Rumi's Secret

by Brad Gooch

  Rumi not only commanded his son to submit to Salah, but he also soon arranged for him to marry Fateme, Salah’s eldest daughter. In his time living at the home of Salah with Shams, during their first intense seclusion of three months, Rumi had grown close with Salah’s family, including his wife, Latife; his mother, also named Latife, who lived in the house after her husband’s death; Fateme, about ten years old at the time; and her younger sister, Hediye. Latife and her daughters were allowed before Rumi “with their faces fully unveiled,” as he was considered mahram, or part of the family. He once exclaimed, of his bonds with them, “Fateme is my right eye, and her sister Hediye is my left eye.”

  Of all the women in the family, Fateme was definitely Rumi’s favorite. When she was still a little girl “because of the extreme affection he felt for her,” he began teaching her writing and reading the Quran—quite unusual for a girl of the period. So the choice of Fateme as a bride for Sultan Valad, now that she had come of age, was natural for Rumi. He was also accomplishing a spiritual version of a state wedding, merging their two families, with great hopes for a resulting baby, combining the strains of Rumi and Salahoddin. For Sultan Valad, the marriage was less ideal, and some hard days would lie ahead for the newlyweds because of his attitude. Never as visionary as his father, a marriage to the daughter of a goldsmith remained a social demotion for Sultan Valad.

  Balancing any misgivings of his son, Rumi expressed nothing but ecstatic joy and happiness. He wrote at least two poems, either on the occasion of the wedding contract or the wedding celebration, or both, replete with mentions of “the Sheikh,” the father of the bride, and raining down upon them blessings from all the religious holidays at one time:

  May the blessings that flow in all weddings

  Increase with even more blessings, for this wedding,

  The blessings of the Night of Power, and fasting, and the feast

  The blessings of the meeting of Adam and Eve

  The blessings of the meeting of Joseph and Jacob

  The blessings of the vision of the heavens above

  The blessings that cannot be put into words

  For the daughter of the Sheikh and my eldest son.

  In another of these nuptial poems, Rumi gives a glimpse of the celebrating that took place, full of the percussive drumming now central to daily life in his community:

  Dance you saints! Whirl you righteous ones!

  In the kingdom of the king of the world, lift our spirits!

  With drums hanging from your necks, in the rosy nuptial bower

  Tonight, full of tambourines and drums, the best of the best . . .

  At this moment Sufis are gathering together out of joy

  Glimpsing an invisible world, through my shouts of praise

  A throng of clapping guests, clapping like the waves of the sea,

  A throng of upright guests, like sharp arrows, bundled in a quiver.

  By the time of the wedding of Fateme and Sultan Valad, Rumi was adrift in a continuous outpouring of music and poetry. He performed the five daily prayers, as no one was more assiduous at adhering to the religious regimen than his self-designated Sheikh Salahoddin. (Once when he left his robe outdoors in winter, Salah was said to have put on the frozen garment and rushed to morning prayers rather than risk any infringement of the letter of the religious law.) Yet Rumi was mostly living in an atmosphere of musical instruments and altered states brought on by whirling, fasting, and meditation, while sleeping only a few hours a night. The result was the accumulating creation of the rest of his nearly 3,500 lyric ghazals, written in fifty-five different meters, including obsolete classical meters. The creativity that had begun under the dramatic influence of Shams continued apace and expanded in its breadth throughout the 1250s.

  An apparent source of this virtuosity was Rumi’s natural talent and knack for music. His favorite instrument to play was the rabab, which he customized for his purposes with a hexagonal box rather than the traditional square shape. His favorite musician, Abu Bakr Rababi, named for his mastery of the rabab, was remembered clearly enough to make his way into the histories. “His knowledge of music, which, in reality is the source of rhythm, provided Rumi with the necessary wherewithal and artistic skill to write poetry that has greater metrical variety than any other Persian poet,” concluded the Iranian scholar Badi al-Zaman Foruzanfar of Rumi’s technical skill, “and that is why a number of meters can be found in Rumi’s lyrics which are absent in the poetry of other Persian poets.”

  His method of composition was often collaborative. Not only Rumi’s expertise explained his experimenting in different meters, but also the knowledge of the musicians around him, trying out different musical modes as Rumi took up the challenge to fit his words and messages to their rhythms and beats. If Shams had been the designated representative of sama and its evils during their time together, Rumi was left standing alone as its defender. “One day they asked my father, ‘Why is the sound of the rabab so strange?’” recalled Sultan Valad. “He replied, ‘It’s the creaking sound of the door of paradise that we hear.’” When a local religious eminence heard the remark, he quipped, “But we also hear the same sound. How is it that we don’t become as passionate as Mowlana does?” Rumi wittily responded, “God forbid! In no way! What we hear is the sound of the door opening, while what he hears is the sound of that same door closing.”

  Amid all this provoked and controlled ecstasy—in a society where personal gravitas was expected—while cultivating the delicate cult of friendship between men of God, Rumi still managed to be alert to the competing practical needs of his circle, especially his family. His most pressing concern, following the wedding of Sultan Valad and Fateme, was their married life together, which turned difficult quickly and continued to present challenges when Fateme did not bear her husband any children during their first few years. Quite possibly the aggressive behavior that Rumi’s wife reported witnessing from Sultan Valad toward family members in the harem was toward his wife, as Rumi was moved to write a supportive letter to Fateme, promising his advocacy:

  If my dear son Bahaoddin is being mean to you, truly and with all my heart, I will withdraw my affections from him, and I won’t respond to his greetings, and he won’t be allowed to come to my funeral. Don’t be sorrowful, and don’t be unhappy, because God is by your side and He will help you. Whoever brings harm to you, if they swear a hundred thousand oaths that they are innocent, I will still find them guilty, because they are not kind to you and don’t appreciate you. . . . Do not hide anything from this father, but tell me in detail about whatever happens to you so that with God’s help I will be able to provide you the utmost possible assistance.

  He likewise wrote a letter to his son, with whom he was more politic, almost gingerly in his approach, revealing his expertise at persuasion and tact. He made a case for his son to modify his behavior around his wife, while presenting an astute argument for respect toward women, an approach not always required of husbands at the time:

  Because of the white hair of her father, and because of our family, I want you to treat her dearly, and every day and every night, treat her as if it were the first day, and every night as if it were the night of the bridal chamber. Don’t think that you have caught her and you don’t need to pursue her anymore, because that is the manner of superficial people. She is not the sort of woman who will ever lose her freshness. I swear to God that she has not complained, and is not sending any messages to me, either by hinting or by gesture. . . . I’m not going to tell anyone of this advice. This letter is a matter between us.

  Rumi was similarly engaged in bringing about the marriage of the second daughter of Salah, Hediye, to the young calligrapher Nezamoddin, a scribe of the sultan and teacher of the young princes. The obstacle was the poverty of Salah, who had given up his livelihood as an artisan to take over full-time as the spiritual leader of Rumi’s community, as well as being his closest companion and deflecting as much business and workaday concern from him as
possible. Yet the father of a bride was responsible for providing a dowry, an expense out of reach for Salah. Though living within the tight constraints of poverty, which sometimes weighed on his own wife and family, Rumi expended much energy in letter writing to procure jobs and loans for his dependents. And so he approached a female tutor of the royal princesses, and a “child” of Rumi’s, to take a request to the powerful and wealthy queen mother, Gorji Khatun.

  The request met with a charmed response, as was often the case when the women followers of Rumi were involved. Gorji Khatun ordered her treasurer to conjure two or three clothespresses and prepare five outfits, as well as veils, hats, and jewels as accessories. According to Aflaki, “They collected rugs and curtains and delightful carpets from Georgia, Shiraz and Aksaray, as well as a tray, a pan, a cauldron, copper and porcelain bowls, a mortar, candlesticks and a complete set of kitchen utensils.” The value of the goods, transported to Rumi’s school on mules, was high, and he divided the value of the trousseau between the two sisters to prevent any hurt feelings. Rumi next began writing helpful letters on behalf of Nezam, whom he praised as “my dear child and an accomplished artist,” as well as “my eloquent, literary, competent, and honest son.”

  As expected, Rumi created a nuptial poem for the wedding of Hediye and Nezam. These occasional poems are not among his most inventive. They are formulaic and—even if Rumi was not a patronized courtly poet—tailored to the expectations of his audience and their degrees of understanding. But these standard poems stood in clear contrast to the tortured odes that had poured out of him publicly and privately over so many years not even a decade earlier. Rumi truly did seem to have found some balance of mystic solitariness with the patriarchal pleasures of seeing his family grow and flourish into the next generation. The palm dates, cups of red wine, and streams of milk and honey in these happy matrimonial poems of the 1250s exude felt life. As Rumi sang that day:

  May this wedding still be smiling like the angels

  Today, tomorrow, and for all eternity . . .

  May this wedding be fortuitous, beautiful, and acclaimed

  Like the moon, and like the blue wheel of the sky.

  I grow silent, unable to find the words to say

  How radiantly my soul glows on this wedding day.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Fall of Baghdad

  DURING the autumn of 1257, Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, began a march on Baghdad, sweeping with his Mongol forces across the Great Khorasan Road, the route traveled by Rumi’s family four decades earlier. Since the death of Genghis Khan, in 1227, the Mongols had limited themselves to incremental conquests of the south of China, Russian territories, or parts of modern-day Iran, but nothing on the scale of their earlier leveling of an entire civilization in the Central Asian capitals of Samarkand, Bukhara, Balkh, and Merv. Hulagu had renewed global ambitions and was now focused on the ultimate prize of Baghdad, the financial, political, and cultural capital of the Muslim world, where much wealth had been conspicuously displayed for five centuries.

  Following the standard practice employed by his grandfather with Khwarazmshah, Hulagu sent Caliph al-Mustasim an ultimatum urgiung him to atone for a contrived list of grievances, including not providing the Mongols with military aid in various conflicts, as the caliph had sworn allegiance to Genghis Khan. The Abbasid Caliph, the thirty-seventh successor in a direct line from the Prophet Mohammad, as well as ruler of a metropolis legendary at least since the creation of its most famous fictional resident, Scheherazade, in The Thousand and One Nights, was dismayed by these blunt demands. A hybrid of pope and emperor, al-Mustasim replied that the entire Muslim world, from as far as North Africa, would wage a holy war to defend the capital and its caliph.

  The holy war never materialized. By January 1258 the forces of Hulagu had surrounded the city walls of Baghdad and occupied its suburbs, stretching beyond the confines of the old “round city,” which was quickly filling to capacity with refugees. The Mongols bombarded the city with innovative ammunition, including missiles fashioned from the trunks of local date palms and gunpowder treated with oxygen to create more powerful explosions, as well as rudimentary grenades, smoke bombs, and fire rockets.

  The destruction of Baghdad was catastrophic and matched the brutal razing of Termez or Nishapur, decades before, by the unsurpassed creator of terror, Genghis Khan. Destroying dams and diverting the Tigris to create a barrier of water around the city, on February 5, 1258, Hulagu and his forces broke through the walls, burning its great libraries to the ground, massacring scholars and soldiers alike, and piling up their skulls. Hulagu then summoned the captured caliph to his camp outside the city, where the leader of the Islamic faith and his male children would be executed. According to different reports, they were wrapped in carpets or sacks, and either kicked to death by booted warriors or trampled by fierce horses. The Islamic caliphate that had existed for more than six centuries was destroyed within a week, along with its rarefied culture of meticulous Arabic scholarship and research, while the control of the central lands of the realm of Islam passed to an utterly foreign power.

