by Brad Gooch
The result of the meeting of minds of Rumi and Hosam at this time was dramatic and significant. For Rumi to make any major shift in his life at this stage, he needed to align his roles as sheikh, preacher, father, teacher, mystic, and poet. In the confluence of Hosam with his emerging Masnavi, he had discovered a diligent secretary, a respected deputy, and a beloved companion for his later years, as well as a medium of poetry that allowed him to be both ecstatic and didactic, both a mystic seer and a moral preacher.
Hosam was hardly a newcomer. His involvement in Rumi’s life dated to the arrival of Shams, who took an interest in the young man, a teenager with the maturity of an older man because of having lost his father at an early age, while inheriting power and respect among Kurds and followers of the akhavan youth movement. Much noted had been the handsome appearance of Hosam. As Aflaki recorded, “When Hosamoddin reached the age of puberty, he was extremely beautiful and the Joseph of his day.” (The reference was to the young Joseph, so irresistible to women, as described in the Quran.)
By the evening of his proposal of the Masnavi, Hosam had begun making his transit into the much more intimate poetic cosmology of Rumi, and was soon to be affixed in his shining firmament as the third of Rumi’s beloveds, both muse and companion. In this personal universe, Shams was the sun, and Salah either moon or mirror. Like Salah, Hosam was only gradually introduced in the poems—sometimes in puns on the Arabic word for sword, “husam.” Sultan Valad wrote that his father came to think of Hosam as a star, or a constellation of stars. Yet in his poems, he usually identified him with sunlight—not shams, the source, but rather ziya, which is a sunbeam or “ray of sun.” Rumi codified this private image in the prelude, introducing Book IV of the Masnavi:
You are a ray of the sunlight of Truth, Hosamoddin
With your light the Masnavi glows brighter than the moon
Though Hosam was busy as a community leader, and devoted to his wife, he and Rumi set to work almost instantly on their project, which was taxing, time-consuming, and intensive. The poem was collaborative, as nothing was written unless Hosam was there to record it, and then to read it back and help revise it. For months and eventually years, he accompanied Rumi everywhere, writing down verses as Rumi spoke them, whether walking along the street or in a bathhouse, at home, or turning about a pole during sama—his informal version of the whirling dance that sometimes accompanied the meditation. Hosam recited the lines back, and Rumi would correct them, before they would be read to the disciples, as sermons or stories in serial form. Rumi preferred nighttime for poetic composition—as for prayer—and included apologies to Hosam for keeping late hours:
It’s dawn. You who support and shelter the dawn,
Please grant me pardon from Hosamoddin
You who grant the release of intellect and soul
You, the soul of souls, and the radiance of coral,
From whom the light of dawn now begins to shine.
Rumi would occasionally confuse his scribe, playing tricks on him, teaching him personal lessons beyond those expressed in his verses. As Hosam told of one incident: “One day Mowlana came to our house. Choosing the winter room for seclusion, he went inside and did not eat anything at all. . . . He asked that the doors be closed and the windows covered. He ordered me to bring several packets of Baghdadi paper. He then began uttering divinely inspired knowledge, and I wrote down whatever he dictated in Arabic and Persian. I would read aloud whatever I had recorded, page by page, and set them aside when I was finished. He then ordered me to light the oven. He took hold of around one hundred sheets of paper, one page after the other, and threw them into the oven. . . . When the fire sent up flames and kindled the pages, he smiled, and said, ‘They came from the invisible world and shall return to the invisible world.’ . . . I wanted to hide a few pages, but he shouted, ‘No! No! That’s not correct!’”
The poem survived such treatment, though, and thrived, and their work of the early 1260s was finally fashioned into a coherent first volume of about four thousand lines, with a beginning, middle, and end. Introducing the poem was a traditional enough Arabic prose preface, replete with Quranic references, identifying the poet, as Rumi used his first name; giving his family pedigree, “Mohammad the son of Mohammad the son of Hosayn from Balkh;” and crediting the inspiration for “this long work of rhyming couplets” to Hosam, the “Sword,” or “husam,” of truth and religion. Less traditional was Rumi’s appearing to make the long poem analogous to the Quran, or at least, as he wrote, “the unveiler of the Quran,” as well as not including the usual invocation to the Prophet.
After the plangent opening aria of the flute, bemoaning “love’s path, full of pain,” a few lines into the first tale concerning the love of the slave girl for the goldsmith of Samarkand, Rumi halts to share an aside on the creation of the Masnavi. Among the key verses of the Masnavi is this dramatized vignette in which Hosam understandably enough requests that Rumi speak to him more about his beloved Shams of Tabriz. Like the royal physician in the tale, Hosam is seeking love’s pulse. Rumi, the “I,” in the segment, tells Hosam, the “he,” that the truth of love can only be expressed by metaphor:
“It’s better the secret of the loved one be disguised,” I said,
“Even if you’re telling the story, be sure to cover your ears,
It’s better that the lover’s secret
Be told through the tales of other lovers.”
He said, “No, tell it openly, and unveiled,
It’s better to reveal than to hide your devotion
Lift the veil and speak nakedly.
I don’t wear clothes when I sleep with my beloved.”
I said, “If you were allowed to see the beloved naked,
You would no longer exist, neither your chest, nor waist.
Please don’t request what you can’t endure
A blade of straw can’t endure the weight of a mountain,
If the sun, illuminating our world, came any nearer
Then everything would be burned and go up in flame
Don’t seek to make such trouble, or turmoil, or strife,
From now on, never ask again about the Sun of Tabriz!”
In the twenty-five thousand verses of the Masnavi that follow, the name of Shams is rarely again mentioned, though his presence shimmers throughout. Only when Rumi neared its final sections would he again press harder at revealing in code the true begetter of his poem.
The key term in these verses of rhymed conversation between Rumi and Hosam was “serr,” or secret, which for Rumi conveniently elided with “sher,” or poetry. (Which elided further with “shir,” sweetness, reminding him of the beautiful Shirin of Persian love poetry, and so on.) He never bothered to title his poem, known already in his lifetime as the Masnavi, or, sometimes, Masnavi-ye manavi, or Spiritual Couplets. In the heat of composition, he once called the poem Hosamname or The Book of Hosam. Had the title not already been claimed by Attar, Asrarmame, or The Book of Secrets, would have fit. For Rumi circled in its accumulating lines around his most cherished secrets—the nature and identity of the beloved, and the borderline between the human and the divine.
Rumi exhaustively played in his ghazals on the ambiguity of the Persian pronoun “u,” which could refer to either “he,” “she,” “it,” or “God.” The gender of the beloved was a game built into the language that was occasionally played by Persian poets, but Rumi especially exploited its metaphysical confusions: Were his poems truly to Shams? Or God? Was he praising the natural sun, the human Sun, or the eternal Sun? In the Masnavi, which was more of a teaching poem, he engaged in theological issues, but with the same coy gamesmanship. In the Masnavi, edgily dubbed “the Quran in the Persian tongue,” probably by the Sufi poet Jami two centuries later, Rumi explored the nearness of the human to the prophetic or the divine. Such intimacy seemed especially granted to the lover, or to the poet of love, as Rumi cast himself as the thin reed flute played by Love:
You blow into me. I am in
love with your breath.
I am your flute! I am your flute! I am your flute!
The Masnavi expanded into a grand book of tales, like much of the literature Rumi had grown up with as a boy in Khorasan. A number of the stories in its first book are set in the locations—either geographical or imaginative—of his childhood. The slave girl has been carried away from her goldsmith of Samarkand, perhaps during the siege of Khwarazmshah. The lion and hare of Kalile and Demne appear early on, as the hare tricks a marauding lion into lunging after his own reflection into a deep well. From Attar, Rumi retooled a number of stories, such as the parrot of India who escapes her cage in a greengrocer’s shop by playing dead. Unlike the originals, though, these tales are not framed or continuous, but are linked or interrupted by Rumi’s musings in a manner closer to the rambling style of a Sufi master adlibbing a mixture of stories and morals.
Other stories came from Rumi’s memories of tales told by Shams, not only the secret pulse of the poem but also a source of much of its raw material. If Rumi maintained his closeness with Shams by whirling in sama, he did so, as well, by retelling his stories. During his time in Konya, Shams especially liked to tell of a vain gentleman who fussily instructed his barber to pick out all the white hairs from his beard. The barber espied so many white hairs that he snipped off his entire beard and laid out the hairs before his customer, saying, according to Shams, “You pick them out. I have work to do.” (In Rumi’s version in the Masnavi, the moral is the unimportance of theological hairsplitting for lovers of God.) Or his tale about the mouse that took the reins of a camel and started walking, fancying he pulled the beast by his own strength. Rumi used many of these lines and stories, like bits of colored glass or tile, in his complex epic arranged in mosaic form.
After a year or two, Rumi concluded the first volume of the Masnavi by reciting to Hosam an incident told of Ali, the nephew and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad, who was on the battlefield and about to deliver a death blow to an infidel knight. As Ali lifted his sword, the knight spat in his face. Suddenly Ali, instead of stabbing downward, let his sword drop. Not spun as a parable of nonviolence by Rumi, the incident is a showcase of the mysterious ways of God. Held by Sufis as a model of the mystic saint, like Arjuna on the battlefield in the Bhagavad Gita, Ali sees beyond mere winning or losing to a larger divine pattern:
I am a mountain. He is my solid base.
Like straw blown about by the thought of Him.
My desire is stirred only by His wind,
I am ridden by the love of Him alone,
Anger is the ruler of kings, but my slave;
I have tied anger beneath my horse’s bit,
I have beheaded anger with the sword of patience
God’s anger has been turned within me into kindness
I am plunged in light, though my roof lies in ruin
I am turned into a garden, though I am filled with dust.
Rumi concludes his first book, perhaps still conceived as the entire work, with the true lover, the lover of God, and emphasizes his essential theme as religious and spiritual. He would eventually quotes or alludes to 528 Quranic verses in thousands of the lines of the epic.
As Rumi was absorbed in the composition of his Masnavi, he became clearly aware of the tremendous changes he had undergone in the two decades since his first poems encouraged by Shams of Tabriz. If the beloved were a mirror in which the lover could see his soul, poetry was a mirror, too, in which the poet could glimpse personal reflections. Rumi had matured, and like many poets still creating into their later years, he had advanced from lyrical abandon to a more classical and meditative mode. A measured clarity replaced the earlier divine madness. Rumi recognized, and shared with the audience for the new Masnavi, his sense of the loss of his more torturous rapture, his late work framed as the calmer product of his sunset rather than his sunrise years:
When I first began to compose poetry, there was a strong inspiration that caused me to compose. At that time it was very effective. And now, even though this inspiration has weakened and is setting, it still is effective. It is God’s way to nurture things while they are rising, and create great effects and much wisdom. Yet even during the setting time that nurture still stands. The noble title Lord of the East and the West means that God nourishes both the rising and the setting inspiration.
CHAPTER 13
“A nightingale flew away, then returned”
SOON after Rumi completed the first book of the Masnavi, around 1262, revealing his expanded powers as a poet of richly animated spirituality, production came to a sudden halt. Hosam’s wife had died, and the young man’s response was severe. Like Rumi, Hosam had a single wife, rather than the conventional harem of wives kept by Rumi’s father, Baha Valad. Hosam was also a notably devoted husband. From the earliest days of their marriage he would not look at other women, whom he could have married according to Islamic law. And he took care to avoid the bathhouse during the day when he might catch sight of women entering and leaving, instead going at night when only the men bathed.
The death of his wife caused Hosam to plunge into a severe depression, and he exhibited a lack of energy for completing daily tasks. He experienced an inner darkness that led him to withdraw. As Aflaki described his condition, “In his emotions and in his body, he became sluggish and slow. Within himself, every moment he experienced a new mood and a new perplexity so that he could not be engaged with anything else.” Rumi later described this hidden phase in his life as leading to Hosam’s “spiritual ascension.” During the long interruption, the two men neither visited nor spoke with each other.
