in strict observance of protocol. Yet Rumi from an early age was drawn to kindness as the most effective teaching tool. Second only to Quranic recitation in elementary school had been handwriting lessons, a subtle skill with Arabic cursive script, and he recalled most fondly one penmanship teacher, clearly gentle in his pedagogy: