Rumi's Secret

by Brad Gooch

  When I went to Tabriz, I spoke with Shamsoddin

  Of the oneness of God, without needing any words

  At least once, Rumi heard news of Shams in Tabriz that was believable enough for him to write a poem excitedly about the possibility of his being alive, more visceral than his whimsical payments given to strangers claiming a sighting here or there. Rumi compared the reception of this news to the Quranic story of Joseph’s father, Jacob, catching the scent of his vanished son, who was said to have been murdered and cast down into a well by his brothers—suspiciously similar to the murder rumors about Shams:

  Joseph’s shirt, and the scent of him have come!

  Following these two signs, surely he too comes!

  The finale of the ghazal fixes the living Shams’s whereabouts confidently within Tabriz:

  You asked for a banquet from heaven

  Rise up, and prepare. The table descends.

  Good news, O Love! From Shamsoddin,

  In Tabriz, a new sign has come!

  Finally, though, most likely in Damascus, around 1250, Rumi heard some confirmation of the death of Shams that caused him to decisively face his worst fears, which he had been avoiding as much as pursuing during the past two years, and to adopt instead an attitude of mourning, and to no longer hold out hope. The tenor of his writing, speaking, and feeling about Shams shifted. He moved toward acceptance rather than denial. From him poured a classical elegy, a container for his grief, filled with tears that were hot but not hysterical, each line of the threnody ending with the sad radif, “weep”:

  If my eyes could bear to cry fully for this great grief

  Days and nights, until dawn, I would only weep . . . .

  Death is deaf to mourning, and hears no wailing

  Otherwise, with a burning heart, he would weep.

  Death is an executioner, without a heart,

  Even if he had a heart of stone, he would weep.

  The noble ode ends in a sorrowful mode unusual for Rumi’s writings on his personal sun:

  Shams of Tabriz is gone, and who

  For this greatest man among men, will weep?

  In the world of essences, he is enjoying his wedding,

  But in our world of mere forms, without him, we weep.

  Rumi might never have known the exact cause of Shams’s death, or his final resting place, and he appears to have strongly dismissed all murder rumors to the end of his life. Whether inklings or doubts rose and fell over the years is not known. No one will ever know the truth about the hazy circumstances of Shams’s death and burial, which were just as mysterious and obscure at the time—not entirely surprising for a lone figure, no longer young, possibly traveling incognito, and without an entourage. Tombs for Shams exist in Konya, Tabriz, and Multan, Pakistan—the most ancient in Khoy, a town near Tabriz on the main road from Konya, its grave site, with encrusted minaret, dating back at least to 1400.

  Rumi’s acceptance of Sham’s death, though, set him free and also set Shams free to live again in Rumi’s poetry as a state of being as much as a mere mortal. During the rest of Rumi’s time in Damascus, he reconciled himself to this finality while allowing himself to be remade from within to become the man he wished to be in the wake of Shams’s departure. When Shams left for Aleppo, four years earlier, Rumi discovered how much he relied on the volatile teacher for his new way of life. Now he needed to accept that Shams’s absence was permanent. He had the option of returning to Konya, defeated, to take on the turban and robes again to live out his life respected, if perhaps a bit pitied, or of seizing responsibility for embodying the freedom and love Shams sought to impart. To do so meant undergoing the kind of life change common in young people in transition from adolescence to adulthood, but more rare in a man in his forties.

  Sultan Valad wrote of the transformation of his father in Damascus in the technical terms of medieval theology—his father went from being a “pious man” to a “mystic.” A “pious man,” explained Sultan Valad, obediently follows the religious laws, believing “If I do good deeds, I won’t be drawn to evil.” Yet the mystic, he wrote, “Out of love, says ‘What will come to pass?’ In a state of amazement, he waits to see what God will do.” Sultan Valad probably learned of this distinction from his father, who composed another elegy for Shams at that time revealing a similar understanding of his change:

  Each dawn, like an autumn cloud, I rain tears at your door

  Then wipe the tears from your house with my sleeve

  Whether I travel to the east or the west, or up into the sky

  I won’t see any sign of life, until I see you again.

  I was a pious man of the land. I held a pulpit.

  Then fate made my heart fall in love and dance after you.

  Rumi’s final days in Damascus were quieter and more formal. The madness of Konya for him had subsided. Aflaki later reported of time spent by Rumi studying in the company of a local leader of the Damascene Sufi community whom he “loved dearly.” He had clearly avoided Konya, the scene of so much pain and breakdown, and was now ready to return. In another set of Sufi terms, he had graduated from “lover” to “beloved,” finding the source of the power and wisdom he admired and missed in Shams within himself. The integration he experienced in his poetry occurred in his life as well. In Sultan Valad’s version, Rumi discovered Shams, “in himself, radiant as the moon.” As he directly repeated his father’s words, either from verses Rumi recited, or from a near rendition:

  He said, “Since I am he, who am I seeking?

  I am the same as he. His essence speaks!

  While I was praising his goodness and beauty

  I myself was that beauty and that goodness.

  Surely I was looking for myself.”

  At about the age of forty-three, Rumi returned to Konya, rarely to leave again. Much had transpired in the capital since he had looked on as a young man while his father was given a royal welcome when his family first arrived two decades earlier. His own reentry was now quite different, as those gilded and hopeful days were long faded. The great protector of both his father and the Seljuk Empire, Kayqobad I, had been dead for over a dozen years. Likewise Kayqobad I’s profligate and inept son, Kaykhosrow II, had died four years earlier—after having temporarily placated the Mongols with a weak financial deal. He left behind an uneasy triumvirate of three young princes, all younger than twelve—Ezzoddin, Roknoddin, and Alaoddin, the son of the sultan’s favorite wife, Gorji Khatun.

  These royal personages and their machinations were more than distant chess pieces to Rumi. He returned to Konya a far more outspoken figure than he left—less “pious,” to use the word of both his son and himself. These key personalities of the Seljuk court would turn out to be far more forgiving and protective than some of the more upright members of the religious establishment in town, and his relations with them were often quite close. Either mother or stepmother to all three sultans, Gorji Khatun became the center of a circle of noblewomen devoted to Rumi, and was mentioned warmly in a poem of praise written by Sultan Valad. At least nine letters exist from Rumi to the Sultan Ezzoddin, in which he referred to Ezzoddin as his “son” and himself as his “father.” Mutual fondness also tied him to Karatay—a freed Greek slave, now regent, the true power behind all three thrones between 1249 and 1254—whose “angelic qualities” Rumi once extolled.

  Karatay especially was helping preserve Konya from the sort of destruction and stripping of all beauty and subtlety that Rumi had just witnessed in Damascus. Indeed the capital was experiencing a mellifluous and florid spike in its art and architecture that lent a warm context to Rumi’s wish for a spiritual life of music and poetry. The symbol of this late phase of the Seljuk Empire in Konya was the madrase built by Karatay as his own legacy, a theological school across from the Citadel, midway to the Madrase Khodavandgar, which was finished in 1251, just as Rumi was returning from Damascus. Its architecture was a clear departure from the sobriety of the Alaoddin Mosque toward a more refined Seljuk cl
assical style—covered in turquoise blue glazed tiles, encircled by bands of Kufic inscriptions, with carved interlocking triangles leading toward an open dome. The white, bluish, black, and turquoise tiles of the dome formed complex patterns of stars. At night, actual stars visible in the circle of the dome reflected in a pool below, the sort of effect never lost on Rumi, for whom reflections expressed his metaphoric way of seeing:

  Just as water reflects the stars and the moon,

  The body reflects the mind and the soul.

  If Rumi’s life had been disrupted by Shams, so had the family to which he returned, though in ways set up early on by their first responses to the stranger from Tabriz. Kerra went along rather easily with her husband’s transformation following Damascus. She had always exhibited a bent toward a magical spirituality of dreams and visions as well as hovering jinn and lurking water monsters. Many of the more incredible tales of Rumi after his death—like being transported to Mecca during prayer and returning with dust on his feet—were traced back to her. Of his two sons, both in their midtwenties, Sultan Valad had solidified his role as his father’s dutiful favorite. His white sheep image, though, was sullied by some, like Kerra, who complained of his violent behavior, out of his father’s view, toward other family members in the harem. The more tortured Alaoddin left Konya for a time after the disappearance of Shams, shamed by his father’s blaming him for his role in the events—the estrangement between the two never entirely healed during Alaoddin’s lifetime. Rumi’s third son, Mozaffaroddin, a young boy, was still in the harem, with his sister Maleke; within a decade both children would need to decide whether to lead mercantile lives or to become Sufis.

  When Rumi returned from Damascus, he moved between court and family and school as he always had, yet he was somehow changed. And that change became the next mystery for those around him to notice and try to understand. Unlike Shams, truly an outsider with no stake in any place or institution, Rumi had always been an entitled member of the religious and ruling class of Konya, and his comments and actions were topics of note, especially given the ongoing drama of his very public adoration of Shams. He knew when he returned to Konya that he was walking onto a stage again. He went about his business with that air of being solitary while being among people that Shams had counseled. Yet he was now not a frightening or aloof figure to most. He had evolved into a far more accessible and concerned religious leader, without pretense, good-humored, humble and simple in approach, living life in a new way in his old town.

  Many stories of Rumi following his return from Damascus report quiet acts of kindness around town. Typical was the friend who told of Rumi having asked him to purchase two trays of tasty delicacies at market. When he gave them to Rumi, he wrapped them in a cloth and departed. Curious, the friend trailed him and discovered Rumi inside a ruined building, feeding the treats to a dog that had given birth to puppies. When confronted, he explained, “This unfortunate dog has not eaten anything for seven days and nights, and because of her puppies she is unable to go off.” Such mercy from Rumi, described as having walked with his head down, spoke to all the people of Konya, his humility and kindness understood as virtuous by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike.

  He appeared everywhere, mixing with everyone, in all kinds of settings. Many of those around him wished to protect him by keeping him apart and dignified. But he repeatedly showed by his demeanor that he was a changed person. Once he attended a sama session where a young man brushed against him during the dance, and Rumi’s disciples said harsh words to the overly excited whirling Sufi about his decorum. Rumi quickly cut them off, refusing to be kept insulated or to hurt anyone’s feelings in the name of piety:

  My kindness is such that I don’t want anyone’s heart to be hurt because of me. When someone in a crowd in sama brushes up against me, some of my friends try to prevent them, but I am not pleased by that. I have said a hundred times don’t presume to speak for me. Only then am I content.

  He was also bold and energetic in organizing his own sama sessions in public, drawing a clear line to show where he stood on this issue of music, dance, and song in religious meditation and prayer. While exceedingly kind, he was also galvanized and immoveable in his resolve. As Sultan Valad remembered, stressing his remarkable reinvigoration: “He went to Damascus like a partridge, and returned to Rum like a falcon. A drop of his soul became as expansive as the sea. The degree of his love became even greater. Because he became like this, don’t ever say, ‘He didn’t find him.’ Whatever he was seeking, he truly found. He again called together all the musicians, on the roof and in the yard. Not knowing his head from his feet, he shouted with all his strength, his voice boisterous. His love was filled with waves like a stormy sea. Everyone was astonished.”

  In trying to make sense of the meaning of his time with Shams, and its lessons for his life going forward, Rumi’s thoughts often returned to a favorite Sufi guiding notion of the need for a living spiritual world axis, either known or anonymous, who was the center of love and understanding in his time, and on whom the welfare of all human beings depended. Rumi later explained this subtle, elusive concept in Book II of his Masnavi:

  In every age a saint appears

  As testing continues to the end of time

  When those with good souls will be liberated . . .

  He is the lamp that gives light to other saints

  Lesser saints are like lamp niches, reflecting his light.

  Rumi never directly said that he considered Shams as the saint of saints of his epoch. He did not attempt to place him technically within the complex hierarchy of Sufi spirituality, remaining as guarded, or ambiguous, on this as on many theological matters. Yet he implied in all his turns of phrase that he did believe Shams was such an exalted figure. He went about Konya looking for the reflection of such light in the people he met every day.

  With the passing of the decades, especially the tumultuous decade of the 1240s, Sultan Valad came to present the life of his father schematically, following the basic contours, but tidying them into defined squares and boxes. As his son described his father’s life, the crazed search by Rumi for Shams was resolved by 1250, when he returned to Konya having attained a station of empowerment. Yet Rumi actually remained fitfully pained by his aching memories of the loss of Shams throughout his life, while revealing or concealing that secret in different ways. Likewise his “Collected Shams of Tabriz,” or at least the thousand or so poems explicitly naming Shamsoddin, were implied to have all been written during their time together, especially during the searching in Syria. Logically, if Rumi understood the need for a living spiritual saint, he would not have kept summoning the spirit of Shams in poetry. He did, though, continue writing poems of love that pointed to just such composition, as in one wrenching late ghazal:

  I grew old mourning him, but say the word “Tabriz”

  And all of my youth comes back to me

  Rumi kept honoring the memory of Shams and marked his continuing presence, his enduring spirit. He often visited Shams’s cell near the madrase portico. Evoking his own nicknaming of Shams, Rumi, according to Aflaki, “one day lowered his head before the door of Mowlana Shamsoddin’s room and, with red ink, inscribed in his own blessed handwriting, ‘The place of the beloved of Khezr.’” The cell was kept untouched as a timeless shrine to Shams. Years later, when Rumi heard someone doing repairs, and hammering a nail into the wall of the cell, he cried out, “They feel no fear in hammering a nail in this place? Don’t let them do it again. I imagine that they are driving that nail into my heart!” No one could spend time in the Madrase Khodavandgar without sensing the resonance of Shams’s lasting impact upon Rumi. Folded into his aura of solitude, and his faraway look, was the absence of the one man who would have understood him.

  Even Rumi’s way of dressing was a constant reminder for him of Shams. As a sign of respect, when he accepted Shams’s death, Rumi put aside the white turban that had been his headgear until that time, the standard designation of t
he scholar and mature religious leader, and wrapped a smoke-colored turban about his head instead. He also dispensed with his wide-sleeve jurist’s robe, like the atabi robes worn by academics in Baghdad, made of shimmering silk. He fashioned an inexpensive faraji cloak woven from thick linen cloth, made in India or Yemen, and dyed dark blue. Such was the garb associated with traveling Sufis, their dark hues masking the clotted dirt of the road, while Rumi associated them as well with the rich violet hues of the early morning skies:

  Morning rises, and draws his polished blade,

  In the heavens, a light as white as camphor bursts forth

  The Sufi of the skies slices his blue robe and shawl

  Downwards, deliberately, until he touches his navel.

  Dark blues and violets were also the colors of sorrow and distress in medieval Persian society, and family members wore blue clothing as often as black during their formal forty days of grief. As Aflaki reported, “This was his clothing until the end of his life.”