by Brad Gooch
For some time, like everyone, I adored myself,
Blind to others, I kept hearing my own name.
PART II
CHAPTER 7
“The face of the sun is Shams of Tabriz”
A stranger appeared in Konya on November 29, 1244. About sixty years old, dressed in a cloak fashioned from coarse black felt, and wearing a simple traveler’s cap, he checked into one of the inns managed by the sugar confectioners or the rice sellers within the market district, not far from Rumi’s school. His name was Shamsoddin, or Shams of Tabriz, and he was a singular outlier mystic in a period of history crowded with extreme religious seekers, especially active in the wake of the Mongol invasions. From decades of restless travel throughout all the religious capitals of the Muslim world, he had earned the nickname “Parande,” or “The Flier.”
Ignoring the social etiquette that Baha Valad had followed so strictly, Shams bypassed the Sufi lodges, where he could easily have found subsidized room and board. Instead he chose to remain incognito in a merchant inn, disguising himself as a commercial businessman, even putting a giant lock on his door to insinuate that he was carrying valuable wares that needed to be safeguarded, though inside was nothing but a straw mat. In conversations with Rumi later written down by students, including Sultan Valad, Shams remembered being asked, “Aren’t you coming to the madrase?” and answering, “I’m not a debater. I’m a stranger. The inn is the right place for strangers.”
Most likely during the first week of December, Shams and Rumi suddenly met. At the crest of his prominence as a religious teacher and jurist, Rumi was on his way from one of his teaching appointments at the Cotton Sellers Madrase and was passing by the inn where Shams was staying. He was riding a mule and surrounded by a posse of students, walking on foot, holding his stirrups, adding an aura of celebrity similar to the retinue of Razi in Herat during Rumi’s childhood, though on a smaller scale. In place were the symbols of his scholarly status he wrote about later in a self-deprecating tone:
My turban, my robe, and my head
Are worth less than a single penny
Slicing through all the jostling, his black cloak wrapped tightly about him, Shams grabbed the reins of Rumi’s mount. The conversation that ensued was a hasty theological exchange. As Shams later recalled:
The first words I spoke to Mowlana were: “Why didn’t Bayazid follow the example of the Prophet and say, ‘Glory be to You!’ or ‘We have not fully worshipped You?’” Mowlana perfectly understood the full implications of the problem, and where it came from, and where it was leading. It made him ecstatic because his spirit was so pure and clean, and shone in his face. I realized the sweetness of my question only from his ecstasy. Before then I had been unaware of its sweetness.
The issue that Shams was raising pivoted on Bayazid Bestami, an Eastern Iranian Sufi mystic of the “drunken” school, who exclaimed, “Glory Be to Me! How great is My Majesty!” Like Hallaj’s “I am the Truth!” Bayazid’s unorthodox hymn of praise, seemingly to himself, could be interpreted as evidence of a mystic having lost all sense of self. To ordinary ears, he was risking blasphemy by merging his human identity with the divine. Shams was asking Rumi how such a high state of rapture should be compared with the Prophet Mohammad, who had spoken of being raised to the highest heavens, and yet, more humbly, prayed, “We have not known You as You should be rightly known.”
“Was Bayazid greater or Mohammad?” pressed Shams.
“Bayazid’s thirst was quenched by a single mouthful, and he was satisfied, and claimed he was no longer thirsty,” answered Rumi. “The water jug of his understanding was filled with a single sip. His house received light that fit the size of its single window. But Mohammad’s quest for water was immense, consisting of thirst upon thirst.”
Some reported that Shams “fell in a swoon” at Rumi’s response, though it was fairly standard in the Muslim catechism: Mohammad was the greatest of all men. Yet Shams and Rumi had gazed at each other, and this exchange was far more disruptive. A recurring theme in the literature of romantic love and Sufi mystical love was this deep gaze. Not only Layli and Majnun exchanged amorous looks, so did Sufi masters and their true disciples behold each other. Writing of this extraordinary meeting, Sultan Valad used all the rich language and imagery of ecstatic love to describe his father’s first glimpse of Shams. Rumi “saw the veil pulled away from his face” and “fell in love with him.”
Describing their meeting months later, among a circle of interested students, Shams did not spell out Rumi’s parsing of his leading question. Rather he simply remembered responding to his pure spirit, shining face, joy at finding a kindred soul, and a tenor of sweetness. A through-line in Rumi’s poetry, too—following from this flash of a meeting—was the certainty that recognition occurs beyond speech, language, and thought:
For lovers, the beauty of the beloved is their teacher
His face is their syllabus, lesson, and book
Whether in a faint or awake, Shams was led immediately afterward by Rumi to the Madrase Khodavandgar. In seclusion, the two spoke more openly, and their intimate discussion was compelling enough for Rumi to decide that he wished to follow its thread even further. He also realized such an exploration would be impossible in the burgeoning school that was doubling as his home and a busy harem for his wife, children, and extended family. So he decided that same day to decamp. As Aflaki described the next of the startling developments: “After that Mowlana grasped his hand and they departed.”
Rumi took Shams back into the market district, to the street of the goldsmiths, to the shop of Salah, who had been such a devoted follower of his tutor Borhan. After the death of Borhan, four years earlier, Salah returned to his fishing village, married, had several children, and then moved back to the capital city to set up his permanent home and shop. Though an illiterate workman, he had an enthusiastic spirit that Rumi trusted, as had Borhan. In the past few years, whenever Rumi delivered one of his celebrated public sermons, Salah was said to have shouted fervent yells of assent. Rumi’s intuition proved correct, as Salah responded warmly to the unusual newcomer from Tabriz.
Rumi and Shams lived together in near seclusion in a room of Salah’s house for at least the next three months. The rapidness of their bonding was shocking, but not without foreshadowing, as the vehemence of Rumi’s seizing at an escape from his daily round, as well as his future eviscerating of his former way of life, all indicate that he was ready for a major change. He later claimed to have had some premonition of a figure like Shams. Since shams is the Arabic word for sun, Rumi used imagery of the sun to express his feelings for the man. His poems would be saturated with this sunlight, as he revealed:
I already held a sweet image of you in my heart
When at that dawn, I first truly felt the sun
While Rumi may have had some inkling, Shams claimed the two had actually met once. The place was Damascus; the time, sixteen years earlier. Shams later spoke in his talks of remembering Rumi, as a student, a sort of prodigy, talking in public about the unity of souls: “I remember Mowlana sixteen years ago. He was saying that creatures are like clusters of grapes. If you squeeze them into a bowl, no difference remains.” He greeted him with “Salam,” in a public square. Rumi did not pay much attention, yet Shams, older and wiser, quickly perceived the glimmer of Rumi’s true potential: “From the first day that I saw your beauty, attraction and kindness towards you filled my heart.”
The friendship between Rumi and Shams was intense from the start, and often difficult to define. Shams did not fit the pattern of a traditional sheikh, as he never received a cloak from a Sufi master, the standard ceremony of commitment, and so was not part of an established lineage. (He claimed to have received a cloak in a dream directly from Mohammad, as Attar claimed to have received his cloak in a dream from Hallaj.) With Shams, who was nearly twenty years his senior, Rumi’s attitude was that of a pupil. Yet Rumi was already a spiritual director and teacher. Shams complained once abo
ut this lack of clarity: “I need it to be clear how our life is going to be—brotherhood, friendship, or sheikh and disciple. I don’t like not knowing. Is it teacher and pupil?”
During the period of withdrawal in Salah’s house—a sort of chelle, for two rather than one—Shams was directing Rumi toward a new way of being in the world, and he followed. “Before me, as he listens to me,” said Shams, “he considers himself—I am ashamed to even say it—like a two-year-old before his father or a new convert to Islam who knows nothing. Such submission!” While Shams refused labels, he was well within the malamatiyya tradition of the fools of God—his mission, to free Rumi from the weight of his own dignity. So he devised tasks such as dispatching him to the Jewish neighborhood to buy wine and carry the pitcher through the streets. Konya had a tavern frequented by Armenian Christians, and Shams said: “Let’s go see the women in the tavern. Let’s go to church, too, and look in.” Such neighborhoods became romantically spiritual for Rumi:
The tavern keeper became my heart’s companion
Love turned my blood into wine and burned my heart
Shams grew keen to dismantle Rumi’s reliance on his talent for using words to spin arguments and spellbind audiences. “Where’s your own?” he demanded, if Rumi was quoting too many proverbs, or poems and tales. “Come on, answer!” Like Kerra, irked by the incessant lamplight while he read, Shams was bothered by Rumi’s poring over pages of his father’s manuscripts. He once barged in while Rumi was reading, and shouted, “Don’t read! Don’t read! Don’t read!” Aged disciples informed his biographer Aflaki that Rumi told them, “He firmly commanded me, ‘Don’t read the words of your father any longer!’ Following his instruction, I stopped reading them for some time.”
Shams also disapproved of the fashionable poetry of Rumi’s favorite Arabic poet from his schooldays in Aleppo, al-Mutanabbi. Besides his father’s writing, Rumi loved to read verses of al-Mutanabbi in the evening. Shams said to him, “That is not worthwhile. Never read that again.” Rumi ignored his warning until, one night, falling asleep reading the poet, he had a nightmare in which Shams grabbed al-Mutanabbi by the beard and dragged him forward, saying, “This is the man whose words you are reading!” Al-Mutanabbi, scrawny with a tiny voice, begged, “Please release me from the hands of Shams and never read my book again!’” Another dubious poet read by Rumi was al-Maarri, a blind Syrian, melancholy—like Khayyam—about life’s quick passing: “How sad that man, after wandering freely through the world, is told by fate, ‘Go into the grave.’” (Even Shams was known to recite a line or two of al-Maarri now and then, but he thoroughly disliked Khayyam for speaking “mixed-up, immoderate, and dark words.”)
Rumi and Shams were not entirely isolated during their stay at Salah’s home, just insulated from conventional responsibilities. Both Rumi’s wife and Sultan Valad visited, and were drawn into some extreme tests of loyalty, obedience, and liberation, sprung by Shams. Rumi allowed his wife to be unveiled in front of Shams, an exposure reserved for family members, which would have been a difficult transgression for her. When Shams asked for a beautiful boy to serve him, Rumi presented Sultan Valad, though Shams thoughtfully declined, saying that the young man was more like a son to him. Missing was Alaoddin, Rumi’s second son, who was following an orthodox path, with plans to become an esteemed religious figure like his father. Shams posed a threat to his ambitions to carry on the family name, and Alaoddin was appalled by his influence. These dynamics among family members—lining up in response to Shams’s presence—remained set from that first encounter, with Alaoddin always sorely judging from outside.
The only other intimate allowed into the charmed circle was Hosamoddin Chelebi, a nineteen-year-old from a good middle-class Konya family of Kurdish origin, from Urmia in Azerbaijan, who had grown enamored with Rumi’s way of teaching. Hosam’s recently deceased father was Akhi Tork, his name indicating that he had been a leader of an akhavan organization, a fellowship of craftsmen, laborers, and merchants, like early guilds. This brotherhood (akhi could mean “my brother”) overlapped with a wider fotovvat movement to which even the caliph belonged, combining chivalric morals with Sufi mysticism and a touch of vigilante power, as its members wore uniform vests and trousers. At the time, the streets of Konya were full of such young men, often long-haired, with glinting daggers slipped into their ceremonial belts, protective yet intimidating.
Hosam was welcome because of his mild temperament. He was intuitive and empathetic, as he was said to feel the pains of his friends in his own body. He was considered a handsome paragon of decent behavior and, like Salah, was drawn to asceticism from an early age. Most importantly, for Rumi, Shams expressed great fondness for the young man. Shams’s judgments of character became Rumi’s judgments, and the circle forming around Shams would remain the nucleus of his own world. Decades later, Rumi described Hosam, in an affectionate letter to him, as “both father and son to me, both light and sight.” With the death of his father, Hosam was looked upon as the leader of the group of workingmen, and key in aligning these new followers with Rumi, just as Alaoddin, and other traditional pupils of Baha Valad, were growing disgruntled.
