Rumi's Secret

by Brad Gooch

  Like straw before the fierce wind, whirling and frightening

  Through the cracked mountains, deep mines were revealed

  Where you could see ruby on ruby, shining like moonlight,

  In that glow, you beheld him, his face porcelain, like the moon,

  His hands open, full of blood, like the hands of a butcher.

  Yet the “bloody” handprints in these poems may also have reflected a grim possibility that must have been playing on Rumi’s mind, and certainly in his most troubled fantasies in his unsettled state, as the question spread through Konya: Was Shams murdered? The atmosphere of the past few months made such an act conceivable. Rumors of murder were swirling around Rumi, two of them—contradicting each other—finding their way into Aflaki’s later accounts. In one of these dark scenarios, Shams and Rumi were seated together in the evening when a stranger came to the door and whispered for Shams to step outside. Shams rose and said, “They want to kill me,” to which Rumi responded, “Perhaps it is God’s will.” Shams walked outside, where he was set on by seven ruffians with knives. His loud shouts caused them all to pass out in unison and when they awoke they saw nothing but a few drops of blood, with no other sign of their victim. In a second rumor, Sultan Valad, alerted by a dream, discovered Shams’s corpse at the bottom of a well and buried him in the madrase walls. Rumi never endorsed such reports of the murder of Shams, though they were haunting his poems.

  Almost as compelling as the unsolved murder mystery, though, was the distress in Konya and the Madrase Khodavandgar that allowed even the suspicion of the killing of Shams of Tabriz to have taken hold as imaginable. Somehow this unique bond between Rumi and Shams was unconventional enough to have driven those around them to irrational and outsize reactions. As Annemarie Schimmel has described their challenge: “The relationship between Mowlana and Shams was nothing like the traditional love of a mature Sufi for a very young boy in whom he saw Divine Beauty manifested, and who thus is a shahed, a living witness to Divine Beauty—indeed it is revealing that the term shahed, favored by most Persian poets, occurs only rarely in Mowlana’s work. This was the meeting of two mature men.” The Iranian-American scholar Janet Afary has described their connection as “a more reciprocal ethic of love.” Rumi and Shams were tampering with social formalities, and their lack of clear boundaries was disturbing, as the cultural norm of “lover” and “beloved” between men and boys, or even between sheikh and disciple, required one partner to be the moth and the other the flame.

  Rumi next fixed on the hope that Shams was in Damascus, where he first traveled sometime between the winter of 1248 and the spring of 1249, and then on one or two other occasions, alone or with a retinue. Whatever lapses of sanity Rumi may have undergone in the first weeks and months of their jarring separation, he kept enough presence of mind to pursue with a steady logic the dwindling few chances of finding Shams, while striving to keep his spirit stitched to him through sama and poetry.

  Even before departing Konya, Rumi seized on travelers from Damascus, hoping to hear news of Shams, his desperation making him vulnerable. As Aflaki told: “One day someone informed Rumi, ‘I saw Shamsoddin in Damascus.’ Rumi became more cheerful than can be expressed in words. He gave away everything he was wearing to the man as gifts—his turban, cloak, and shoes. A close companion said, ‘He lied to you. He has never seen him.’ Rumi replied, ‘I gave him my turban and my cloak for his lie. If his news were true, instead of giving away my clothing, I would have given my life away. I would have sacrificed myself for him.” This desire to give away, or throw away, grew extravagant.

  Barely able to manage his daily existence, Rumi had easily let the business of the madrase fade to the margins of concern, while holding many of those in the community responsible for Shams’s vanishing, especially his son Alaoddin, from whom he became estranged during this period of heightened emotion and tension. As Sepahsalar wrote, “During that time, whoever was blamed for this separation did not receive any attention from him.” When he went away, Rumi put Hosam, the young leader of the local workingmen, in charge of keeping order in the day-to-day operations of the school. He instinctively only entrusted a position of authority to someone drawn from within the small, warm circle around Shams—a pattern he continued for the rest of his life.

  With Syria riven by civil war, and suffering from the famine and general ruin caused by the incursions of many Crusader armies, the Damascus that Rumi confronted upon his arrival was not the paradise of brilliant intellectual debate, spirited commerce, and monumental architecture he had witnessed just a decade earlier from the removed vantage of the Sufi Salehiyye neighborhood during his student years. Yet the circles in which he had moved were still active, and so, reported Sultan Valad, he went street by street, “putting his head into every corner.” He performed very public sama sessions, hoping to attract locals who knew Shams, or might have information. And he composed new, anxious ghazals, written in Arabic. As he proclaimed his mission on a third journey:

  For the third time, I rush from Rum to Syria,

  Seeking his curls as dark as night, seeking the fragrance of Damascus

  If my Master Shams, the Truth of Tabriz, is there

  I will be the Master of Damascus, the Master of Damascus!

  The Damascus period of Rumi’s search for Shams lasted about two years. After days or weeks scouring the Sufi neighborhoods, with the same disappointing results he had encountered in Konya, Rumi spent much of the rest of the time hunting down clues or listening to hearsay, waiting to talk with the pilgrims returning from Mecca, or other travelers, as travel was the main artery of communication. He was also cultivating sama and beginning to write poems with more intensity and frequency than ever before. The pitch of hysteria reached in Konya could not be sustained, and he began to discover in his emerging poetry and song not only expressions of pain but also inklings of love.

  Rumi instinctively relied on whirling after Shams’s disappearance to quell his panic and somehow stay closer to his companion by imitating him at a time when he could think of nothing or no one else. His intuition about his need at that moment for sama was a positive one. The philosopher Mohammad al-Ghazali, whose intellectual legacy Rumi and his father encountered, especially in Baghdad, claimed the whirling practice had pulled him back from his own period of despair, which has been construed as a nervous breakdown. Indeed, he devoted an entire volume of his monumental Revival of the Religious Sciences to sama, eloquently writing of having his spiritual life saved by such practices. His testimony helped in the spread of rooms appointed for sama in tenth-century Baghdad. Rumi, too, was now sensing that his sanity and spiritual revival owed much to the meditative dance.

  While Shams was in Konya, he and Rumi practiced sama in seclusion, hidden from the eyes and ears of the legally minded, including Alaoddin. Even though Rumi’s father was sympathetic with Sufis and practiced secret mystical techniques, he would never have allowed music and dance in the halls of the Madrase Khodavandgar, as such expressions were likely to be dangerous, even illegal. Just as popular as al-Ghazali’s defense of sama in Baghdad was the treatise The Trickery of Satan, by an austere theologian claiming music and dance were the devil’s work. Many medieval Islamic leaders—failing to find sanctions in the Quran or the teachings of the Prophet for listening to music, singing, and chanting—insisted that the only acceptable music worth listening to was Arabic Quranic recitation. As Rumi became more public and open about sama in Konya and Damascus, he was moving closer toward a fault line, and setting up a defining conflict of the rest of his life.

  Likewise in Damascus Rumi’s poems began to reveal a new lightness and to announce their true source of inspiration, Shams of Tabriz, as the messenger of love. Since the works of medieval Persian poets are arranged according to the alphabetical order of their rhyming letters—beginning with the long a—and within that scheme by meter, rather than chronologically, the sequence of Rumi’s poems has never been clear. Yet a logic of suffering and acc
eptance was at work indicating their falling into loose, overlapping stages, marked by their openness in naming Shams as muse. By the time Rumi left Damascus, he had found his voice as a poet or, as he understood it, found Shams’s voice through his poetry, while experiencing a midlife creative burst that was exceptional in the history of world poetry as he wrote the bulk of his lyric love poems.

  Following from the verse-letters that he wrote on Shams’s first departure to Syria, over a year earlier, Rumi resumed, likely in Damascus, rhapsodizing Shams in extravagant codes of praise. Rather than mentioning his name, using Sufi discretion, he invoked his reliable symbol for fiery Shams, the “Sun of Religion,” and “Sun of Tabriz”:

  Since I am the servant of the sun, I speak only of the sun.

