by Brad Gooch
For the three years leading up to the Mongol invasion, the geographer Yaqut had been staying happily in Merv, where he was researching his travel books in its many libraries. “But for the Mongols I would have stayed there and lived and died there,” he wrote, “and hardly could I tear myself away.” When the Mongol attack was imminent, Yaqut fled to Mosul. Soon afterward the invaders burned down all of its libraries, and smashed the dams and dikes so that the oasis reverted to a desert swamp.
Yaqut then joined an exodus of displaced Persians on the clogged roads heading west toward Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia. Caravans now included escapees from Khorasan, crossing paths with returning hajj pilgrims. In Baghdad, lodging was in short supply, and housing difficult to rent, as the displaced attempted to find places to stay. In a letter penned shortly after his escape, Yaqut, in an effusive, elegiac court style, mourned the palaces he had witnessed “effaced from off the earth as lines of writing are effaced from paper, and those abodes become a dwelling for the owl and the raven; in those places the screech-owls answer each other’s cries, and in those halls the winds moan.”
The numbers of dead were wildly exaggerated at the time, with suggestions of casualties in the hundreds of millions, far beyond the population of any cities in Central Asia. (Even some modern scholars, though, have confirmed the possibility of a 90 percent extermination rate among the Persian population in Khorasan, constituting racial genocide.) If a percentage of the victims were spared for deportation as skilled slaves, Genghis Khan was uncompromising in his systematic destruction of cities, as well as lead piping and irrigation systems, turning farms and orchards back to grazing lands for his herds. Voicing a general pessimism in the society, one contemporary historian opined that the Mongols were “the announcement of the deathblow of Islam and the Muslims.”
Yet as Genghis Khan was establishing his brutish militarist state in Central Asia—an absolute threat to the religion of Islam—curiously resilient were the mystical practices of Sufism, already established in the western provinces and revivified by these Khorasani immigrants, including Baha Valad and his family. Sufi lodges became welcome cultural outposts of refinement, where sheikhs, or spiritual leaders, offered messages of hope and transcendence, friendship and love, as well as musical concerts, poetry, and dance, evoking rapture. Sufi orders, loosely similar to Western religious orders, were beginning to multiply and would become more formalized in the next decades and centuries. As the German Middle East scholar Annemarie Schimmel summed up the contrast: “This period of the most terrible political disaster was, at the same time, a period of highest religious and mystical activity.”
The full force of the Mongol campaigns would be concentrated in two aggressive phases—the first, the conquest of Central Asia, and the second, commandeered by the grandsons of Genghis Khan, marked by incursions into the Middle East and Anatolia in the 1250s. A newly configured world map spread contiguous Mongol-controlled territories from Korea to Hungary. From the age of ten until his death, Rumi coped with the turmoil caused by this churning realpolitik of the Mongols. Yet either ignoring, or because of, the pain and suffering caused to his family and community, as an adult, Rumi stuck resolutely to his surety of an “invisible hand” in these dark historical events:
While everyone flees from the Tatars
We serve the Creator of the Tatars
He framed the issue even more starkly for his circle, often immigrants from Khorasan, writing, “If you’re afraid of the Tatars, you don’t believe in God.”
In the final phase of his life, Baha Valad—now nearly seventy years old—found the acceptance, even acclaim, which had eluded him during his earlier years. He might well have discerned divine providence at work—and communicated to his son this understanding of otherwise tragic events. His choice of location in Asia Minor was not random, as he moved as an itinerant preacher from city to city, and patron to patron, working his way always closer to Konya, the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, ruled by Sultan Alaoddin Kayqobad I, which he may have first visited as early as 1221. And of course the timing of this late-life migration had allowed his family to escape possible execution by the world conqueror known, by then, simply as “The Accursed.” He and his family spent the next seven years in the center of Anatolia before finally arriving in Konya, and Rumi passed from a boyhood spent traveling to young manhood.
Within four years of arriving in Erzincan, by 1222, Baha Valad was finally on his way, with his family, to the more central city of Larande, well inside the realm of the Seljuk sultanate. The daughter of the shah of Erzincan had been married to Kaykaus I, the Seljuk king, and may have smoothed the way for Baha Valad with members of the royal family. Originally one of dozens of nomadic Turkic clans in Central Asia, the Seljuks were nearing the apogee of a two-century hold on power in the central Islamic lands. In 1055, the Great Seljuks had taken control as “protector” of the Abbasid Caliphate; in 1077, the Seljuks in Anatolia defeated the Byzantines, at the Battle of Manzikert near Erzincan, almost to their own surprise, giving them sway over much of Asia Minor.
Arriving when he was about fifteen years old, Rumi truly came of age in Larande, or modern-day Karaman, sixty miles southeast of Konya. The hilltop town was full of gardens, fountains, and sweet peaches, which he later said could set a whole town smiling:
Today a hundred beautiful faces are smiling in Konya
Today a hundred peaches are arriving from Larande
This pleasant association fit the experience of his family, particularly his father. Baha Valad’s patron was the local governor, who built him an entire school on the main square in town. Baha’s orientation as a Sunni Hanafite with Sufi leanings fit with the broader agenda of the Seljuks, as they had been part of the military force behind a “Sunni Revival” of the Abbasid Caliphate, and had originally been converted to Islam by the heartwarming preaching of the Sufis. This formula worked especially well in trying to win over the local Greek Christians, rather than a hardline legalism. (Larande also included many Christian Turks, who were writing Turkish using a Greek alphabet.)
Most of Rumi’s adolescent education took place in these learned settings arranged for his father in such Anatolian towns. In spite of any juvenile resistance to primary school lessons, he had grown into an avid pupil, curious and studying widely, absorbing all manner of religious, scientific, and literary texts. The basics of his classwork were meant to prepare him for a life of preaching, teaching, and judging. He studied Arabic grammar and prosody; commentaries on the Quran; accounts of the life and sayings of the Prophet Mohammad; and Sharia, or religious law. He also studied history, philosophy, mathematics, and a favorite Persian science, astronomy, its scientific instruments for precise measuring and stargazing recurring in many of his later lyrics:
The sky is an astrolabe, while the truth is love
When I speak, spin your ear towards my meaning
Turning seventeen in Larande, Rumi was wed, in 1224, to Gowhar, in a ceremony that bore all the marks of a traditionally arranged marriage. As the daughter of Sharaf of Samarkand, the deceased patron and disciple of Baha Valad, and his widow, the matriarch now known as the Great Kerra, Gowhar had been close to Rumi since they were both learning their alphabets. She had traveled with her mother in the harem of the caravan all the way from Samarkand, and, like Rumi, had grown from a child into a young adult over the course of the eventful decade—rare memories, which they shared. Almost immediately, they had two sons: Bahaoddin Mohammad, later known as Sultan Valad, born in 1226, and named with his grandfather’s full name, and Alaoddin Mohammad, named for Rumi’s older brother, who possibly died during the long journey.
Rumi was keenly observant of the process of giving birth, and the transformation of a wife into a mother, his empathy palpable in the Masnavi, where he writes of pregnant women trembling at each spasm, or chewing on clay lumps to help ease their birth pangs:
In childbirth every mother suffers aches
As her baby tries to break ou
t of prison.
The mother cries, “Where is my refuge?”
The baby laughs, “Salvation is here!”
He graphically rendered the first demanding phases of child rearing, when he devised an analogy for his students about God’s transformative patience with spiritual immaturity:
God is able to do all things. . . . When a child is newly born he is worse than a donkey. He puts his hand in his filth and then his hand in his mouth to lick. His mother slaps him to prevent it. When he pisses, he spreads his legs so that the pee doesn’t drip on his leg. . . . Yet God is able to turn a baby into a human being.
And he tenderly recalled a mother’s breastfeeding moments at the side of a baby’s crib:
Unless the baby in the cradle cries and weeps
How does the anxious mother know to feed him milk?
