by Brad Gooch
Like most commercial cities of the era, Tabriz was constantly changing hands, a contested chip in power struggles. When Shams was a boy, the Turkic ruler was Atabeg Abu Bakr, described by him as “towering over everybody, and surrounded by armed guards an entire arrow’s flight around.” Similar to the Seljuks, the Atabegs favored Persian as their primary language, and art and culture flourished. Tabriz, too, was culturally closer to the cities of Central Asia. In 1220, the unchecked Mongol invasions of Khorasan reached the city. For urging resistance to the non-Muslim Mongols, Shams praised its ruler as the “greatest of the age,” though by the time Shams arrived in Konya to meet Rumi, Tabriz was securely part of the Il-Khan Dynasty of the Mongol Empire.
Both Rumi and Shams wrestled with the authority of father figures, but in opposite manners. Rumi had tried to imitate and please his revered father, while Shams, apparently an only child, from early on struggled with his own father, Ali ebn Malekdad, for lack of understanding and for being pampering and overprotective. “The fault is that of my father and mother for they brought me up with too much kindness,” Shams oddly complained. Shams’s father worried over signs of spiritual zeal in his unusual son, who had not yet reached puberty yet was already hearing preaching whenever he could, and fasting for at least a month at a time. “You’re not crazy,” his father said, “but I don’t understand your ways.” Shams felt as if he were a duck egg laid by a common hen. Like Rumi, at the same age, he was sure he saw “angels and higher and lower worlds. I assumed that everybody saw what I saw. Then I found out that they could not see it.”
His father’s “spoiling” was partly a response to the exceedingly sensitive spirit that he recognized in his introverted son. In Tabriz, stray cats often jumped in windows to swipe food from cloths on the floor, and were duly beaten off with sticks. Even if one of these cats broke a dish of milk, Shams’s father spared it because of his son’s delicate sensibility. Instead he would say, “This is destiny! This is a good omen!” In the fifteenth century, Dowlatshah, writing a Lives of the Poets in the Timurid court in Herat, recorded for the first time stories that had been passed down of Shams as a beautiful boy, with a temperament considered by some “effeminate,” supposedly proved by his skill as an embroiderer in gold, a handicraft learned from tarrying with the women in the harem.
Shams told Rumi of a search for kindred spirits that led him first to the lively Sufi neighborhoods of Tabriz—the Sorkhab quarter to the north, where many Sufis were buried in tombs at the foot of Valienkuh, or Saints’ Mountain, and, to the south, the Charandab quarter. The density of Sufis in these neighborhoods was so high that the souls of saints in the cemeteries were said to rise on Friday nights, form groups of red and green doves, and fly to Mecca to encircle the Kaaba. Nearly seventy Sufis were clustered about one charismatic leader, who built a Sufi lodge in the Sorkhab district and taught a popular form of devotion based on mystical states rather than on studying books. Many Sufis in Tabriz favored this simple, unlettered approach, of the type described by Rumi:
The Sufi’s book is not made of words
It’s nothing but a heart, as white as snow
Shams said to Rumi, of these inspiring local figures, stimulating so much excitement and growth, “There were people there in comparison to whom I am nothing, as if the sea cast me up, like waves tossing up driftwood. If I am like this, imagine what they were like!”
He told of gravitating, while still a teenager, toward Sheikh Abu Bakr Sallebaf of Tabriz, who headed a Sufi lodge in the Charandab district. A maker of wicker baskets by trade, his followers tended to be drawn from the working-class fotovvat movement and were often threateningly more loyal to him than to the rulers. “There were dervishes staying with Sheikh Abu Bakr,” remembered Shams. “When one of the assistants of the vizier would come to see him, the dervishes would show reverence to the sheikh a hundred times more than they had before the official arrived.” Sallebaf did not bother with all the Sufi trappings, such as bestowing cloaks. Either from this sheikh, or another passionate local Sufi, Shams learned the whirling practice that he was teaching to Rumi: “With such a love, the passionate companion seized me in the sama. He was turning me around like a little bird. Like a husky young man who hasn’t eaten for three days and suddenly finds bread—he grabs it, and breaks it apart hastily. I was like that in his hands.”
As with most of his mentors, though, Shams finally felt misunderstood, or underestimated, and stepped back from unconditional loyalty. He later confided to Sultan Valad, “I used to have a sheikh by the name of Abu Bakr in the city of Tabriz and he was a basket weaver by trade. I learned much about godly friendship from him, but there was something in me that my sheikh could not see and that nobody ever saw. Only Mowlana has seen it.” Unlike Baha Valad when Rumi had visions of angels, Abu Bakr cautiously forbade Shams to talk about his visions. In turn, Shams was suspicious of the practice of Tabrizi Sufis of begging for a living. So he set out from home on a protracted quest that lasted four decades and took him on a scribbling route through the Middle East. A highly motivated seeker, he traveled to Baghdad, Mecca, Damascus, Aleppo, and many Anatolian cities, meeting on his journey with most of the prominent Sufis of his day.
Shams supported himself on the road by working odd construction jobs, teaching the Quran to children, or weaving trouser ties. Due to the frail look that came from his indefatigable fasting, he was often passed over for hard labor crews, to his disappointment. “They chose everybody else but left me standing there,” he recalled. He was more successful as an elementary school instructor and appreciated the humility of the position. He recognized one of Rumi’s disciples as having once seen him as a teacher and not acknowledged his presence. “You used to come to the school and saw me as a mere teacher,” accused Shams. “But how often an unknown person does us a service.” He was proud of having taught a stubborn boy to memorize the Quran in three months, though he appeared to have done so with the help of a liberal use of strict beatings.
Eventually he found his way to Baghdad, the center of Sufism, some years before Rumi passed through with his family. Shams belonged to the Shafii School of Islamic jurisprudence, more common among Sufis than the Hanafi interpretation followed by Baha Valad, Rumi, and many from Central Asia. Shafii judges based their legal decisions as much as possible solely on the blueprint of the life and practices—or sunna—of Mohammad, often by using analogies. Shams and Rumi discussed one of the basic Shafii legal texts, written by an early professor of the Nezamiyye College in Baghdad. Yet their slightly different legal orientations never seemed to matter overly to either of them. “If Abu Hanifa saw Shafii, he would pull his head towards him and kiss his eyes,” said Shams, of the founders of the two schools. “How can God’s servants disagree with God?”
Likely having stayed at the Daraje Sufi lodge on the western bank of the Tigris, Shams told of being involved briefly with the Turkish Sufi Kermani, the leader of an order in Baghdad and Damascus. Kermani was one of the more vivid and outrageous of the Sufi figures of his time. Very much in the school of Ahmad al-Ghazali, who glimpsed flashes of divinity in the faces of beautiful boys, Kermani was notorious for tearing open the cloaks of beardless young men during sama dancing and pressing his chest against theirs. He was also rumored to have undone some of their turbans in the heat of whirling.
Although Kermani was decades older, Shams was not intimidated. One evening he came across the mystic staring into a bowl of water, and asked what he was doing. “I’m looking at the reflection of the moon in a bowl of water.” “Unless you have a boil in your neck, why not look at the sky?” Shams questioned, sarcastically. “Maybe you should see your doctor to be cured so that you can see the real thing.” His intent was to refute the practice of looking for divinity reflected in human beauty rather than directly in God. Nevertheless, Kermani invited Shams to become one of his close companions. Shams insisted that he first “drink wine with me in the middle of the bazaar of Baghdad.” Unlike Rumi, who at least bought wine fo
r him publicly, Kermani refused, and Shams moved on.
In Damascus, Shams gravitated toward the renowned Sufi Salehiyye district, at the base of Mount Qasiyum, near Rebva, its panorama evoked by Rumi in the Masnavi using a popular Arabic proverb, which counseled maintaining perspective on life’s trials:
When you see grief, embrace it lovingly:
Look on Damascus from the top of Rebva
According to Shams’s own dating of his first passing encounter with Rumi, he was in Damascus around 1230, if not before or after. While Rumi may have had some contact with the circle around Ibn Arabi, Shams appears to have become a serious student. He spoke of a “Sheikh Mohammad,” who is thought to have been the visionary Andalusian Sheikh Ibn Arabi, to whom he had likely been referred by Ibn Arabi’s friend Kermani. “He was a mountain, a true mountain!” praised Shams. “He was such an exalted scholar, and he was more knowledgeable than me in every single way . . . a seeker of God.”