Shams had an aggressive, domineering manner that could seem extreme to many. Unlike Rumi, a public speaker practiced in politic turns of phrase and graced with the ability to charm, Shams was guileless. He avoided small talk: “I rarely speak with people.” His speech was spare, yet musical and expressive in its rhythms and its simple, moving imagery, occasionally like Rumi’s mature poetry. He disapproved of the gap between Rumi’s speaking in public and the voice he heard when they were alone. “He has a beautiful manner and speaks beautiful words, but don’t be satisfied with those,” he warned a group of students. “Beyond them is something else. Seek that from him.” He claimed, “He has two ways of speaking, one is circumspect, and the other, honest.”
During these intensive first three months together, the range of conversation between the two men was wide, and Shams did not hold back from exposing Rumi to all his beliefs and practices, acting as if these moments together might never be repeated. Shams especially encouraged the honest, heartfelt Rumi. His was entirely a religion of the heart. “Practice is practice of the heart, service is service of the heart, and devotion is devotion of the heart,” he told him. To illuminate Rumi’s heart, he felt the need to shake him loose not only from his father’s writings and al-Mutanabbi’s poetry but also from all the language and philosophy that had been his support and the basis of his fame in early adulthood. Consistent with some strains of Sufi thought, Shams saw words and logic as “veils,” hiding Rumi from the truth. Of the Greek philosophers, he preferred Plato because he “laid claim to love.” As Rumi would write of this radical reorientation:
When your love enflamed my heart
All I had was burned to ashes, except your love.
I put logic and learning and books on the shelf.
To replace thinking in words, especially the words of others, Shams rapidly introduced music, sung poetry, and dance into Rumi’s life, through the practice of sama. Technically meaning “listening,” sama applied to listening in the scholarly reading groups that Rumi had attended in Damascus, when a certificate, or ijazat al-sama, was granted for having heard a book read aloud. In many Sufi circles, though, sama came to mean a session of listening to music and poetry, sometimes accompanied by a whirling dance. The Great Kerra had taught Rumi as a boy to sway his arms to music. Shams, within weeks of their having first met, instructed him more fully in whirling—teaching him to literally spin loose of language and logic, while opening and warming his heart:
When all the particles of the air
Are filled with the glow of the sun
They all enter the dance, the dance,
And never complain of the whirling!
Shut away in private with Rumi, Shams soon became a compulsive topic of gossip throughout Konya, much of it malevolent and suspicious. The result of their sequester at the home of Salah was chaos
and anxiety for Rumi’s family and seminary students. Both groups relied on Rumi, not just for moral guidance but also for their livelihood and support as the patronage for his madrase trickled down. As Sultan Valad dramatized the passing of the staff of leadership, his father’s pupils had sworn allegiance to Rumi, saying, “We will seek wealth and gain from you.” So Shams was disparaged as a bewitching sorcerer, casting a spell on their local saint, or an unlearned “Towrizi” from Tabriz. (“Towrizi” was another term for “Tabrizi,” in a local spoken dialect of Persian.)
Actually Shams was neither a sorcerer nor uneducated, yet he was not in the habit of sharing many of the details of his eccentric and extraordinary life. In their three-month period of intimacy, though, shut away in Salah’s home, Rumi did begin to learn his life story, as Shams told of decades passed as a lonely sojourner, seeking the truth, but often confronted with the pain of being misunderstood. While on the surface the conditions of their two lives contrasted highly, like Rumi, Shams had been driven by a longing rarely satisfied. The revelation of this shared quest and mutual dissatisfaction only ignited further their spiritual and intellectual romanticism, and sealed Rumi’s final commitment.
Like many others in this era of chaos and high mobility, Shams traveled long distances before arriving in Konya, having grown up in Tabriz, in eastern Azerbaijan, where he was born sometime around 1180. Similar to Balkh or Samarkand, though farther west, situated in a fertile province between modern-day Turkey and the former Russian Transcaucasia, Tabriz was an important Persian market on the main trade routes between India and Constantinople. The city was also pinpointed in lore as the location of the Garden of Eden. Rivers to its north and south flowed into the Caspian Sea; nearby was the salt lake of Urmia, and the hometown of Hosam’s family. Rumi never visited, though he spoke knowingly of “the rose-garden district” of the “glorious imperial city.”