  I do not worship the moon, nor do I speak of dreams

  Astrological houses could stand for Shams, too, such as Mars, or Venus, or the panoply of stars. Gypsies, or lulis, evoked his perpetual motion and cleverness, and the wide desert, the sahra, his location beyond all places and categories, his abstraction from daily life, his transcendence. Rumi addressed Shams as his “sovereign,” or, in Greek, as afenti or aghapos, honored and beloved, and used various other glorifying terms for him:

  I gave him so many names, perfect and imperfect,

  But since he is unique, he has a hundred times more

  One fixture of traditional Persian poetry that Rumi began to experiment with in these poems, as he seemed once again more in control of his method of composition, was the takhallos, a poetic signature, or pen name, reserved for the final line of a ghazal, also romanticized as a “clasp,” holding together the strung pearls of single lines into a necklace. Rumi shied away from using his own name as a takhallos. Only once, in an early, opaque poem, did he try using his title bestowed on him by his father as a tag in the more conventional fashion:

  Jalaloddin, go to sleep now, and quit writing

  Just say: No leopards can find such a unique lion.

  Many of the poems of crisis were unruly and lacked a polished final line altogether. In some, Rumi had abruptly announced, “Bas!” or “Enough!” Yet he came close to an inventive takhallos by closing several with “Khamush!” or “Silence!,” indicating an approach to a mystical state of unknowing as well as reticence in naming his inspiration:

  Be silent my tongue, since my heart is burning,

  Your heart will burn, too, if I speak of my burning heart

  A breakthrough for Rumi occurred when he was finally able to name Shams in his poems, as if the same breaking down of a wall between his inner and outer lives, which had been forced by Shams’s disappearance, also needed to take place in his poetry. This transition was enacted in one crucial ghazal where he dramatized an imaginative vision, reminiscent of dream visions he experienced during chelle, including a voice of wisdom:

  One night, I awoke at midnight, unable to find my heart

  I looked everywhere, around the house. Where did he go?

  When finally I searched every room, I found the poor thing

  Crying in a corner, whispering the name of God, and praying.

  As he eavesdropped on his own heart praying, Rumi heard him confessing trepidation about ever uttering the name of his beloved for fear of having his secret stolen away by someone who might be listening. A guiding voice commanded him to speak the name:

  A voice called to the heart, “Say his name,

  Don’t worry about others, say his name boldly

  His name is the key to the wishes of your soul

  Say his name at once, so he will open the door quickly.”

  The poet’s heart remained anxious, in spite of divine intervention, until finally at dawn the sun rose—reliable code for Shams—and the heart yelped, “Tabriz!” unraveled by these efforts like the woof and warp of a carpet. The poem ends with Rumi’s joyful confession:

  As I was fainting away, the name of Shamsoddin,

  That ocean of generosity, was engraved upon my heart

  Having opened the door, as he described the sensation, Rumi found, within the heart of his poetry, permission to speak the name of his beloved, going against all caution and secrecy. In the Persian poetic tradition, such love poems were only written to youths, not mature men, and personal names rarely, if ever, used, except for that of the patron or the poet’s own takhallos pen name. Rumi was explicit about the course of his evolution toward this liberation. Not only could he speak of Shams in code, but he could now also spell out Shams’s name brazenly within the lines of his poems, a bold transparency he found exhilarating and inspiring as he made use of this new freedom rhapsodically:

  Not alone I keep on singing, Shamsoddin and Shamsoddin

  The nightingale in the garden sings, the partridge in the hills . . .

  Day of splendor, Shamsoddin, turning heavens, Shamsoddin

  Mine of jewels, Shamsoddin, day and night, Shamsoddin.

  In the abundance of incantatory poems that followed were lines revealing Rumi’s belief that chanting Shams’s name freed his spirit from the guarded fear that contributed to their painful separation and gave luster and a radiant spark to his art and poetry:

  Say the name of Shamsoddin every single moment

  Until your poems and songs begin to glow with beauty

  Naming names was a bold personal move for Rumi, especially given his public position. His next steps, though, were even more radical, as he began writing poems that moved beyond anything dared so far in either Persian lyric poetry or Muslim devotional poetry. Novelty was immaterial to Rumi. He was not interested in becoming a poet’s poet. Yet in trying to articulate his love for Shams, he was led by force of passion to breaking with tradition. His innovation in Persian lyric poetry was to begin using as his takhallos, or signature tag, the name of Shams of Tabriz, rather than his own. By the end of his life, he had written nearly a thousand poems mentioning Shams or ending with the flourish of his name. The most extraordinary probably date from his Damascus period, when he was away from the judgmental eyes and ears surrounding him in Konya. He had been energized by the poetic license he felt granted him by his own heart, reacting to divine prompts, and allowing him to be at once romantic and religious. As he wrote in one ghazal composed while the search for Shams was under way, using his special takhallos:

  I wonder, where did the handsome beloved go?

