Rumi's Secret

by Brad Gooch

  One incident was so distressing that Shams waited two days before informing Rumi. This confrontation at his cell was not the first, or he had been warned, because he had been awake all night in anticipation of some kind of incident. “I was restless the whole night,” said Shams, when he told of the disturbing encounter. “My heart was trembling.” Finally at daylight some guards arrived, under the command of Aminoddin Mikail, an important lieutenant and viceroy of the sultan, though he was not present. They claimed the emir himself ordered that the cell must be emptied and Shams must leave. They also claimed the authority of Tajoddin Armavi, a high-ranking lieutenant.

  “‘This cell belongs to the sweeper, and now this man puts a lock on it and says that it belongs to him.’” Shams reported the incoherent shouting of the head guard, in Turkish. “Then he said, ‘We’re talking to you. Why did you lock this cell? You’re not a licensed instructor here. We’re talking to you. They threw you out of town. What do they call you? Shams? What? Shams? What?’” Then Shams stood up silently, having not yet said a word: “Those men of Aminoddin looked at my face and thought they needed to speak Turkish to me. They didn’t think I understood what they were saying. ‘This is Mowlana’s cell,’ I said. ‘It’s his library. I will go and get the key from Mowlana, and I will open the door.’ ‘Get him,’ they said. ‘He’s lying. He has the key. Get the key from him.’” One of them persisted, “Why are you coming here? We threw you out a few times.” Shams asked whether they had really been sent by the proper authorities. “I know Tajoddin’s nature,” he said. “I need proof if he says that I’m a dog and a nonbeliever.” (Tajoddin, also known as “Tabrizi,” was from Shams’s hometown.)

  Amid all the anxiety and disruption of being trapped within the surveillance of the religious military state, if only at its lower echelons, Shams in these last days persisted in his teaching, mostly meant for Rumi alone, during a period that lasted anywhere from a week to several months. He still had important themes to communicate that he felt his existence hung upon and were the core of “the work” he was intent on finishing. Essential for him was the message of love, and of the heart, which was Rumi’s great inspiration. In Persian epic or spiritual poetry, nâme meant “book,” as in the Shahname, the Book of Kings, or Attar’s Asrarname, the Book of Secrets. For Shams, the Quran was the Eshqname, or Book of Love. He also rose to poetic utterances about the practice of whirling. “The dance of the men of God is delicate and weightless,” he exulted. “They are like leaves floating on a river.” That such delicate, sensitive lessons were expounded in an atmosphere increasingly unsettled and dangerous only added to their sense of urgency.

  A darker and more complex theme began to emerge, as well, in Shams’s teachings to Rumi during this chaotic time—separation. He revealed his departure to Syria as having been an object lesson, not an impulse, and threatened more such lessons. “If you can,” Shams spelled out his intentions, “act such that I don’t have to travel for the sake of your work and your best interest, so the work may be accomplished by the journey that I already took. That would be better. I am not in a position to command you to travel. I can take on the traveling for your benefit, so you may become more mature. In separation, you say, ‘That degree of commandments or prohibitions was nothing. Why didn’t I do it?’ It was easy compared to the hardship of separation.”

  “I was just speaking in riddles,” he went on, unpacking his metaphor. “I should have been explicit. What’s the worth of that work? For your best interest, I would make fifty journeys. Otherwise what difference does it make to me whether I am in Rum or Syria? Whether I’m at the Kaaba or in Constantinople, it makes no difference. However it is certainly the case that separation cooks and polishes. Now, is the one polished and cooked by union better, or the one polished and cooked by separation? . . . Was Mowlana ever happy from the day that I left? . . . The deeper the union, the more difficult and arduous the time of separation.” This was a core lesson, a sermon, he implied, he was willing to teach with his own life.