Equally disruptive, the death occurred in mid-September of the same year as that of Alaoddin, who had been estranged from his father since the disappearance of Shams, nearly fifteen years earlier. Dying young at about the age of thirty-five, Alaoddin had children who were living separately from the madrase. He had continued to follow the orthodox path of teacher and preacher, questioning the musical and mystical practices of his father, and embarrassed by the changes wrought upon the family legacy bequeathed by his grandfather. Rumi, in turn, had never forgiven his son for his part in the disappearance of Shams and for joining the insurrection against him. He did not even attend his funeral. As Aflaki recapped the family history, “Having waged war against Mowlana Shams of Tabriz, he hastened to ally himself with the rebellious disciples. It is said that they led him astray and put him up to this. Afterwards, being angry with him, Mowlana cast out of his blessed heart the love he had for him. . . . And during those days after Alaoddin had died, he was not present at his funeral and did not pray over him.”
The reported hard feeling for his son, even at the time of his funeral, was harsh and not always accepted as accurate. Some explained Rumi’s absence at his son’s funeral as extreme grief. Others took the report as propaganda against Alaoddin in a conflict between his descendants and those of Sultan Valad over the family heritage. Indeed many signs pointed to Alaoddin’s continued engagement with his family. Sultan Valad wrote two elegies for his brother—if not especially moving quatrains—and he was buried in the family plot, near Baha Valad and Salah. Rumi had written at least three letters to Alaoddin in recent years, addressing him as “my dear son,” “light of my eyes,” and “pride of professors,” pleading in one for him to return home, where he belonged, and to ignore accusations leveled against him. Filial relations were strained but not broken:
Dear pride of professors, and beloved of the pious, accept greetings from this father, and pray for him. I wish for you to look into your generous spirit and shut the window of anger. . . . If someone does not fulfill his duties as a son, he will never feel peace and his heart will never grow light, even if he prays and fulfills all his religious duties.
Though their relationship remained tense at the time of his death, his father eventually came to forgive Alaoddin for his part in the traumatic events of the decade of the forties. A schoolteacher told of having accompanied Rumi one day to visit
the tomb of Baha Valad: “After he prayed for his father and recited litanies for him and meditated for quite some time, he asked me for an inkwell and a pen. When I brought them, he stood up and went to the tomb of his son Alaoddin, and wrote a couplet on the whitewashed tomb. . . . Mowlana immediately forgave him and said, ‘I had a vision that my Lord Mowlana Shamsoddin Tabrizi had made peace with my son and forgave him and interceded on his behalf so that he became accepted as one of those pardoned by God.’”
While the conflicts with Alaoddin were resolved for Rumi after his son’s death, the theological issues that had separated them continued to divide Rumi from other prominent members of the local community of learned Muslims. Rumi often found himself at odds with both the pious clerics and other Sufis. Aflaki described the ceaseless criticism of his practices among the clerics: “At this time people expressed so many complaints and so much resistance, issued fatwas and read out so many chapters forbidding sama and the rabab that it would be impossible to describe in an entire book. He tolerated all of this because of his extreme kindness, compassion, and generous spirit, and he said nothing.”
In spite of Aflaki’s stress on his magnanimous serenity, Rumi was not always impassive about internecine conflicts, especially those involving other Sufis. By the 1260s the religious figures known as “Babas,” who often accompanied Turkmen emigrating from Central Asia, had been spending more time in Anatolian cities, attracting large followings and princely patronage. When the Sultan Roknoddin chose one of these popular Babas as his personal spiritual leader, Rumi responded peevishly. He had been invited to a ceremony at the palace in honor of this Baba, but entered with a mere “Salam” and sat alone in a corner. When the sultan announced his oath of fealty, Rumi, in extreme jealousy, shouted, “If the sultan has made him his father, I will take another son.” He departed barefoot, without bothering to collect his shoes.