From earliest childhood, Rumi’s two sons were a tumble of conflicts. Even the order of their births has never firmly been established. Sultan Valad was named after his grandfather, a distinction signaling a firstborn, especially as Rumi’s father was about seventy-five years old at his birth. Yet one contemporary biographer recorded that Alaoddin was one year older. Less ambiguous would be Sultan Valad’s place as his father’s favorite, not only his child but also his disciple, revering his father as Rumi had revered and tried to emulate Baha Valad. So sibling rivalry was ever roiling between these brothers—a source of pain for their father, who sketched all boys’ games as combative:
Wars are like the fights of children,
Meaningless, thoughtless, and petty
They aim at each other with wooden swords
But their goals and purposes are futile.
In Larande, Rumi, now a married young adult, stepped into the position of preacher, occasionally taking his father’s place on the steps of the pulpit, where sermons were delivered in mosques, or in the seat of honor, in a college. In the medieval Muslim world, preaching was an art and a pillar of moral teaching, both entertainment and instruction. Rumi’s father’s delivery was fiery, a popular timbre. His grandson Sultan Valad told of him once throttling three sturdy camel drivers on the road to Baghdad. “They repented and begged forgiveness,” he said, comparing his grandfather to a lion. Such force came through in his sermons. He was saturated in the preaching culture of Khorasan, where sermons often ended on shrill warnings about judgment on the Last Day as weeping listeners, revival-style, came forward to repent of sins by having their heads shaved.
Rumi’s tone was already more dulcet and controlled. He did not preach fire and brimstone, yet he adhered to the basic model. His early sermons were traditional and fairly standard, opening with a benediction in Arabic rhymed prose, in the style of the Quran, praising God, His Messenger Mohammad, and Abu Bakr, the first of the four “Rightly Guided” caliphs venerated by Sunni Muslims. He then prayed for God’s intercession in a lyrical Persian that was full of crescendos—the language was understood in Anatolia by the many Persian immigrants as well as being generally used as the universal court language for business and ceremonies. In one sermon evidently delivered in Larande, he prayed for his father and mother, and for his “instructor,” another figure clearly involved in his sophisticated religious education. He then repeated, in Arabic, a saying of the Prophet—the text of his sermon—after which he switched back into Persian.
In periodic flashes, the later mystic and poet Rumi can be glimpsed in some of these early sermons—otherwise they were the works of a young man trying to conform to his father’s pattern. In one of seven surviving sermons, he borrows a metaphor from a long poem attributed to Attar, The Book of the Camel, but common enough in mystical literature—a Turkish puppeteer performs with seven veils, and at the end of the night, like the cosmic creator, breaks all of his puppets and stores their pieces again in the dark box of Unity. In his opening prayer, Rumi makes enchanting theology from this material:
The magician of the skies, from behind the curtain of imagination, brings forth a play of shimmering stars and gorgeous planets. We crowd around this theatrical spectacle, mesmerized, passing away the night. In the morning, death will arrive, and the performance of these shadow players will grow cold, and the night of our life will vanish. Oh Lord! Before the morning of death dawns, let our hearts grow cold towards this play so that we might escape in time from this crowd, and not fall behind those who have been traveling through the night. When morning dawns, may we find ourselves arriving within the wider precinct of Your acceptance.
Around 1229, Baha Valad finally received his invitation from the Sultan Alaoddin Kayqobad I to travel to Konya to teach and to live, with his family, at the Altunpa Madrase, the only madrase operating at the time in the capital. If Baha Valad hoped to realize his wish to be preaching in one of the more “glorious cities,” he was fortunate. The sultan was gathering together a court unequalled in the Anatolian Seljuk dynasty, with many Persian-speaking poets, artisans, administrators, and scholars, even if the atmosphere included wine drinking and harp playing, which Baha Valad abhorred.
Others were not so fortunate. Uprooted scholars, poets, and religious leaders, bereft of their former university posts or courtly sinecures, were arriving in Anatolia daily, and the court of Kayqobad I was murmured among them to be the most supportive refuge as they tried to recoup their livelihoods in the aftermath of extreme trauma. Just one example of a suddenly needy fellow scholar was Najmoddin Razi, a leading Sufi thinker, a generation younger than Baha Valad, who fled the Mongols to Kayseri in East Anatolia and quickly dispatched inscribed copies of his well-known writings to the Seljuk sultan, without the desired result of a royal invitation to Konya. Yet Baha Valad had luckily managed to salvage, even improve, life for himself and his uprooted family.
Before the Valad family departed for Konya, Rumi’s mother died and was buried in Larande. (The burial place of Momene, known as “Madar Sultan” by the Mevlevis, became a much-visited shrine.) By the time Rumi—now a young father and preacher— left Larande he had experienced not only a panoply of traveling, but he had also seen the stages of life played out, with the deaths of his mother and older brother, his marriage to a childhood friend, and the births of their two sons, who took their names from the older generations. Rumi would discover in birth, and the constant metamorphoses of the life cycle, his favorite metaphor for the inner life:
Like a baby in the womb, I am nourished with blood.
Everyone is born once. I have been born many times.
CHAPTER 5
Konya
THICK stone walls, one hundred and forty watchtowers, and twelve gates rose from the central plateau of Anatolia with all the force and stature of the ramparts of Samarkand, Bukhara, Balkh, or Nishapur, as Rumi’s family made their way to settle in the city where he would spend most of his adult life. The difference between Konya and these classic cities—by then, mostly razed to the ground—was its relative newness. In 1229 Konya was still a buzzing construction project rather than a monument to the past, the Seljuk capital intended as a living replication of these former capitals of Khorasan. The Sultan Alaoddin Kayqobad I had attempted to consolidate and add legitimacy to his raw power by creating a Turco-Persian axis, and coopting Persian literature, religion, art, and architecture, as well as statecraft and pageantry. Baha Valad and his family would have felt some sense of familiarity and even homecoming as they relocated to the capital, a kinship that resonated in warm tones in Rumi’s later poetry:
Come into my house beloved—a short while!
Freshen my soul, beloved—a short while! . . .
So that the light of love radiates from Konya
To Samarkand and Bukhara—a short while!
Even in its layout, Konya more closely resembled the cities of Central Asia than those of Asia Minor. Houses were spread out between markets and flower gardens. Streets and wide alleys were lined with terra-cotta gullies of running water. Fountains were inset into the walls of public buildings in arch-shaped enclosures. Public baths were centrally located
, with sections for men and women, and fresh water spilling continuously from a spout into a basin—all the water was drawn from a reservoir pool beneath a marble dome at one of the city gates. The three miles of city walls were arranged as a rectangle with rounded corners, while the Citadel hill was freestanding in the center of town, in a pentagonal shape, with its own wall and towers constituting a second inner ring of protection. None of this conventional scheme, or its social significance, was lost on Rumi, who later delineated its rigid hierarchy for his son from a celestial perspective:
Bahaoddin, in this city of Konya notice how many thousands of houses, villas and mansions belong to commanders, noblemen and the wealthy. And notice how the houses of the gentlemen and administrators are grander than the houses of the artisans, and the mansions of the commanders are grander than the houses of the gentlemen. Likewise, the arches and palaces of the sultans and rulers are a hundred times grander and more splendid than the others. But the height and splendor of the heavens compared with these mansions turns out to be far more lofty, mighty, and splendid, and indeed many times more so.
Having drawn on Persian mythology to enhance his status in the capital, Sultan Alaoddin Kayqobad I lent himself an invented pedigree distinct from his nomadic Turkic ancestors, beginning with his name. Like his brother, Kaykaus I, and his father, Kaykhosrow I, the sultan took his royal name from the great fictional kings of the seminal epic of Rumi’s boyhood in Khorasan, the Shahname, or The Book of Kings. The sultan likewise had chiseled onto the towers of the two main entrances to Konya’s Citadel sculptural figures and quotations, in tall gold lettering, from the Shahname, and, throughout the palaces were set statues of dragons, a symbol in the epic poem of a Turk warrior, whom Ferdowsi, in the Shahname, describes as “a dangerous dragon whose breath is as fire.” The sultan’s glorification of all things Persian, combined with the status of the Seljuks as latecomers to Islam, helped create the perfect milieu for welcoming Rumi’s family to Konya, as well as the later crucial tolerance and protection for Rumi by the sultan’s descendants.