  Of all the teachings that Shams shared with Rumi, which were becoming the raw material of Rumi’s poetry, he gave him perhaps his most central metaphor in these last talks: comparing the evolution of the human spirit, through the workings of separation, to cooking. This imagery—a way of explaining how a painful separation can have beneficial results, and how love, both human and divine, involves both union and separation—became a continuous motif in Rumi’s poetry and talks, a familiar and homey analogy of the type that he favored. Rumi liked to tell of the chickpea transformed through suffering in the boiling water of the cook’s pot. He also expressed far more personally his own suffering in the heat of separation, which was visited on him through his love for Shams:

  My entire life has come down to three words—

  I was raw, I was cooked, I was burned

  He used nearly the same wording in a less precisely parsed cry from the heart in a ghazal:

  My entire life has come down to three words—

  I burned, I burned, I burned

  Shams was emotionally riveting as he talked of separation, especially gripping for Rumi, who felt the fire in his words, yet he had motives for dwelling on separation besides the poetic and philosophical. Shams’s daily life was ever more precarious in Konya, and he faced constant difficulties. The incident at his cell was not isolated, and Rumi’s followers were aligning with the cohort identified with Alaoddin. Shams spared Rumi many details, though he confided his apprehensions to Sultan Valad, who later recalled Shams’s ultimatum to him: “He said, to me, ‘Have you seen them? Reunited again by envy with each other? They want to separate me from Mowlana, who is far wiser than anyone else. They want to separate me and take me away. After me, they want to be in charge of everything. This time, I’ll leave in such a way that no one will be able to find where I am. All will fail miserably trying to find me. No one will be able to find the slightest clue. Many years will pass in this way. No one will find even a trace of my dust. When I have been gone for a long time, they will say surely they think that an enemy has killed me.’ He repeated his words several times because he wished to emphasize them.”

  When he was feeling particularly troubled, Shams did occasionally discuss matters with Rumi. He was once accused of stealing and spoke in obviously distressed tones to Rumi. “I cannot even get a separate house,” he was saying of his fragile and uncharacteristically dependent living situation. “I don’t want to make you a prisoner here. But I don’t want anything else from this place, just to be able to see you.” He was underlining that the only attraction for him in Konya was Rumi, but that just such singleness of purpose could finally become an increasing burden for both of them. At other times, though, he blamed Rumi for not coming to his defense, and keeping him out of sight, as if embarrassed by him, or living his two lives in two discrete compartments.

  One practice in Rumi’s household, traditional in the Islamic culture that set Fridays apart for congregational prayer and for time spent with family, was for him to visit with the community during the dusk hours after evening prayers, following any obligations at the Citadel mosque or on the palace grounds. Customarily, the men would be seated at the top end of a long carpet, where some bread or dates were usually laid out, the women seated farther down, while Rumi listened to the concerns of the household, or told stories, or otherwise invested his charm in calming conflicts. He did not invite Shams to those Friday gatherings, and Shams was stung. “As neither Mowlana nor I like to spend time without a purpose, we tend to stay alone with each other,” Shams complained. “So every Friday that he doesn’t bring me with him, I become depressed. Why can’t I be included in this group? I know my sadness should not be real, but it is.”

  Sometimes Shams’s feelings of betrayal by Rumi broke through their mutually adoring banter. Rumi appeared to be trying to distance himself from Shams’s disruptive presence, to keep the peace, especially following the death of Kimiya and the sharpened anger of Alaoddin, who would have
been present at the Friday gatherings where Shams was excluded. “I became so upset when instead of answering them, you stayed silent,” Shams said, confronting Rumi when he had not countered criticisms against him, the sorts of complaints making the attacks possible. “My whole resentment arose when they said those things and you didn’t answer them. You remained silent. You know my loyalty. You know me. But when someone outside the house said something, you didn’t answer.”

  This incident, or another similar, kept Shams awake at night. “To be able to look into my friend’s eyes, I have to go through the eyes of a hundred enemies,” he bemoaned. “Last night I was thinking of you, and I was picturing your face. I was saying to you, in my mind, ‘Why didn’t you answer those people, clearly and directly?’ In my imagination, you were saying, by your expression, ‘I am ashamed of them,’ or ‘I am shy,’ or ‘I don’t want them to be upset.’ I talked to you, and our argument took a long time within my mind.” Rumi had always been averse to open conflict and had evidently reverted to trying to placate Alaoddin and Shams’s many critics, doing his best to keep all parties placated, especially after the difficult events of the winter. Shams clearly felt that Rumi was not defending him sufficiently, and he was left staving off threats while feeling less certain that Rumi needed him as absolutely as he had in their early days. Yet he had not lost control of his wisdom and understanding of the events around him. His recent conversations with Rumi were profound in revealing the nature of love as including suffering and separation—a message that was about to become even more relevant.

  One morning Rumi arrived at the school and, as was his custom, went to visit Shams’s cell near the portico. When he entered, he found no sign of his friend other than his cap, a pair of shoes, and a few items accumulated while in Konya. Missing were the personal belongings that Shams carried when traveling, alerting Rumi to his departure. Given the dark mood and tragic events of the past months, Rumi understood that this hasty flight was not simply in keeping with Shams’s elusive character but had an air of finality that even the first disappearance lacked. He realized with horror that his own attempt to live his life both ways had just collapsed. Rumi rushed into Sultan Valad’s room. “Bahaoddin, why are you sleeping?” he cried out. “Get up, and seek for your sheikh. I’m not sensing his merciful presence anywhere nearby.” “When Shamsoddin wasn’t found after a day or two,” recalled Sultan Valad, “Mowlana began crying from pain.” As Sepahsalar reported, out of sorrow, “Mowlana roared like thunder.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “I burned, I burned, I burned”

  RUMI skirted madness. Or madness was simply the only explanation those closest to him could find for his heartbreaking collapse in the wake of Shams’s departure. Even five decades later, when the Arab travel writer Ibn Battuta passed through Konya, he was still hearing stories of the mad behavior of “the sheikh and pious imam” Jalaloddin Rumi following the disappearance of a Shams-like figure who sold him sugar-covered fruits, causing Rumi to abandon his college post to pursue him. “Subsequently he came back to them, after many years, but he had become demented and would speak only in Persian rhymed couplets which no one could understand,” as Ibn Battuta recorded the local lore. “His disciples used to follow him and write down that poetry as it issued from him.”

  Rumi lost control on the morning that he discovered Shams’s empty chamber, and the howling and sobbing heard throughout his school and house went on for days, not hours. When Shams had mysteriously left town two years earlier, Rumi retired to his private quarters and shut the door, allowing a recriminating silence to fill the hallways until those responsible for the rattling event repented. This time was dramatically different. He was focused only on hearing Shams’s inimitable voice once again, and feeling “his merciful presence,” as he said to his son, anywhere nearby. All pretense of maintaining his carefully constructed two lives that had so irked Shams was abandoned.

  Their time together lasted only about two and a half years, and in that interval, Shams had disappeared for nearly a year. Yet nine of their months together were spent in near seclusion night and day as they communed, talked, and shared secrets, in a marked parenthesis that Rumi cared enough to carve out of the middle of his busy and already accomplished life. Nothing remotely resembled the intensity of the time he spent with Shams, who rightly said just weeks earlier that he and Rumi preferred each other’s company to the superficiality of most other social life. Rumi knew their connection was unique. It had begun with a gaze that pierced his heart. Now he was left with the memory of those searing eyes and whatever transforming truth they had communicated to him. The memory caused Rumi to experience an unraveling between his heart and his mind.

  After “a day or two,” according to Sultan Valad, Rumi went even more public with his hysteria and grief, beginning a search throughout Konya for Shams. Such a wide hunt would have included all of Shams’s favorite “seedy” spots, such as the taverns and Armenian churches they visited together, as well as steam baths in every district. Rumi’s concerned family as well as friends and disciples tried to help. He was well connected in the government and able to involve the imperial guards and police in the action. Shams’s prophecy to Sultan Valad that he would disappear without a trace appeared to have come true. “They looked for him in every alley and house,” remembered Sultan Valad of the citywide pursuit, with no clues or leads turning up. “No one had any news of him. Nobody could find a hint of a scent of him. The sheikh was crazed by the separation.”

