Rumi's Secret

by Brad Gooch

  While Rumi was undergoing this major change of life with Shams, and evolving in his understanding of his vocation, the Seljuk Empire of Rum, outside the wall of their cell in the Madrase Khodavandgar, was undergoing an equally major disruption, though more a devolution, a loss of power and might. The Sultan Kayqobad I, the patron of Rumi’s father—having overseen an uninterrupted stretch of prosperity and cultural glister—died in 1237, while rumors circulated claiming he was poisoned by his son and successor, Kaykhosrow II. On ascending the throne, Kaykhosrow II married the daughter of a ruler of Aleppo, but soon revealed his predilection for Christian ladies by marrying his second wife, Tamara, or Gorji Khatun, a young Georgian princess who rose to the level of his consort and eventually became one of Rumi’s most ardent female disciples.

  Unlike his father, a paradigm of wise rule, Kaykhosrow II had a sillier disposition and delighted in nightly cups of wine while being entertained with songs and clever quatrains. Having inherited valuable territory that included most of Asia Minor, Kaykhosrow II managed during his decade of governance to diminish Seljuk Rum to a kingdom in name only, his father’s empire never regaining its former grandeur. First among his challenges, caused by the populations displaced from Khorasan by the Mongols, were popular Turkoman Sufi preachers, usually called “Baba,” meaning “father,” by their followers, who preached against the power of the state and set rural Turks against urban Seljuks. These incendiary preachers riled both the Khorasani refugees and local peasants until Kaykhosrow II put down their insurrection with the help of Frankish mercenaries.

  Even more destabilizing were Mongol forces on his eastern borders. In 1243 Kaykhosrow II assembled a large force to make a stand at the battle of Kose Dag, where the smaller Mongol army routed them. As panic spread through Anatolia, Kaykhosrow II escaped to the coast while his vizier negotiated a weak peace treaty, agreeing to payment of annual tributes of gold and silver to the Mongols in return for sparing Konya. By the time Kaykhosrow II returned to the capital, he had outlived his power, and Konya its political independence. (Shams’s praise of the Tabrizi ruler Shams Toghri for bravely standing up to the Mongols would have been heard as a putdown of Kaykhosrow II.)

  Though a sense of floating anxiety that both Rumi and Shams knew well, from the encroachment of the Mongols into their native homelands, now permeated Konya, the streets into which they reemerged after their second retreat were still reasonably safe and unchanged from the earlier days of peace and prosperity before Shams’s arrival. Shams tended to thrive in one of two settings—locked away in seclusion, or wandering and seeing the sights. He claimed these contraries in his state were actually one. “Be among the people, but be alone,” he advised Rumi. “Don’t live your life in seclusion, but be solitary.” In Konya, Shams took his own advice, accepting that Rumi could not always be with him. “When I’m by myself, I’m free,” said Shams, with a dose of his usual sarcasm. “I wander anywhere and sit in any shop. I cannot take him along—a well-born man, one of the muftis of the city—to look in on every seedy place.” A favorite place for them to at least talk without disturbance was the rooftop of Rumi’s school, where they could look down in the bright light of a full moon on neighbors on warm nights sleeping on their terraces. Rooftops became sweet reminders for Rumi of these elusive private interludes:

  Sometimes Love shone on the roof like a moon

  Sometimes like a breeze, moving from lane to lane

  Rumi and Shams did go walking together through the epicenter of Konya, its thriving market district, which especially fascinated their moral imaginations with its power to lure and seduce by playing on basic desires and fantasies. As Rumi later wrote:

  The world is an illusion, and we are like merchants,

  Trying to buy its moonlight, measured by the yard

  They paused to watch gypsies, or lulis, who passed through Konya. With their music and rope dances, they excited interest and were given money. Sugar was sold in the apothecary shops in little brown bags, or wrapped in packets of paper, like candy. So Rumi later wrote of Shams:

  Whenever I write the name of Shams of Tabriz

  I sprinkle my favorite sugar into a paper wrapper

  Both men were equally drawn to the disturbing as well as the pretty. Rumi was reminded by the butcher shops selling intestines of the cruel beloved of Persian love poetry, like a butcher, his hands bloodied with the livers of unrequited lovers. Fascinated by the dark shops offering bloodletting, near the herbalists, Shams reflected on its customers choosing to disappear into the darkness while “a sun has come up, filling the world with light!” More pointedly he suggested learned theologians would do better to “be like the poor Russian man, cloaked in sheepskin, wearing a tall fur hat, and selling sulfur matches.”

  Just as central as the bazaar in Rumi’s and Shams’s life in Konya were its many hammam, or bathhouses, particularly as Seljuks were enamored of fresh flowing water and made medicinal use of the countless mineral springs of Anatolia. They both frequented the hammam, singly and together. “I stop in every bathhouse,” reported Shams. Rumi was visceral in his fondness for the hammam and dwelled on each detail, taking in the nimbleness of the attendant stoking heat in the stove, or the cup for pouring water over the body, or the thick sultani soap. He was most fascinated by decorative paintings on bathhouse walls, often of heroes from the Shahname, and meditated on the difference between a painted heroic Rostam and a real warrior, between artifice and spirit, and the way light falling from a window in a dome animated these static figures:

  The world is a bathhouse, its skylight eternity

  Illumined by the window is the hero’s beauty

  Following their freeing spell of withdrawal, Rumi did step back, tentatively, into his former life as a religious leader in the city, too. Remaining in his sights was Qonavi, the godson and designated deputy of Ibn Arabi. After Ibn Arabi’s death, Qonavi had moved north to Konya and was continuing the philosophical tradition of Ibn Arabi, filling in more steps of mystical knowledge in learned Arabic treatises. Rumi and Qonavi were about the same age, and before Shams’s arrival, Rumi attended his lectures. Yet with Shams’s influence, their ideas increasingly diverged, as Qonavi preached the path of knowledge, and Rumi performed the path of love. They came to represent the two antipodes of Sufi temperament in Konya yet remained respectful, if wary, colleagues.

  Rumi returned to teaching as well, but with Shams doing most of the talking, or the two of them engaged in dialogue in front of a hall of students. Many of the more conservative disciples were horrified to find Rumi nearly silent, or deferring to the words and opinions of the strangely rambling mystic from Tabriz, who spoke at times in riddles or enigmatic non sequiturs. Like Rumi, Shams was an intellectual. Yet inspired by the “unlettered” Tabrizi mystics of his childhood, he had left learning behind, as if he had climbed a tall ladder that he then pushed away. Rumi likely assigned Sultan Valad to write down these sessions, as one of the surviving transcripts appears to be in his handwriting.

  Instead of lecturing on logic and religious law, Shams preferred to speak vulnerably and tenderly of his friendship with Rumi. These public teaching circles became love fests as much as occasions for unpacking one or another abstruse topic. Shams modeled speaking from the heart rather than the more formal double-talk, hypocritically mastered, he grumbled, by Rumi, which made him so impatient. “We’ve met each other in an amazing way,” he exclaimed, with transparent joy. “It’s been a long time since two people like us have fallen together. We’re extremely open and obvious. The saints did not used to be so obvious. But we are also hidden and we do have our secrets. . . . I’m so happy to be your friend—so happy that God has given me such a good friend! My heart gives me to you—whether I exist in that world or in this world, whether I’m in the pit at the bottom of the earth or above the heavens, whether I’m up or down.”

  He revealed, in this open setting, the ground rules of their friendship: “The first stipulation I made was that our life should be w
ithout hypocrisy, as if I were alone.” He insisted that he saw himself not as a sheikh but as a friend: “God has not yet created a human being who could be Mowlana’s sheikh. Yet I am also not somebody who can be a disciple. Nothing of that remains in me.” He compared his beloved Rumi to moonlight and, audaciously, to the qibla, pointing the direction to Mecca for prayer: “I wanted someone of my own kind so that I could make him my qibla and turn my face towards him. I was bored with myself. . . . Now that I have that qibla, he understands and grasps what I’m saying.” According to Shams, Rumi was a bolt of natural energy, dislodging the dam that caused his waters to stagnate: “Now the water flows forth smoothly, freshly, and splendidly. . . . I speak eloquently and beautifully. Inside, I’m bright and luminous.” He put much stress on the freeing informality between them both in public and private.

  Shams not only spoke of his feelings, but he also acted them out, leaning over to stroke or take hold of Rumi’s hand. “Now rub my little hand,” he cajoled. “It’s been awhile since you’ve rubbed it. Do you have something better to do? Rub just like that for a while.” He rambled on in squibs of exalted poetry: “In the lane of the beloved there’s a kind of hashish. People take it and lose their minds. Then they can’t find the beloved’s house and they fail to reach the beloved.” And he testified to having finally found meaning, not in a set of ideas, but in their friendship. Truth, Shams implied, was face-to-face: “The purpose of life is for two friends to meet each other and to sit together face to face in the spirit of God, far from earthly desires. The goal is not bread or the baker, not the butcher shop or the butcher. It’s simply this very hour, while I’m sitting here at ease in your company.”

  Shams examined theology, but his approach was untraditional, as he acidly put down the philosophers’ need to prove God’s existence. As Rumi recalled one incident:

  In the presence of Shamsoddin of Tabriz, someone said, “I have proven the existence of God, indisputably.” The next morning Shamsoddin said, “Last night the angels came down and blessed that man, saying, ‘Praise to God, he has proven our God. May God grant him long life!’ . . . O poor man, God is a given fact. His existence needs no logical proof. If you must do something, then just prove your own dignity and your own rank in His presence. He exists without proof. Of this there is no doubt.”

  Shams ridiculed scholars for quoting sayings of the Prophet and giving the source—a “chapter and verse” approach—rather than speaking from their hearts and citing God as the source. He skirted heresy with provocative comments: “I do not revere the Quran because God spoke it. I revere it because it came out from the mouth of Mohammad.”

  Rumi, too, grew bolder about expressing his feelings for Shams in public. One day he was attending the inaugural ceremony for an important new madrase. Shams arrived late and he was sitting among the onlookers in the entranceway, where shoes were removed and stacked. Rumi sat with the prominent religious scholars, and a symposium was being conducted on a most pressing issue for them—“Which place is the seat of honor?” Echoing his father, while turning social decorum on its head, Rumi said:

  The seat of honor for the scholars is in the middle of this raised platform. The seat of honor for the mystics is in a corner of their own house. The seat of honor for Sufis is next to the raised platform. But in the practice of true lovers, the seat of honor is next to the beloved, wherever he may be.

  At that moment Rumi stood up and quickly exited the stage, making his way through the press of gathered dignitaries, and shockingly sat down in the far vestibule next to Shams.

  Such behavior was endured because Rumi was so cherished by the town fathers. They were not so patient with Shams, and kept trying to find ways to weaken his position or drive him away. One day a delegation of these local notables showed up at Rumi’s school to raise the issue of Shams and wine drinking, which was forbidden in Islam, though famously a test case of rules and rituals among some Sufis. He was obviously at least understood to be drinking real wine, not just divine wine. So they asked Rumi the leading question, “Is wine forbidden or not?” His cutting reply was dismissive, as he showed that he refused to be intimidated by them, even using a Khorasani curse:

  It depends who is drinking. If you pour a flask of wine into the ocean, the ocean would not be transformed or polluted, or darkened by the wine, and so it would be permitted to use its water for ablutions and drinking. But, without doubt, one drop of wine would make a tiny pool of water unclean. . . . My clear answer to you is that, if Shamsoddin drinks wine, for him everything is permitted, since he has the overwhelming power of the ocean. But for you—you brother of a whore—even eating a piece of barley bread should be forbidden.