Yet Shams’s warm praise of Ibn Arabi’s scholarly knowledge was not the entire story. As with all his teachers, relations were occasionally contentious due to Shams’s defiant attitude. The two of them discussed many intricacies of prophetic sayings and related Quranic passages, a sort of Muslim version of the Talmudic scholarship of Jewish rabbis. Shams, though, was disappointed that they did not engage in more extended sparring. “Sheikh Mohammad used to give in to me, and not debate,” grumbled Shams. “Yet if he had debated, there would have been more benefit. I needed for him to debate with me!” He would accuse Rumi, too, of refusing to debate with him satisfactorily. Obviously tireless, Shams wore down his debating partners. “You crack a powerful whip!” wryly joked Sheikh Mohammad, yet he always referred to Shams endearingly as his “son.”
Off-putting for Shams was his opinion that Sheikh Mohammad did not “follow,” or imitate the Prophet Mohammad faithfully enough. “He was compassionate, a good friend. He was a unique human being, Sheikh Mohammad, but he did not follow.” This “following” was a charged issue in debates among the Sufis of Anatolia. Shams’s original question to Rumi when they met had pointed toward it. Wherever Rumi fell in this argument, his odes to Mohammad were certainly inspired by heights of adoring passion, which would have been shared by Shams. Rumi wrote of Mohammad in the mode of love, often returning to the account in Sura 54 of the Quran on his splitting the moon:
Our caravan leader, Mohammad, the pride of the world
The moon was split in two, by seeing the beauty of his face,
The moon, with its good fortune, gazed on his humility . . .
Look into my heart, split, like the moon, at every moment.
For such tender logic, Rumi became a “pearl” to Shams, and Ibn Arabi a mere “pebble.”
Shams also grew close in Damascus with Shehab Harive, a materialist philosopher from Herat, where he had been a prize student of Razi. Shehab relied on logic, analysis, and reason, and dismissed revelation, miracles like the splitting of the moon, or bodily resurrection as fables for common folk. Theirs was an unusual friendship that should never have been if the logic that Shehab found so irrefutable were applied. In the scholastic ferment of Damascus, Shehab was sought after for his brilliant arguing that God has no free will, backed up by the certainty that “intellect makes no mistakes.” “For me, death is as if a weak man has been loaded down with a sack tied to the neck,” he said. “Someone cuts the rope, the heavy load falls, and he is released.”
Years later in Konya, Shams was still arguing in his mind with his old friend Shehab. He told Rumi, “I would say, ‘I don’t want that God. I want a God who has free will. I seek that God. I would tell him to destroy that God of whom he spoke. . . . If the whole world were to accept that from Shehab, I still wouldn’t!” Yet Shams and Shehab were brought together by their aloof dispositions, their sharp misanthropy and stubbornness, and each other’s appetite for ceaseless debating. “This man is congenial,” said Shehab. Likewise Shams said, “I felt at ease when sitting with him. I found ease there.” He wittily added, “Though Shehab spoke blasphemy, he was pure and spiritual.” Tellingly, for Shams, their mutual affection outweighed any philosophical differences.
Contrary, difficult, and unpredictable, Shams debated and refuted his way through the emerging intellectual centers of Anatolia, as well. Traveling north from Aleppo, he spent time in Erzurum and Erzincan, where Baha Valad had taught in his “Esmatiyye” school for four years; Sivas; Kayseri, where Borhan passed the final years of life; and Aksaray, unusual in the region for having been organized by the Seljuks as a purely Muslim model town, a hundred miles northeast of Konya. Typical of Shams’s arguments was a disagreement with a scholar in Sivas. Annoyed that Shams contradicted him in public on a fine point about man’s knowledge of God’s essence, the scholar said, “You are asking old questions.” “What do you mean ‘old?’” Shams snapped back. “It’s aching with newness! Is this what passes for lecturing these days?” A number of eminent teachers refused to take on Shams as a private student because of his abrasive manner.
Having trouble finding his place within this well-ordered society of saints and scholars in the medieval Islamic world, Shams’s individuality kept interfering. His conversation was flecked with mentions of challenging texts of law and spirituality. He resided in a madrase college in Aleppo for fourteen months. Yet he never felt comfortable among either the legal scholars or the Sufi dervishes. Of his ambivalence, he said to Rumi, “At first I wouldn’t sit with jurists, I sat with dervishes. I used to say, ‘They’re strangers to dervishes.’ Then I began to know what it is to be a dervish and where they were coming from, and now I would rather sit with the jurists. At least the jurists have taken some trouble to learn. The others simply brag about being dervishes.”