  Unable to find him in person, while remaining hopeful if not in full denial, Rumi tried to re-create his closeness to Shams once again in sama. Besides his focused final messages to Rumi on the meaning of separation, Shams, according to Sepahsalar, had encouraged him to keep practicing sama. “Perform sama!” Shams said. “Whatever you seek will be gained in abundance in the sama.” Rumi treated this mystical dance they had performed together as a form of bonding, though now he was revolving incoherently around the absence of Shams as much as practicing enlightenment. He needed the steady rhythms to mollify his pain and was said to whirl, or turn unsteadily about a pole, while spouting some of the incomprehensible lines heard by anyone nearby.

  Rumi soon invited a group of musicians to be present as well, filling in the empty spaces around his solitary dance. The traditional instruments he chose hearkened back to Central Asia, the cultural homeland of both himself and Shams. Crucial was the mournful nay, or reed flute, which one story credited as having first been brought to Anatolia on caravan by Rumi’s family. He came to associate each instrument with the travails of love. The bold trumpet “sang” only when touched to a player’s lips: “Without your lips, I’m silent.” The Khorasani rabab was a voice heard only when stroked with a bow. Rumi imagined his heart a trembling tambourine. Included, too, in his intimate band were a harp held in the lap; drums, both large and small; a tambura lute; and bundled Pandean pipes. As he later wrote, “Sometimes I am a harp, sometimes a lute, night and day.”

  Rumi danced his repetitive spinning to music long into the night to the dismay of his exhausted musicians, who were as much drawn into the hole of his despair as they were allowed to act as a healing force. Sultan Valad recorded these frantic scenes he witnessed: “Day and night he began to dance sama, on the ground like a spinning wheel. His voice and his cry reached the sky. Everyone heard his lamentations, young and old. He gave gold and silver to the musicians. Whatever he had in the house, he gave away. He was continuously dancing sama. Day and night, he did not rest for a moment, so the musicians could not keep up. From singing so much they lost their voices. Their throats were sore from singing. Everyone hated the gold and the silver. Everyone was tired and run-down. Without wine, everyone was hungover. If that hangover had been from real wine, it would have disappeared with more wine. Everyone was tired from lack of sleep. Their hearts were cooked, not from fire, but from the pain.”

  Rumi’s response during his first and far more benign separation had been to pivot to
writing poetry to channel his pain as well as to lure Shams to return with flattery and proof of his creativity, which his beloved had encouraged and nurtured. Now Rumi turned to poetry again, but with less polished results, as stumbling in execution as his sama dancing. As Aflaki reported, “Mowlana was extremely agitated day and night and had no peace and no rest. He constantly walked up and down in the courtyard of the madrase, reciting quatrains.” Sometimes he muttered broken phrases. At other times, he seemed—in painful, occasionally sinister, often roughly constructed lines—to be trying to gain a foothold onto his own sanity as much as onto the metrical terrain of poetry. The themes tended to oblivion or total annihilation in the shadow of the vanished beloved:

  The night wears black to show us that it mourns

  Like the widow who wears a black dress after burying her husband

  He spoke of these desperate poems as “bloody,” as they were clotted with violent images, perhaps evoking the distress caused by his menacing thoughts. He imagined in one of them Mount Sinai “covered in blood, longing for love,” and elsewhere wrote:

  This earth is not covered with dirt but blood

  From the blood of lovers, the wounds of a checkmated king

  Written under pressure of grief, and relying on heart and imagination rather than intellect for their rapidly flashing imagery, such lines often approached a surreal incomprehensibility.

  When the water boiled into a wind, making mountains fly