  This news could have taken a couple weeks to reach Konya. Eventually Rumi did speak to his circle of the nearly apocalyptic event for orthodox Muslims. As with other historical incidents, he was quite accurate in his basic account, down to the exact dating:

  When in the year six hundred and fifty-five Hulagu Khan arrived in the region of Baghdad . . . the Khan ordered the vizier of his kingdom and the pivot of his affairs: “Write a letter on my behalf to the caliph telling him to be obedient and to submit and not to act insolently.” . . . The caliph refused, acted with insolence, and uttered much abuse. That same day Baghdad was conquered and the caliph was taken away as a prisoner.

  In his rendition of the imprisonment, Rumi tells of the caliph begging for food and being given instead bowls of jewels, pearls, and coins from his treasury as a lesson for his profligacy in spending monies on luxury rather than armies. Marco Polo chronicled a parallel tale of the caliph imprisoned in the treasury tower where he stored gold. Rumi then detailed his ignominious execution, “in a sack . . . kicked to death.”

  The Arabic poets of the time were traumatized by the fall of Baghdad and the caliphate and mourned its passing in rhyme and meter. As one poet sorrowfully wrote of the incomprehensible event, “Oh seekers of news about Baghdad, the tears will tell you.” He saw no benefit remaining as “the beloved has departed.” For yet another poet, the unthinkable disaster signaled a “loss for the kingdom, for true religion,” which could turn a child’s hair white. For some, the waters of the Tigris ran red from the bloodshed, for others, black from the ink of the books. Regarded as marking the apex of an Islamic golden age, Baghdad would remain much depopulated and mostly in ruins for centuries.

  Rumi never joined in the wailing chorus. Rather than focusing on damage done to the religion of Islam or the insult to the caliphate, he mostly dwelled on the benefits of fasting, using the Mongols as examples, as they fasted for three days before the battle:

  Now if not eating and fasting had such an effect on the affairs of unbelievers and doubters of the faith so that they could attain their goal and become victorious, imagine what would be achieved and bestowed upon supporters of religion and upon all good and pious people if they were to do the same.

  As Aflaki summed up Rumi’s treatment of this crucial historical event of the Muslim era: “Mowlana brought forth this story on behalf of the excellence of hunger and not eating.”

  The crisis was even less seismic in Rumi’s poetry, dedicated to a spiritual world that had become even more powerfully attractive as the events on the ground in the Middle East and Anatolia grew more dire by the year. Rumi did pay his respects to the power of the caliphate in his Masnavi but in lines likely written years after its demise:

  The deputy of the Merciful God, the Caliph of the Creator

  Because of him, the city of Baghdad is like springtime

  These words of p
raise, though, were put in the mouth of the Bedouin wife, perhaps purposely dated as a character from times past. He never revealed any orthodox reverence for the figure of the caliph or for any of the symbolic trappings of religious power in Baghdad.

  Mongol armies had been appearing intermittently at the gates of Konya, too, ever since their victory over the Seljuks in 1243. In one ghazal, Rumi included a personal nightmare of the Mongols threatening Konya. He atypically dated the dream within the lines of the poem as having occurred on November 25, 1256, perhaps inspired by an actual threat by Baiju, the commander of the occupying Mongol forces in Anatolia:

  The Tatar armies, with bows and arrows, swelled the sky

  Ordered to rip apart the pregnant sky, to give birth to a baby . . .

  On Saturday night, on the fifth of the month of Qa’de

  In the year of six hundred and fifty-four

  Turbulence shook the town. An earthquake seized the town.

  While the poem was phantasmagoric, Konya never suffered the horrific fate of Baghdad. At its conclusion, Rumi was unharmed, calming his own spirit, “Help yourself to sleep.”

  Rather than the dramatic reversal of fortune suffered by Baghdad, Konya endured an interregnum of decades of appeasement and subjugation, with some benefits as well as much anxiety and uncertainty. In his letters, Rumi gave glimpses of his own worries as a citizen of the Il Khanate—the vassal empire that was now formidably ruled by Hulagu and his extended family, and stretched from Central Asia to Anatolia, or the entire arc of the world Rumi had traversed. He complained of the greed of the Mongols for demanding endless “taxes and camels.” In one letter to a Seljuk official, away from Konya on military business, he reported horrid disruptions of daily life by rough bands of Mongols: