Rumi's Secret

by Brad Gooch

  Caravans leaving Kufa took nearly a month to arrive in Mecca, a journey of over a thousand miles across the Arabian Peninsula, through much of modern-day Saudi Arabia, which included forbidding territories troubled by stifling heat, deadly winds, and clouds of black flies. The desert road stretching from Kufa to Mecca offered only water in wells, or cisterns, and an occasional underground canal. Absent were the caravanserai stationed along the Khorasan Road. Pilgrims remained in caravans at night, without the protection of walls, or they continued traveling in the dark. As Rumi later embroidered:

  A man traveling with a caravan on a dark, overcast night does not know where he is, how far he has traveled, or what he has passed. At daybreak, he sees the results of the journey, that is, he will have arrived at some place. Likewise, whoever labors for the glory of God is never lost, though he shut both his eyes.

  While Rumi had many experiences with caravans to draw on, his more extreme memories of fears faced during travel were consistent with tales told of going on hajj in medieval times. He spoke of travelers attacked in one spot, “piling a few stones on top of each other as a marker, as if to say, ‘This is a dangerous place.’” And his evocation of caravans in desolate terrain conveyed the menace for a child of many imaginary threats:

  Say there is someone in a caravan on a dark night. He is so afraid that he constantly imagines that bandits are attacking the caravan. He wants to hear and recognize his fellow travelers’ voices. When he hears their voices, he feels safe.

  The greatest threat was marauding Bedouin tribes that raided caravans. By day these Bedouins tried to sell hungry travelers meat, milk, and cheese. Yet even in daylight the journey was filled with the potential for accidents and sudden catastrophe. The Spanish geographer Ibn Jubayr, traveling to Mecca thirty years before Rumi’s family, witnessed a roadside stop where seven pilgrims had been trampled to death in a rush on a water tank used by men and camels. Rumi compared these travails to spiritual efforts:

  The glory of the Kaaba and its gathering is proved

  When pilgrims brave Bedouins and travel the wide desert

  Once within the sacred zone of Mecca, the basic rituals of hajj had remained constant over the centuries, though political control of the region shifted. (One local ruler during this period mistreated pilgrims from Baghdad to display his power in a feud with the caliph.) While the majority of pilgrims were males, their families and single women also took part. Men and boys wore the pilgrim’s robe—two sheets of white cloth, secured by a white sash, with sandals. Women wore modest dress and hijab. The core event was walking seven times counterclockwise around the Kaaba, the granite cube that stood at the center of the Islamic world, the vanishing point of qibla, so that, as Rumi wrote: “When you’re inside the Kaaba, you don’t need to face in any direction.” Especially cherished was the Black Stone, affixed by Mohammad in the Kaaba wall. Other rituals included running between the hills of Al-Safa and Al-Marwah, drinking from the Zamzam Well, standing vigil at Mount Arafat, and the symbolic Stoning of the Devil.

  While the meaning of hajj centered on communal worship at the Grand Mosque, and the final animal sacrifice in the nearby village of Mina, marketplaces thrived, even if officially discouraged. Ibn Jubayr noted, between the hilltops of al-Safa and al-Marwa, a “market full of fruits” set up such that pious runners could “hardly free themselves from the great crowd.” He described the exhalation after the two weeks, when the Grand Mosque, the sanctuary of the Kaaba, “became a great market in which were sold commodities ranging from flour to agates, and from wheat to pearls.” Poor Yemenis bartered wheat, raisins, or butter for “women’s veils or strong quilts,” worn by Bedouins.

  Rumi once told his students that the true place of the Kaaba in Islam was to fulfill the recorded saying of Mohammad that “cohesion is a mercy, and isolation torment.” Visiting the Kaaba was made obligatory so that people from many cities and climes of the world might gather there. Yet most often he transposed Mecca to the spiritual plane, never commenting on his personal experience of hajj. He even pitied a poor pilgrim, lost in the surrounding desert:

  Oh you who’ve gone on hajj—

  Where, oh where, are you?

  Here, here is the Beloved!

  Oh come now, come, oh come!

  You, lost in the desert—

  What air of love is this?

  You are the house, the master,

  You are the Kaaba, you!

  Such sentiments reflected the attitudes he shared with, and may even have learned from, Attar and the Sufis of Baghdad: in his Lives of the Saints, Attar told a story of Rabia on her way to Mecca being met and welcomed on the road by the Kaaba, rather than proceeding as a pilgrim to pay her respects at the shrine. “I need the Lord of the house,” she said. “What am I to do with the house?”

  Within a week of the conclusion of these sacred ceremonies, all pilgrim caravans once again departed for Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and points beyond as Mecca and Medina reverted to quiet and sleepy towns until the following year. And the Black Stone of the Kaaba, for Rumi in his later poetry, like the qibla, resolved into a human face:

  The pilgrim kisses the Black Stone of the Kaaba

  As if he were kissing the red lips of the beloved

  CHAPTER 4

  “Fire fell into the world”

  AS a gathering place for pilgrims from throughout the wider Muslim world, Mecca also served as a center of news and information, where Rumi and his family would have heard the latest in eyewitness reports, or twice-told rumors from various corners of the map. In 1217, the urgent talk among travelers from Central Asia concerned the threat of the Mongols. Since the time of the departure of Rumi’s family from Khorasan, tensions had only increased between Genghis Khan and Khwarazmshah, with word spreading of an onslaught that was taking place along the easternmost borders, nearer to Vakhsh and other outlying regions. The fate of those on hajj was unclear, and the decision open of whether to return to endangered cities such as Balkh or Samarkand.

  After Mecca, Rumi’s family next appeared in Damascus, which required taking a route from Mecca back to Baghdad, and connecting near its Syria Gate with a western road, the entire journey lasting about two months. Not knowing whether war was imminent, Baha Valad would have been pushed to clarify his decisions about the future. A teaching post in Damascus, one of the core cities for Islamic intellectual life, along with Cairo and Baghdad, was desirable, but Baha Valad’s imperfect spoken Arabic may have been an impediment, as seamless eloquence was expected from public speakers. Damascus itself was also volatile. While the Crusades, launched by the Latin Catholic Church, were according to one historian a “sideshow” compared to the destruction about to be inflicted by Tatar armies, Syria was still checkered by this conflict—the ruler of Damascus at the time was al-Moazzam, whose father was off fighting the Fifth Crusade.

  Baha Valad moved with his family, once again, this time from Syria to Anatolia—the Asian, or Asia Minor, section of modern-day Turkey—probably during the summer of 1217. Until this move, Rumi, about ten or eleven years old, had been exposed to diverse religious groups, but always in Muslim-controlled areas and with clear Muslim majorities. Anatolia was territory defined in the imagination of Muslims as the outer limits of their civilization, the borderlands of Christian Rome, or Rum. (The term “Rumi” was used sometimes as a synonym for “Christian,” this shadow meaning still clinging to the name when used for Rumi after his death.) From now on they would be living in cities where they were greatly outnumbered by mostly Greek-speaking or Armenian Christians, with Muslims in Anatolia estimated at just 10 percent of the population.

  The city where they first alighted, Malatya, in southeast Anatolia near a juncture of the Euphrates River, was a garrison town attached to an eighth-century fortress, the first square of defense in a line of fortresses against the Byzantines extending to the Mediterranean. Yaqut described the town as part of Greek territories when he traveled through, yet the Seljuk Turks were apparently in charg
e when the family of Baha Valad resided there briefly. The climate of the large town wavered—between desert aridity and northerly precipitation—as did its religious persuasions between Christian and Muslim.

  While in Malatya the boy Rumi had the second of his reputed meetings with remarkable men. Also living in town at the time was the Spanish-born Arab mystic Ibn Arabi, the grandest and most sublime thinker of the era, his speculations concerning the merging of Creator and Creation sometimes accused of being a pantheistic, heretical bending of the theology of a transcendent deity in Islam. Picking up pieces left behind in the writings of al-Ghazali a century earlier, Ibn Arabi created a synthesis of mystical thinking, an intellectual Sufism in hundreds of volumes, where he developed ruminations on abstruse matters such as a “science of letters” of God’s name, which had absorbed Sufi thinkers since at least the eleventh century. Although he taught in Damascus, Syria was enough of a war zone that he passed the years from 1216 to 1220 in Malatya.

  As the story was told, a conversation had been arranged between the newly arrived Baha Valad and the greatest living master of Sufi theology. He brought along his son, yet when they departed, as with Attar, it was the boy who drew the attention of the great mystic. Watching young Rumi trail his father down the street, Ibn Arabi remarked, “Glory be to God! An ocean is following a lake!” Again, Rumi never spoke of such a meeting. Yet unlike his supposed encounter with Attar, Rumi as an adult had more ambivalent feelings about Ibn Arabi, as about all things highly intellectual or abstruse, and later in life even made a small joke at Ibn Arabi’s expense. He had walked into a hall where his disciples were discussing Ibn Arabi’s esoteric Meccan Revelations. Suddenly Zaki the Singer entered and broke into a joyful song. Rumi exclaimed, “Well now the Zaki Revelations are even finer than the Meccan Revelations!” And he began to whirl. His point was that music, poetry, and dance were more important than abstract ideas.

  The first solid patron of Baha Valad in Anatolia was Bahramshah, the prince of Erzincan, and his wife, the princess Esmati. Their capital was located at the upper end of the Euphrates Valley, where Rumi’s family soon undertook yet another journey, of two hundred miles, to northeast Anatolia. Erzincan was a large and primarily Armenian Christian town. Such towns often provoked the ire of visiting Muslims, who expressed indignation at all the wine, pork, and religious processions. Wishing to avoid these alien practices, Baha Valad insisted that his own school be established nearby in the more sober town of Aqshahr, and there he apparently was set up in the winter of 1218, in “Esmatiyye,” named after his royal patroness, teaching general classes, rather than a strict Hanafi law curriculum, with a soft edge of Sufi mysticism.

  This minor shah of Erzincan was already accustomed to patronizing Persian cultural figures such as Baha Valad. He had earlier supported the production of a long didactic poem, Treasury of Secrets, written in the style of Sanai, by Nezami. A court poet of Azerbaijan, Nezami had also written the most famous romance in masnavi couplets, Layli and Majnun, a classic tale of the unrequited love of Majnun, a Bedouin youth, his name meaning “Crazy,” driven insane by his intense devotion for the delicate Layli. This star-crossed pair remained in Rumi’s imagination as his favorite fictional lovers, and he later sainted suffering Majnun as the quintessential Sufi “martyr of love” for God:

  Majnun, embrace the Layli of night

  Night is the time for divine solitude.

  Layli is night, and the day is ahead, Majnun.

  At dawn, wisdom will light the curls of her hair.

  About a year had passed since Rumi and his family had been on hajj in Mecca. During this time Baha Valad, and anyone else from Khorasan, was anxiously looking and listening to discover recent news of the situation there. No one was truly settled anywhere. Yet the reports brought by travelers were increasingly dire, and any future plans of Baha Valado eventually to return were quickly demolished, their sojourn in Anatolia looking more permanent. If Rumi’s family set out on their quest as pilgrims, or even as emigrants, within the next few years they wound up as displaced refugees. Rumi later brought to life the feelings aroused by hearing of the chaos caused by this greatest of historical disruptions:

  Day and night I’m thinking of you

  In these bloody days and nights, how do you feel?

  As this fire fell into the world

  In this smoke of the Tatar army, how do you feel?

  By the time Baha Valad was finally settled in his new school in Aqshahr, the Khorasan region, where he had left behind his aged mother, as well as oldest son and daughter, was registering serious activity, sparked by a small border incident. Rumi later told this history, with accuracy, as he knew the terrain and players intimately. As a boy, he had seen the Asiatic faces of the traders in Chinese silk and camel cloth, silver and jade, and his father had early identified the unreliable character of the Khwarazmshah:

  Some of them who used to come as traders into the territories of the Khwarazmshah would buy muslin to clothe themselves. The Khwarazmshah prohibited them and ordered their traders killed. He also taxed them and barred his own merchants from traveling to their lands. The Tatars went humbly before their king, wailing, “We have been destroyed.” The king sought ten days to consider the matter and went into a deep cave, where he fasted the ten days, and he beseeched and prayed. A cry came from God, saying, “I have heard your plea. Come forth and be victorious wherever you go.” They came out and under God’s command they were victorious and conquered the world.

  This provocation, retold by Rumi, occurred in 1217, when Genghis Khan, eyeing Khwarazm as a lucrative trading partner, sent his ambassadors to negotiate a trade agreement and followed them with a caravan of 450 merchants carrying luxury goods. As the caravan crossed into present-day Kazakhstan, just north of Rumi’s childhood home, its governor, a relative of the Khwarazmshah, seized the goods and killed the merchants, as spies. Genghis Khan sent envoys to demand retribution. Instead, Khwarazmshah beheaded one envoy and returned the others, their beards insultingly shaved. Verifying Rumi’s account, the contemporary Persian historian Jovayni reported that Genghis Khan ascended a mountaintop to pray, and descended, “ready for war.” He dramatically added that the rash acts would wind up having “laid waste a whole world.”

  The ensuing, punishing invasion lasted four years, until Genghis Khan, in his sixties, returned home to Mongolia, leaving behind in ruins the grand cities that Rumi had known as a boy—Bukhara, Samarkand, Balkh, Herat, Merv, and Nishapur. As Jovayni described the vanguard of the descent of the Mongol forces on Bukhara—a signature display of sound and fury—the townspeople “beheld the surrounding countryside choked with horsemen and the air black as night with the dust of cavalry, and fright and panic overcame them.” Genghis Khan himself rode into the town that for Rumi “stands for the true source of knowledge,” halting to ask if the mosque, the biggest edifice, were the sultan’s palace. He ordered imams to feed his horses, using the libraries as stables, and Quran stands as mangers for straw. One survivor succinctly reported, “They came, they sapped, they burnt, they slew, they plundered, and they departed.”

  From Bukhara, the Mongol armies proceeded through the fertile Zarafshan valley to attack Samarkand, an operation far more brutal than the siege Rumi had witnessed as a boy, just eight years earlier. Mongol numbers were augmented by a forced march of prisoners, the weakest dropping from exhaustion. Outside the walls of the city, these prisoners were disguised as soldiers, with every tenth one holding a flag, so that the citizens of Samarkand imagined a force many times larger. Genghis Khan entered by the northwest gate, dividing thirty thousand of the skilled artisans among his sons and kinsmen, and then killing a sizable portion of the population. The lustrous new Cathedral Mosque, built by Khwarazmshah after his own siege, was bombarded with hurled pots of flaming tar.

  The cavalry then retraced the same route from Samarkand to Balkh that had likely been traveled by Rumi’s family. Termez— where Rumi’s tutor Borhan stayed behind—was shown no mercy.
Jovayni recorded that “all the people, both men and women, were driven out onto the plain and divided proportionately among the soldiers in accordance with their usual custom; then they were all slain, none being spared.” In Balkh, where members of Baha Valad’s family were perhaps still living, any fortifications and walls, as well as mansions and palaces, were obliterated, and the killing fields of Termez were replicated: “Wild beasts feasted on their flesh, and lions consorted without contention with wolves, and vultures ate without quarreling from the same table with eagles.”

  Nishapur suffered the most numbing treatment of all the cities in this prolonged exercise in bloody revenge and tactical empire building. An arrow shot from the city ramparts during its defense killed Tokuchar, the son-in-law of Genghis Khan. The conqueror allowed his widowed and pregnant daughter to exact the revenge. In April 1221 she decreed death for all except four hundred craftsmen, including dogs, cats, and any living animals, and ordered the skulls of the corpses to be piled into three pyramids—for men, women, and children. A few accounts numbered Attar among these dead, seemingly fitting for this subtle and melancholy poet who described himself as “the voice of pain.”