Shams did have one trusted guide—his heart. He did not reject teachers one after another on the basis of a consistent theological stance as much as on feeling and intuition. Within his crusty exterior still beat the heart of the sensitive boy from Tabriz, which remained the source of his discernment. “Whenever you see someone whose character is expansive, speaking broadly and patiently, and blessing the whole world, so that his words open up your heart, and you forget this narrow world . . . he is an angel from paradise,” he counseled Rumi. “Whenever you hear in someone’s words anger and coldness and narrowness, you become chilled by his words. . . Whoever discovers this secret, and puts it into practice, pays no attention to a hundred thousand of the sheikhs.”
Shams told of visiting Konya on previous occasions. On his first visit, he found three dirham coins, marked as currency of the Seljuk sultan, on the road to a main gate, leading toward the town square. Kayqobad I was the first Seljuk sultan to mint gold coins, but Shams obviously found an ordinary one. Each night he would buy a half piece of fine white flatbread and give away an amount equal of its cost to the poor. When the money was used up, he departed once again for Syria. His visit in the fall of 1244 was more intentional. He later said that he had a dream in which God promised to answer his prayers, and to make him at last the companion of one saint, “in Rum.” Shams had arrived in Konya with strong hopes of reaching the end of his long and solitary road, and his meeting with Rumi clearly seemed to him the fulfillment of that prophetic dream, just as Rumi had revealed the premonition that he felt was surely being realized in Shams.
Sometime in 1245 Rumi and Shams emerged from the winter of seclusion that followed their first meeting. They returned to the Madrase Khodavandgar and began to take part in a curtailed manner in the life of the community. Making short work, though, of the longings of many family members and students for a complete resumption of normalcy, the two quickly disappeared behind closed doors within the madrase for yet another intimate encounter that lasted six months—to the astonishment of those left again counting the days against an uncertain ending to the strange silence that had fallen over the school, without any classes or sermons being delivered by their youthful patriarch.
The dismay of those left behind was und
erstandable. The connection between these two complicated souls could seem weird and inscrutable. Shams was acerbic at times and misanthropic, likely at any moment to reveal the sharp edges of his personality that had caused many sincere Sufi masters throughout the Middle East to keep their distance or back off entirely. Rumi was his foil, a man of great charm and affection in a position of power and influence, now risking everything to remain locked away in insulated confinement, allowing all that he and his revered father built so diligently to be endangered, family and students adrift, while he lost himself in the challenge of Shams.
Still their love was instantaneous and enduring. Shams had seen Rumi for who he was, and that look of recognition had begun to set Rumi free. No matter how many honors and accomplishments he accumulated, Rumi still felt encumbered by his position. Shams saw that Rumi was creative, a poet and a mystic, not a gatekeeper for rules. He encouraged him to find his voice, and so Rumi owed him his newfound heart. Likewise, Shams, for all his grumbled bragging about self-reliance, traveled for decades in search of someone who would recognize his own authentic self, his softer core. As Shams had told Sultan Valad, Rumi was the first to do so. The religious life for men of their day was often demanding and restrictive. Together they created a safer, lighter domain of their own. Both were old enough to know the value of their discovery, and wished it to last.
The only two visitors allowed during this time were Salah and Sultan Valad, who gained even more of his father’s affection to the degree that he supported his devotion to Shams. Even Kerra was now excluded from the room, kept apart from her adored husband, who she was used to fussing over for trifles—like warning him to chew a stick of straw to ward off bad luck because he had broken his belt. Yet although her marital and family life had been greatly disrupted because of Shams, she never spoke publicly against him. Likewise Shams occasionally spoke affectionately of Kerra and seemed to understand her predicament. “Kerra Khatun is jealous,” he said. “But hers is the sort of jealousy that takes you to paradise, not hell, and is truly part of the path of goodness.” Belying slurs against Shams as untutored, Sultan Valad later accurately wrote of him as a man of “learning and knowledge.” (Rumi likewise attested to Shams’s familiarity with “alchemy, astronomy, mathematics, theology, astrology, law, logic, and debate.”) Sultan Valad looked up to Shams as “beloved” and a spiritual “sultan.” In turn, Shams took a guiding role, teaching him the meditative sama as well as counseling the adolescent young man.