  Rumi appeared to acknowledge to them that Shams was indeed drinking real wine and presumably did not think of himself as a “tiny pool of water” rather than an ocean.

  Shams did not help his position with the elders of Konya or with Rumi’s more immediate circle inside his school. He made enemies more easily than friends, as he began to act as a kind of secretary, chamberlain, even bodyguard, interceding, blocking access, and occasionally charging a small fee for audiences with Rumi: “What have you brought and what will you give away as an offering, so that I show him to you?” One day a visitor asked Shams, who was sitting in front of the door to Rumi’s private room, collecting money, “For your part, what have you brought since you ask something of us?” “I’ve brought myself,” Shams answered, dramatically, “and I’ve sacrificed my life for him.” To Rumi, Shams explained the taxes as a test: “One of them claims to love you from the bottom of his soul, but if I ask him for one dirham, he loses his mind, he loses his soul, and can’t tell his head from his feet. I tested them so they would understand a bit about themselves. But they began to revile me saying that I discouraged your followers.”

  Such chafing words and deeds caused resentment to grow. “The lovely son of Baha Valad from Balkh has become obedient to a child of Tabriz,” complained one of Rumi’s followers, obviously from Khorasan, and perhaps among the cadre of men who had accompanied Baha Valad and his family on their emigration. “Does the land of Khorasan take orders from the land of Tabriz?” Other Khorasanis went about saying that the people of Tabriz were all “jackasses.” (These loyalists were eventually buried near Baha Valad in the imperial rose garden.) In his later biography in verse about his father, Sultan Valad recorded some of the harsher of their cascade of outraged comments to each other: “Who is this who stole our sheikh from us?” Paranoia mixed with jealousy as they accused Shams of “‘hiding him away from everybody else. Of his existence there was not a trace. We no longer may see his face. We no longer may sit at his side. He must be a magician casting an evil spell, mesmerizing our sheikh with his incantations.’”

  These grievances were voiced often, and openly, and Shams was just as strident in defending himself in his teaching circles, with Rumi present. He easily quashed the argument of the Khorasani by saying that if a man from Constantinople possessed grace, it would be incumbent even on a man from Mecca to follow him. He mused aloud on the difficulties that the rough edges of his personality might create for others. “Mowlana has great beauty, while I have both beauty and ugliness,” he explained, perceptively enough. He recognized that his own gentleness was balanced with severity. But ugliness and severity, in Shams’s assessment, were elements of absolute honesty and frankness, the absence of hypocrisy. “I’m all one color on the inside,” he bragged. And he claimed to thrive on insults. “I am only troubled when someone praises me,” he goaded his critics.

  Rumi occasionally joined in the argument, rebuffing those who complained that Shams was “arrogant, greedy, and doesn’t mix with us.” He counseled understanding:

  You only say so because you do not love Mowlana Shamsoddin. If you loved him, you would not see greed or anything reprehensible.

  Hidden in Rumi’s response was his cherished tale of Majnun and Layli. As he liked to tell the story, Layli was ordinary, her beauty only obvio
us in Majnun’s own loving vision. He clearly knew his love for the grating and sharp-tongued Shams confused them:

  During Majnun’s time there were girls more beautiful than Layli, but they were not Majnun’s favorite. They said to Majnun, “There are girls more beautiful than Layli. Should we bring them to you?” He answered, “But I don’t love Layli because of her face. She is not just a face. Layli is like a cup in my hand. I drink wine from that cup. So I am in love with the wine that I’m drinking from her. You look only at the cup. You are not aware of the wine. If I had a golden cup, decorated with jewels and stones, and it contained vinegar, or something besides wine, why should I use that cup? A broken old pumpkin that holds wine is worth a hundred times more.”