  I wonder, where did that tall, shapely cypress tree go?

  He spread his light among us like a candle

  Where did he go? So strange, where did he go without me?

  All day long my heart trembles like a leaf

  All alone at midnight, where did that beloved go? . . .

  Tell me clearly, Shams of Tabriz,

  Of whom it is said, “The sun never dies!”—Where did he go?

  The adoption of Shams as his takhallos was an original solution to Rumi’s quandary. He was audaciously implying that he was not the author of his own poems. Shams was writing the verses through him, and he was merely the ink pen or the paper:

  Speak, Sun of Truth and Faith, Pride of Tabriz,

  For your voice is speaking through all my words!

  Rumi pushed the notion of a muse to its extreme, so that he was not merely inspired by but infused with the spoken word of Shams being dictated through him. This frame for understanding the poetry—especially these lyric love poems—remained forever affixed to them, in Rumi’s understanding, and in their public reception. When the poems were later gathered in collections, or divans, some dating back to within a couple decades of Rumi’s death, they were titled as Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (“The Collected Shams of Tabriz”), or Kolliyat-e Shams-e Tabrizi (“The Complete Shams of Tabriz”), or Ghazaliyyat-e Shams-e Tabrizi (“The Shams of Tabriz Ghazals”). (These earliest collections were helped in being judged authentic by their use of Rumi’s local Khorasani spellings for Persian words, rather than Anatolian, similar to the differences between British English and American.)

  Rumi then took a final step, i
nvesting Shams with prophetic or even divine powers, which was as challenging to Muslim orthodoxy as the use of music and dance in sama. It was as if the less chance Rumi felt of their being reunited in person, the more Shams began to merge in his heart with the source of love itself. The Rumi scholar Franklin D. Lewis has written that “there was probably no precedent for addressing any person, other than the Prophets,” as Rumi in one instance praised Shams as “the light that said to Moses, ‘I am God, I am God, I am God.’” Never in classical Persian poetry had the beloved been divinized as the burning bush through whom Moses heard the voice of God, or as the lover’s qibla, for turning to prayer, or beyond the ken of the angel Gabriel, revealing the Quran to Mohammad. Such exclamations bordered on blasphemy:

  It’s not enough for me to call you a human being,

  But I am afraid to call you “God.”

  You do not allow me to remain silent

  Yet you do not reveal to me the proper speech.

  Imploring Shams to forgive his own sins of pride, or heal his wounds, Rumi dared to fashion in these rhapsodic, celestial poems an audacious meld of love poem and prayer:

  You speak for God, you see the Truth,

  You save the world from drowning in an ocean of fire

  A king beyond compare, your majesty is eternal

  You lead the soul away from harmful desires

  You hunt for souls on the path of self-sacrifice

  Looking to discover which soul is the most worthy . . .

  Sun of souls! Shamsoddin, the Truth of Tabriz,

  Each of your radiant beams speaks eloquently of God.

  Yet Rumi had still not accepted the difficult fact of the permanent loss of Shams in death. His last holdout of hope was Tabriz, an obviously magical point on Rumi’s imaginative horizon, and a journey by land of only about seven hundred miles from either Damascus or Konya, although no record exists of Rumi actually undertaking that trip. By 1248 the Azerbaijani capital was solidly within the control of the Il Khan dynasty, under the transitional rule of a Persian ally of the Mongols, responsible for funneling taxes and tributes to its rulers. Rumi’s poems of the period are dotted with mentions of Tabriz, as if the possibility of Shams’s having returned home kept arising—either from reports, or because of his friend’s ardent wish for them to have traveled there together. In these final poems, Tabriz remains a distant place of the mind, not, like Damascus, an actual location: