by Brad Gooch
Turns an intelligent man into an animal, even if he is a Plato
Sometimes he spoke of Plato in the tones he usually reserved for a Sufi spiritual master:
Whatever the Plato of the age advises you to do,
Give up your self-will and act according to his counsel
This resonance may have helped the warm reception given Khorasani mystics in town.
Yet not all his students immediately took to Borhan. Baha Valad had kept a judicial, scholarly tone, while Borhan was more openly (rather than covertly) mystical and poetical. Rumi often needed to come to his defense. Some of the infighting was stinging enough that Rumi could still relate the heated debates to his own students, decades after Borhan’s death, especially concerning the mixing of poetry with theology:
They said, “Sayyed Borhanoddin speaks very well, but he quotes Sanai’s poetry too often.” This is like saying the sun is good but it gives off too much light. Is that a fault? Quoting Sanai’s words casts more light on the discussion. Sunlight casts light on things!
Once a student interrupted Borhan to protest his overuse of analogies, as a frivolous tool for scholars to use. As Rumi told the story, Borhan was not shy in defending his methods:
Sayyed Borhanoddin was giving a lecture. A fool broke in and said, “We need words without analogies.” Sayyed answered, “Let him who seeks to hear words without analogies, draw closer. For you are actually an analogy yourself. You are not this thing. Your self is only your shadow. When someone dies, people say that he has departed. If he were this thing, where has he gone? It is clear that your appearance is only an analogy of your true self, from which your true self can be deduced.”
Others adored Borhan in the manner a dervish did toward his sheikh, looking for guidance on a path deemed dangerous without direction from a mature teacher—a path envisioned by Borhan as an expansive journey, like the flight of Attar’s birds. “The path of reunion has no end,” he told them, “God is the goal and destination.” His most excited recent follower on this spiritual quest was a humble, unlearned goldsmith—Salahoddin Zarkub—a Turk from one of the nearby fishing villages on the Konya plains—who arrived in the capital in the 1230s to set up a small shop in the goldsmiths’ bazaar. He was fervent about Borhan’s emphasis on fasting and purification, and became important enough to Rumi later in life for him to describe Salah as his “root of spiritual joy.”
Rumi spent a year or so in the growing circle of Borhan, learning more of the basics of Sufi thought. He was highly receptive to all of Borhan’s mystical language and concepts. Borhan imparted to Rumi his passion for Hallaj, also known as Mansur. He liked to make a contrast between the “I” of the villain Pharaoh in the Quran, proudly refusing to bend to God’s will in the liberation of the Hebrew slaves, with the egoless “I” in the “I am the Truth!” of Hallaj, which reportedly got him executed in Baghdad. “Pharaoh, God’s curse upon him, said, ‘I am your Lord,’” preached Borhan. “His use of the word ‘I’ brought God’s curse upon him. Mansur said ‘I am the Truth’ and his use of the word ‘I’ was a mercy from God.” In his Masnavi, years later, Rumi neatly set this thought of Borhan:
“I am the Truth,” shone from Mansur’s lips like light
“I am the Lord,” fell from Pharaoh’s lips like a threat
Borhan eventually decided on a plan to prepare Rumi to manage the school established by his father and evolve into a religious jurist and guider of souls. To accomplish this ambition, Borhan resolved that his young charge travel to the most respected colleges in Aleppo and Damascus and study with elevated scholars in a curriculum combining readings in law and religion with a glass-bead game of esoteric knowledge. Borhan would take responsibility for caretaking the madrase, and their grandmother, the Great Kerra, would serve as spiritual mother for Rumi’s boys, then about six years old. She was considered another beneficiary of Baha Valad’s higher “secrets.”
From the seat of honor one day, Borhan singled out Rumi and addressed him directly, charging him with his imminent mission: “God the Almighty, elevate you to the rank of your father. No one is at a higher rank than him, or I would have prayed, ‘God, let him surpass him.’ But that is the ultimate.” Rumi’s son painted the farewell as even more luminous, remembering Borhan as extravagantly and emotionally blessing Rumi at his departure, with the glorious prediction: “And like the sun you’ll scatter light worldwide.”
CHAPTER 6
“I kept hearing my own name”
ARRIVING in Aleppo in northern Syria to begin his studies at about the age of twenty-five, and moving on eventually to Damascus, Rumi took his place in an entitled “turbaned class” of scholars and their chosen students. This selective gathering of the religious elite was made all the more lively and competitive as Syria in the early decades of the thirteenth century was widely considered the heart of Muslim culture in the Arabic language. Here he could see once again the learned society of debaters with clipped beards, trailing turban tassels, and green academic robes with wide, long sleeves, which he first might have glimpsed as a boy in the courtyards of Nezamiyye College in Baghdad.
Yet education in Rumi’s time was also intimate and personal, a matter of a student being taken in hand by a teacher, or a small circle of teachers, and imitating their adab, or manners and style, as much as mastering a single field of apprenticeship. Dispatching his charge to Aleppo, Borhan was entrusting him with cosmopolitan choices, not only in interpreting religious law, but also in comportment, intellectual tastes, and moral conduct. With his disciple Salah, he accompanied Rumi as far as Kayseri, midway between Konya and Aleppo, where they stayed briefly with the governor, who was building Borhan his own madrase. Kayseri was the second most important city in Rum, as Sultan Alaoddin Kayqobad I had built his ornate Qobadiyye Palace on its lakefront.
As a married student, with an ascetic practice encouraged by Borhan, Rumi lived a circumscribed life, in a traditional student cell in the most famous of the colleges of Aleppo, the Halaviyye, which was converted into a mosque from a Byzantine cathedral a century earlier as revenge against the Franks for pillaging during the First Crusade. While Rumi was in Aleppo, around 1233, the Halaviyye was sliding into disrepair and barely used as a teaching facility. Such schools were as much dormitories, with charitable endowments for supporting residential students, as academies granting certificates. The situation was fluid as mosques evolved into schools, then changed back again, and Rumi was free to follow lectures at the Shadbakht Madrase or reading circles at the Great Mosque.
Much like Konya, Aleppo was flourishing in a rare phase of peace and prosperity. The previous Ayyubid sultan al-Zahir, a son of the famed commander Saladin who had founded an Ayyubid dynasty in both Egypt and Syria, had reinforced the oval Citadel in the center of town, added a grand entranceway, repaired the canal system, and built a palace, upgrading Aleppo into one of the most beautiful cities in the Middle East. His son al-Aziz, who ruled during Rumi’s school years, capitalized on the advantages of the city’s trading location on caravan routes linking China with Europe, bringing in revenues second only to Egypt. The wood-roofed bazaar was its trading floor, offering local specialties such as pistachios and the glassware that glimmered in Rumi’s later poems:
I’m the slave of hopeless time, until that time
The wine of unity shines in a chalice of Aleppo glass
Like the interlocking patterns displayed on its stone and marble walls and portals, Aleppo was a complex mesh of East and West, Christian and Muslim. Much of its prosperity came from shrewd trading agreements with Venice that allowed Venetian merchants to establish a colony in Aleppo, with their own trading post, baths, and church. In 1219 Francis of Assisi met in Egypt with the Ayyubid sultan and won an agreement for his “Monks of the Rope” to wander the Holy Land. During the time of Rumi’s stay, the first Franciscan friars began arriving in Aleppo to minister to Crusader princes and soldiers held prisoner in the Citadel. They swept through the streets in their rough, woolen robes, m
uch like the robes worn by Sufis, with similar vows of poverty, and may have imprinted on Rumi the affinities between these two expressions of spirituality.
Rumi’s main teacher in Aleppo was Ibn al-Adim, a quick-witted and urbane scholar, historian, legal expert, diplomat, and calligrapher in his midforties, with a post at Shadbakht Madrase. Five members of his eminent Hanafi “old family”—including his father—had served in the powerful post of chief justice, or qadi, in Aleppo, since the tenth century. Ibn al-Adim was best known as a historian of Aleppo, and as a biographer of its leading citizens in his Biographical Dictionary, a massive, forty-volume who’s who of short vignettes, written by him in penmanship so fine that the sultan once summoned him to the palace to praise its beauty. He also wrote treatises on preparing perfumes, and on handwriting (practices, pens, and papers), as Arab intellectuals of his time were given to such encyclopedic “boundless compilation.” He did most of his writing on diplomatic missions for the sultan, when he traveled on a palanquin rigged between two mules.
