by Brad Gooch
Kayqobad I was the single most important force in the reversal of fortune for Rumi’s family and was generally convincing in fulfilling the heroic ideal of his glorious fictional namesake. His reign was the bright center of the comparatively brief two-century arc of imperial Seljuk Rum. Having ascended to power in 1219, after surviving imprisonment by his older brother Kaykaus I, he was a mostly wise ruler, evidently charismatic, though considered overly haughty by some of his emirs. He was also an able administrator, bringing into his treasury annual revenue of 3,300,000 gold dinars, from trade with Europe, and according to one historian, “embellishing Konya beyond all recognition.” During his fifteen-year reign, his armies secured the whole of Asia Minor from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, transforming Anatolia into a maritime power.
A patron of architecture, a devout Muslim, and an ambitious ruler with a talent for stagecraft, Kayqobad I chose as his legacy project the reconstruction of the Great Mosque on the Citadel hill, adjacent to the royal palaces and overlooking the plains. (When Konya was the classical Roman city of Iconium, Paul, from coastal Tarsus, preached Christianity on this Acropolis.) Built by a Syrian architect, the mosque retained the floor plan of the Great Mosque of Damascus, with a flat roof. The main prayer room held four thousand worshipers, with an atmosphere of awe created by forty-two marble columns, like a stone forest. Including an intricate ebony pulpit, the congregational mosque was used for noon sermons, and Rumi would kneel many Fridays on its woolen prayer rugs:
I prayed so much that I turned into prayer
Whoever looks into my face remembers to pray
The imaginative creatures chiseled on walls and gates surrounding these ceremonial buildings, including the palace, which stretched from the main gate to the wall of the mosque, would filter into Rumi’s imagination, too. Two pairs of winged angels guarded entrances to the Citadel. Over twenty lions, and several double-headed eagles, were carved in relief, as well as a caparisoned elephant pierced by a rhinoceros’s horn:
If you turn into a lion, Love turns into a lion hunter
If you turn into an elephant, Love turns into a rhinoceros
Built as well at the command of Kayqobad I, in 1229—the probable year of the arrival of Rumi’s family in Konya—was Sultan Han, a traveler’s caravanserai, on the road from Kayseri to Konya, in a region of flat Anatolian grasslands broken only by clumps of mountains, much like the steppes of Central Asia. In the first decades of the thirteenth century the main Seljuk construction project was to repair the old Roman stone roads, making them safer for merchants, and positioning rest houses at distances of nine hours travel by camel, or every eighteen miles. The largest of these inns provided mosques and fountains, camel and horse stables, kitchens and bathhouses. The Sultan Han even kept a band of musicians for entertainment. Near the outside gates, water usually gushed from stone animal fountains—decorative, yet for Rumi, also symbolic:
On all the roads they have built caravanserais with stone birds and other figures set around the edges of pools. Water flows from their mouths and spills into the pools. Any intelligent person knows that the water is not flowing from the beaks of the stone birds but from some other place.
His analogy was to God’s force behind “whatever words, voices, or languages He wills.”
These government-funded inns and reinforced roadways were crucial in Anatolia during the severe winters, when heavy snowdrifts inundated the highlands, five thousand feet above sea level, forcing travelers to remain indoors for days until the roads were cleared:
At night Easterners and Westerners and Transoxanians
Stay together inside the same caravanersai
Small and great remain together for days
At the inn, because of the frost and the snow
As soon as the road is opened and the obstacles removed,
They separate, and go in their different directions.
Prime time for traveling was spring—the season the family of Baha Valad would have chosen in the absence of any pressing issues—when the roads leading into Konya from the Salt Lake to the north were lined with camels bearing salt, as well as grass, straw, or wood. On other passes into town, fields of cotton and corn gave way to gardens of yellow plums, or the famous Konya Qamar al-Din, or Moon of Faith apricots. On mornings following thunderstorms, more roses opened, more greenery filled in, and the scent of silverberry trees, hanging like willows, with yellow blossoms, pervaded. Spring is the favorite season in Rumi’s poems, his springtime vignettes often vividly Anatolian:
The rose garden, and sweet basil, all shades of peonies
A violet bed among the dirt, and wind and water and fire, O heart!
Baha Valad was reportedly given a royal welcome to Konya. His great-grandson, Rumi’s grandson Aref Chelebi, about ninety years later, commissioned his disciple Aflaki to gather memories of these times from survivors, and collect them in an often romanticized history titled The Acts of the Mystics. According to Aflaki, the Sultan Alaoddin Kayqobad I personally greeted Baha Valad, and offered him residence, if he preferred, in a room in the palace used for storing vessels, or hand washing, as well as for sleeping quarters. In declining health, Baha Valad, now an old man of Khorasan, spoke of the traditional divisions of society, perhaps not quite as set in the still evolving Seljuk Rum. “Religious teachers belong in schools,” he said. “Sufis in lodges, commanders and princes in palaces, merchants in inns, artisans in guilds, and foreigners in guesthouses.”
The extravagant gestures credited to the sultan were extraordinary for a king—such as kissing the knee of Baha Valad—but not entirely out of character. Sultan Kayqobad I was always at pains to display his reverence, especially toward mystical teachers from the spiritual homeland of Khorasan, considered a repository of ancient Persian wisdom as well as known territory to the Turkic clans. As Asia Minor was set off from the Arabian mainland, and its population was mostly Greek and Armenian Christian, Islam was being allowed to develop under these Seljuks in a fashion more attuned to the universalism of Ibn Arabi. (While living in Malayta, Ibn Arabi had served as an adviser and a spiritual father for the sultan’s older brother, Kaykaus I.) The Seljuk sultans also believed that prayers for prosperity from saintly old men, such as Baha Valad, were especially potent.
Fitting Baha Valad’s sense of propriety, as in Baghdad, he and his family then set up residence at a school, rather than in a Sufi lodge or palace room. The Altunpa Madrase and Mosque had been built for the sultan’s commander Shamsoddin Altunbey in 1202, in the sober and restrained style of early Seljuk architecture, and was located near the main market square in the more populous district of Konya. Such Seljuk schools tended to be rectangular, two-story buildings, with lecture halls and study rooms on the first floor and student bedrooms with fireplaces and cupboards on the second floor, set around a central courtyard and fountain, much like a medieval cloister. Baha Valad paid retainers of a thousand dinars each to two of his new disciples, a baker and a butcher, described as “pleasant and polite young men,” to tend to the kitchen and to the meals.
Baha Valad rapidly attracted a number of other disciples, both men and women. Rather than a drawback, his advanced age of nearly eighty was considered desirable in a religious teacher. In a manual for students written a few decades earlier, in Khorasan, one Hanafi jurist advised selecting as a teacher the “most learned, the most pious and the most advanced in years.” With his livelihood secured by the sultan, Baha Valad, as in Aqshahr and Larande, began teaching a mixture of law, ethics, and mystical Islam, and drawing students from different social classes. He shared his learning not only with a weaver, and with someone identifying himself as a “simple-hearted” Turk, but also with the courtiers.
An early disciple of Baha Valad from among the governing elite was Amir Badroddin Gowhartash, also known as the fortress commander, one of the chief stewards of the palace. Gowhartash took responsibility for building a new madrase for Baha Valad and his family that eventually came to be known during Rumi’s
lifetime as the Madrase Khodavandgar, and to establish the village of Kara Arslan as its endowment—a financial practice designating a portion of the village income from farming to the madrase. While closer to the ceremonial main gate of entrance to the Citadel and the palace, this madrase was located in the same general neighborhood as the Madrase Altunpa, a merchant and artisan district of earthen houses with red tile roofs set among cypresses, maples, and thick oak trees, the sound of water flowing in its gutters always faintly audible. The madrase included an adjoining harem for Rumi’s wife and mother-in-law, as well as his two young boys, who remained, as he had, living in the harem until age ten or eleven.
Baha Valad’s decision to live near the markets made his teaching available to a wider following, as the Citadel was a much more elite and self-contained gated town-within-a-town. Only about nine hundred of the hundred thousand residents of Konya lived and worked in the defended Citadel. They were mostly administrators, palace servants, translators, often Jewish doctors, and, as Rumi observed, commanders living in houses just to the north that were visible from the two-story, blue-tiled imperial palace, its balconies facing in three directions atop an outer wall. The entire complex included a harem, bakery, treasury, bathhouse, stables, wine cellar, gardens, and—about fifty yards from the Great Mosque—the Church of St. Amphilochios, a chapel used by the many Christian mothers, wives, and daughters-in-law of the sultans. (One of the wives of Kayqobad I, Mahpari, was a Greek Christian; she was the mother of his eldest son and successor, Kaykhosrow II.) This nearly accidental religious diversity—a matter of indifference as much as design among these governing sultans—eventually helped to create the conditions for Rumi’s being able to inspire, teach, and learn lessons from all of these different faith communities at once.
Baha Valad did preach regularly at the Great Mosque in the Citadel complex. Indeed, Gowhartash first approached him at the mosque of the sultan, following a sermon that he found powerful. Yet Baha Valad mostly moved among the merchants and craftsmen, following a routine similar to his life in Vakhsh. In the style of the Sufis, he liked to wander about the Konya cemetery, reciting the Quran in a low voice. One day he had a pulpit set up outside the cemetery and preached to both men and women about the Day of Resurrection, reminding them of the stark terrors of the final judgment. He continued delivering legal judgments, many as strict as ever, especially on drinking wine, with his son Rumi always beside him, increasingly serving as his “tongue” and “walking stick.”
After two years, Baha Valad’s health began to fail. Most of his teeth were now missing, his voice quavering, and he was receiving his followers, including the sultan, at home. “Wait until I pass away and you see how my son Jalaloddin Mohammad turns out!” he said of his son, then twenty-three years old. “He will take my place and become more elevated than I.” Late one morning, in February 1231, at about eighty years of age, Baha Valad died. Having led his family thousands of miles, escaping possible extinction, and achieving recognition for wise leadership, he died as a patriarch and hero for his community. Kayqobad I donated the grounds in his rose gardens, beyond the Horse Bazaar Gate, where Baha Valad was buried. When his grandson Sultan Valad later wrote of the widely attended funeral, he emphasized the passing of authority next to his father: “After the mourning was complete all the people, young and old, gathered around, and looked to his son, saying, ‘You are like him in beauty. From now on we will hold to the hem of your robe. We will follow you wherever you go. From now on you are our king.’”
Rumi had always been a highly sensitive and emotional boy. So he remained as a young and mature man, with no event so far in his life shaking and challenging him as much as the death of the father he idolized and emulated. He would return, full of both sorrow and need, to the grave of Baha Valad, near a marble fountain, whenever he wished to gather his thoughts or solve problems. Faced with crises, he was often spotted striding out through the Horse Bazaar Gate to visit his father’s tomb. “He clearly heard the correct answer from the garden of his father’s tomb,” said one of the townspeople.
Rumi also began carrying pages of his father’s writings tucked into the inner sleeve pocket of his long robes. Although Baha Valad was outwardly strict, and stressed the wages of sin, his private journal was filled with intimate meditations on divine love expressed in passionate language that allowed Rumi to hear the voice of his dear father once again, filling him with warmth and purpose, and informing his ideas about love and God. “The most effective and the strongest creation of God is love,” wrote Baha Valad. “Nothing created by God is as strong and as marvelous as love. Without love, life lacks its true power. I am constantly remembering God and I am always occupied with Him.”
Following the death of his father, Rumi traveled to Larande, where his mother was buried and many of his father’s students from his former school were living. He obviously felt a need to reconnect with family and homeland. One day during this visit, the grieving son received a startling message. His mentor from Khorasan, Borhan, had not only survived the Mongol devastation in Termez but had arrived in Konya, and was staying at the Senjari Mosque. Rumi had not seen his tutor in fifteen years, since Borhan carried him on his shoulders during childhood, so he quickly returned home. Borhan, now over sixty years old, rushed through the front door of the mosque and the two embraced again.
The timing of Borhan’s appearance, around 1232, was uncanny. Borhan attributed his arrival to the prodding of Baha Valad in a dream. As Borhan was mourning the news of his passing, Baha Valad angrily rebuked him: “Borhanoddin, why is it that you are not attending upon our Khodavandgar but have left him alone? This is not the behavior of a guardian and a tutor. What explanation do you give for this shortcoming?” According to a different report, Borhan was on pilgrimage in Mecca when he learned from either the sheikhs of Syria or the pilgrims of Rum of the whereabouts of Baha Valad, but not of his death. The result either way was fortunate for Rumi, who was not yet quite ready to assume leadership of the school, the age of wisdom in Islam being considered about forty. So he invited Borhan to move into his room, and to take over his father’s place as preacher and teacher.
Borhan in turn invited Rumi to learn more of the “secret” knowledge he had received from Baha Valad. The psychological subtleties of the matters they needed to discuss could only be understood, he explained, in intimate encounters between a teacher and his student. On their reunion, Borhan told Rumi, “Your father mastered both knowledge of words and knowledge of spiritual states.” Encouraging him to expand his knowledge of such states, Borhan became Rumi’s sheikh, or spiritual director. Over the next decade, he plotted the course of his spiritual higher education. Listening to Borhan was like listening to his father. He trusted him and regarded him with filial tenderness.
At the madrase, Borhan took flight with Sufi notions of the mystical life. He was less circumspect than Baha Valad, though he likewise rarely used the term “Sufi,” preferring to speak of mystics, or of “dervishes,” the Turkish version of a Persian word for those who had renounced the world and served God in poverty. He loved poetry more than Baha Valad and recited favorite lines from the poems of Sanai and Attar. Yet his presence gave the followers of Baha Valad a sense of continuity, as he was an aging, dignified preacher, scholar, ascetic, and Quranic commentator. With his Khorasani accent and bearing, he carried with him echoes of the vanished worlds of Samarkand and Balkh.
Borhan was always trying to impart esoteric ideas he described as “secrets,” which essentially conveyed an understanding of divinity as present in everyone. The “science” he was teaching was a science of the soul. But such a science was not easily put into language and presented perils if the line between human and divine appeared to have been crossed. Most of the Sufis’ doubling of language and use of elliptical and poetic words was intended to, or subtly resulted in, the intertwining of the divine and the human, either through transformation by knowledge, a vision of light, or ecstatic immolation in love. Borhan used ma
ny of the standard Sufi images for these experiences, such as discovering a pearl, reflecting light in a mirror, or burning like a moth in a flame. With students, perhaps even Rumi, taking notes, he explained, “You are your own pearl. . . . If you don’t know anything else, but know yourself, then you are a scholar and a mystic. If you don’t know yourself, then all the science and knowledge that you possess is useless.”
Such messages of self-knowledge were not unfamiliar to the Greeks of Anatolia, either. From the inscription “Know Thyself” (“gnothi seauton”) on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, knowledge, or gnosis, had been aligned for the classical Greeks with religion. Neoplatonic thought emphasizing knowledge as a mystical path was alive in the Anatolian region, and Plato was an almost magical figure, treated as a saint by both Greeks and Turks. Near Konya bubbled “Aflatun Pinari,” or “Plato’s Spring,” where he was believed to have lived. (Aflatun was a translation of Plato.) Some said Plato was buried in the chapel on the Citadel. Rumi often visited the monks in the Eflatun Monastery near Konya, and he made Plato a symbol of great wisdom in his Masnavi:
God’s seal on the eyes and ears of the intelligence