Ibn al-Adim was a master of the basic sciences, explaining his quick ascent in the academic ranks, and was equipped to instruct Rumi in most areas of knowledge required for an advanced religious scholar: Arabic linguistics and grammar; dialectic reason and legal conflict; and the Quranic sciences. He gave indications of being a fellow traveler of Sufism, though he was too shrewdly political to proclaim such sympathies openly. (In the early years of his reign, al-Aziz had executed the Sufi leader Sohravardi for heresy.) Yet his father had called on his deathbed for the prayer beads of a Sufi saint, and Ibn al-Adim reserved a room in his own tomb for a Sufi, perhaps as a hedge against divine judgment. He espoused, if not always fully practiced, the virtues of poverty, solitude, and self-reliance.
While Rumi never absorbed his teacher’s passion for history, he was delighted by his exposure in Aleppo to the intricate joys of Arabic poetry. Ibn al-Adim was a minor poet. He wrote clever lines on slight topics, such as sighting the first white hairs in his beard. Yet he idolized those with “innate poetic ability,” and championed the poetry of the premier Arabic poet al-Mutanabbi, whose verses remained a lifelong pleasure for Rumi. During the eleventh century al-Mutanabbi had lived in the quarter of Aleppo where Ibn al-Adim’s family’s marble compound was located. Rumi’s favorites were al-Mutanabbi’s qasidas, often odes of praise for a patron, known for their technical virtuosity, though a surprising choice perhaps given their standard use of the tradition of braggadocio and praise of wine, power, and battlefield glory. Al-Mutanabbi wrote zestfully of “the play of swords and lances” and “the clash of armies at my command.” Rumi later scattered lines of al-Mutanabbi in his talks, and one of the Arab poet’s more famous openings—“A heart that wine cannot console”—entwined for Rumi with memories of school years in Syria, he transposed as a closing for a poem on spiritual wine:
We can look for the answer in Mutanabbi:
“A heart that wine cannot console”
In Aleppo, Rumi was also introduced to an active Shia community, especially visible during the festivals of the family of Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Mohammad, whose heirs are believed by Shia to be the rightful holders of the leadership of all Muslims. The Sunni rulers observed these festivals warily, while Rumi’s teacher, Ibn al-Adim, a member of the establishment, was described by his biographer as a “sentinel of the Sunni state.” On the Day of Ashura, mourning the death of Ali’s son Hosayn at the Battle of Karbala in 680, Rumi witnessed pious Shia weeping and beating themselves at Antioch Gate, the main fortress gate at the entrance of Aleppo. Thinly disguising himself as “A poet,” Rumi recorded this memory in Masnavi:
On the day of Ashura, all the people of Aleppo
Gather from day until night at the Antioch Gate . . .
One day a stranger, who was a poet, came along
On this day of Ashura, and heard their lamentations . . .
He went along, asking questions gently on his way,
“What is this sorrow? Whose death are they mourning?”
Though Rumi may not have been previously aware of this ritual, as Persians were mostly Sunni during his lifetime, his naïveté in rendering the experience was exaggerated, as he feigned discovering that the martyrdom being mourned had taken place centuries earlier:
Have you been asleep all this time?
You are only now tearing your garments in sorrow?
Rumi may have felt some shock as a young man, but revisiting the event, in his maturity, he was more intent on questioning sorrow as a response to death rather than joy:
Mourn for your own broken faith and religion
If your faith doesn’t see beyond this old earth
The second phase of Rumi’s advanced education took place in Damascus, where he likely traveled about a year later and had previously visited with his family during their original journey from Central Asia. While Aleppo was known as a trading and mercantile city, Damascus, in southern Syria, in the midst of a desert oasis, was both a commercial center and a holy city, the capital of the former Umayyad Caliphate, and one of the important departure points for hajj, especially for pilgrims traveling from points west. Because of the city’s religious history and geography, students of the Quran were welcomed and treated respectfully. The magnificent Umayyad Mosque, still enshrining the reputed head of John Baptist from its previous days as a Christian basilica, hummed all day with groups of students listening to their sheikhs read aloud. As Damascenes were not encouraged to read books silently or alone, the murmur of these many study circles was a kind of spoken music filling the courtyards daily from dawn until dusk.
Over about four years, in his midtwenties, Rumi studied in Damascus in one of the Hanafi seminaries, probably the Moqaddamiyye Madrase, near the Bab al-Firdaws, or Gate of Paradise, where he could stay in an outer building, free of the nighttime regulations overseeing entrances and exits that were enforced on younger students in the inner buildings. Of his studies of one important Hanafi text, he later recalled, “In my youth I had a friend in Damascus who was a companion with me in studying the Hedaya.” He also seems to have attended sessions of a famed Hanafi scholar from Bukhara, who was teaching at Nuriyye Madrase. All public classes were highly formal, modeled on behavior in a mosque, with a nearly sacred space cleared about the lecturer, so his rug and cushion were left untouched. As one manual prescribed proper student etiquette: “Do not look at anything but the teacher, and do not turn around to investigate any sound, especially during discussion. Do not shake your sleeve. The student should not uncover his arm, nor should he fiddle with his hands or feet or any part of his body parts, nor should he place his hand on his beard. . . . Nor should he try to say anything funny or offensive; and he should not laugh except out of surprise. If something overcomes him, he should smile without giving voice.”
Though student life was rigorous, Rumi loved his time in Damascus. He often called Damascus the “City of Love,” punning on the word for love, “eshq,” tucked into its Arabic name, “Dameshq.” He even wrote his single example of an ode to a city for Damascus, not only as homage to the capital, but also to Arabic poetry, where such love poems to cities abound, especially to Baghdad. Only Samarkand comes across in his writings with such verve and close observation. He exuberantly opens his city poem:
I’m madly in love, and crazy for Damascus
Damascus, where I left my heart and soul
Rumi catalogs the most prominent of the thirteen gates to the medieval city:
Separated from friends, I stand alone at the Barid Gate
Beyond the Lovers’ Mosque, in the green fields of Damascus . . .
Far from the Gate of Joy and the Gate of Paradise
You’ll never know what visions I’m seeking in Damascus.
His references are often built on inside jokes that only other visitors to Damascus at the time would fully understand. The Ayyubid sultan, during his stays in town, liked to play polo in the Verdant Field hippodrome, where Rumi imagined hi
s own head as a swerving ball:
I want to roll through her Verdant Field, like a polo ball
Struck by polo sticks, towards the main square of Damascus
A large Quran commissioned by Caliph Uthman was kept veiled as a relic in the mosque:
Let me swear an oath on Uthman’s holy book
The pearl of that beloved, shining in Damascus
The soft border between Muslims and Christians was nowhere more evident than in Damascus, even in these waning days of the Crusades. Many Christians and Jews lived in the capital, though neighborhoods were segregated by religion, with gates clanged shut at the dusk curfew, and beliefs worn on the sleeve: under a legal dress code, Christians wore crosses, and Jews a yellow or red shoulder rope. Syria was the historical center of monasticism, and Rumi was said to have come across a group of forty desert fathers, or hermit monks, on his way from Aleppo. The Quran was understood to say that Jesus stayed on the hill of nearby Rebva, and Damascenes hoped to witness his resurrection at their Eastern Gate:
Let’s climb Rebva, as if we’re in the time of Christ
Like monks, drunk on the dark red wines of Damascus
The Bab al-Faraj, or Gate of Joy, evoked by Rumi stood just east of the Salehiyye, or the Righteous District, outside the walls of the old city at the foot of prominent Mount Qasiyun. This neighborhood had grown in the past few decades and was crowded with mostly Sufi hostels and learning centers, explaining Rumi’s exclamation “On the Mount of Righteousness is a mine of pearls!” The most illustrious of those pearls, of course, was Ibn Arabi—who Rumi may or may not have met in Malatya a decade earlier. Ibn Arabi lived the final phase of his life in Damascus and was buried in a tomb in Salehiyye. Whether Rumi was included in his reading circles, he was certainly aware of the famous mystic. Definitely in attendance at readings of his voluminous texts, as Ibn Arabi was still producing them, though, was his godson Qonavi, with whom Rumi had a gradually evolving friendship later in Konya. Some of Ibn Arabi’s readings aloud were meant for Qonavi’s ears alone. Rumi saw venerated in the person of Ibn Arabi a sublime and knowledgeable approach to spirituality as an elite science available only to initiates with rarefied experience. Though tempted by Ibn Arabi’s approach, he was never entirely committed.