by Brad Gooch
Adding to Rumi’s outsider status, even among his protectors, was the rough working-class background of some of his followers. As many often took their job description as part of their title, the names of those relating firsthand stories about Rumi in later accounts was a catalog of the varieties of labor—hat maker, tanner, carpenter, physician, astrologer, butcher, harpist, as well as such religious jobs as Quran reciter and schoolteacher. At a gathering at his home, the Parvane complained to one of his guests, “Khodavandgar is a king without equal . . . but his disciples are an extremely bad and gossiping lot.” A supporter of Rumi overheard the remark and reported back to him. Seeing hurt in the faces of some followers, Rumi dispatched a response to the Parvane:
If my disciples were good people, I would myself have become their disciple. It is because they were bad people that I accepted them as disciples, so that they might change into good people and enter the company of those who are good and do good works.
Even Sultan Valad felt moved to comment on the unruly nature of Rumi’s growing corps of followers and their difference in demeanor and style from the softer, more restrained, and otherworldly Sufis seen everywhere in those days on the Konya streets. “These Sufis seem very content with each other, and talk without ever arguing,” he observed to his father. “But our companions fight with one another, for no reason, and they do not get along together.” Rumi answered, “Yes, indeed, Bahaoddin. If a thousand hens are in one house, they will get along together. But two roosters in the same place do not get along. Our companions are like roosters and that is why they raise a ruckus.” The decidedly virile virtues Rumi was praising were attributes of the akhavan movement, as close in manner to the chivalric knights of Europe as to the Muslim Sufis.
Exhibiting the sublime sensibilities of Sufism more pleasingly, and with fewer rough edges, was the godson of Ibn Arabi, Sadroddin Qonavi, reputed to be so devoted to learning that he rigged a contraption suspending a bag of stones held by a rope above his bed; if he fell asleep studying and lost grip on the rope the stones would fall on him. He was known in Konya by the honorific title of Sheikh al-Islam, making him a sort of archbishop among Sufis, with his well-appointed Sufi lodge more like a grand governor’s palace, replete with doormen, eunuchs, and porters. His residence was quite different from the modest, drafty Madrase Khodavandgar, with barely enough food to keep its residents nourished and identifiable by the makeshift cell on its roof where Rumi passed his solitary nights.
Qonavi was drawn to systematic mystical thought and gave much-appreciated lessons to the Parvane as they spun abstruse webs of theory together, while Rumi followed the practical path of love, dispensing with the Damascene knowledge of his youth. Tensions could exist between them. Qonavi did not like Rumi at first, and one of Rumi’s admirers voiced offense at Qonavi’s aristocratic airs, saying he felt as if he were visiting the house of a ruler rather than a man of poverty. Yet Rumi advised the Parvane to give a stipend to Qonavi, as he had so many more students to feed in his kitchen. Eventually a quiet respect grew between them, and on at least one occasion Rumi and Qonavi were seen quietly meditating together, their prayer rugs facing, knees touching. When a student approached during this session to ask Rumi “What is poverty?” he would not answer—his point being that silence itself was a kind of poverty.
Rumi’s sincerity, coupled with the entrancing spell of his evolving poetry and the infectiousness of his message of love, granted him freedom from the rules that another might not so easily have been given. At one point the Parvane was considering appointing the son of the vizier Tajoddin as qadi, or chief judge of Konya. The young man was learned in religious law but impervious to the charms of Sufism, especially those of the least manageable of Sufis, Rumi. He agreed to accept the post on three conditions: the outlawing of the rabab; removal of corrupt bailiffs from the court; and paying bailiffs a stipend so they would not accept bribes. The Parvane accepted the last two conditions, but not the first, knowing its repercussions for Rumi. When word reached Rumi, he said, “Such a blessing, rabab! And praise God that the rabab also saved the son of Tajoddin from the trap of being a judge!”
The presiding qadi during most of Rumi’s mature years, and so the most influential in his legal fate, which was always somewhat in jeopardy, was Serajoddin Ormovi, imported to Konya by the Seljuks in 1257, and lasting through all the shifts in imperial administration, mostly because of the support of the Parvane. A Persian speaker, born in Azerbaijan, Serajoddin was already sixty years old when he settled in Konya, after having lived in Mosul, Damascus, and Egypt as part of the civilian elite. A philosopher-theologian of the rationalist school, equally at home in the court or the madrase, he was particularly suited to the Seljuk post, as he spoke Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and was familiar with Jewish and Christian scriptures as well as Islamic legal tomes and studies.
As a meticulously trained logician versed in analysis, Serajoddin was not by nature sympathetic with sama and some of the more illogical practices of the visionary mystics. He and Rumi held predictably opposite positions on many issues. Given the seat of honor at most public ceremonies, he embodied for Rumi the hypocrisy of rank and position, and Rumi judged him handicapped by his reliance on the finer points of logic. When Hosam asked Rumi his opinion of Serajoddin, he answered, “He is a good man. But he circles about the watering hole. He just needs one kick to reach it.” As with Qonavi, though, Rumi gradually developed a respectful friendship with Serajoddin.
As chief judge, Serajoddin often needed to rule on issues involving Rumi. In one instance, Rumi wrote to him to intervene to insure that the children of Alaoddin not be deprived of their rightful inheritance. Another time, Theryanus, the Greek convert saved by Rumi from execution, was brought before the judge and charged with going about town proclaiming that Rumi was God—which was obviously not encouraged in Islam. Questioned by the qadi, he answered, “No, I said he is a God-builder. Don’t you see how he has remade me into a knower of God?” Case dismissed, he reported the proceedings to Rumi, who smiled and replied, “You should have said, ‘Shame on you, if you don’t become God!’”
The crucial rulings of Serajoddin concerned sama, an issue of spiritual life and death for Rumi, who had by then given up on traditional instruction in favor of teaching with insights gained with the help of such tavern pastimes as music, song, and poetry. At least once, formal charges were brought against Rumi by a group of the religious scholars in Konya, their pressing for a legal ruling reminding the qadi of the radical nature of Rumi’s liberated life and teachings. “Why must this kind of innovation advance and this practice be promoted?” they demanded. The answer of the qadi focused on the person of Rumi, not on any theological principle: “This heroic man is strengthened by God and is without peer in learning. You should not quarrel with him. He is the one who knows, as does his God.”
After two years, in June of 1264, Hosam finally recovered from his protracted mourning and depression. He had been feeling the predictable wish to marry again, and was searching for a wife. He awoke one summer morning, though, pining again for the spiritual life, and also for the poem-in-couplets that he had abandoned in his sorrow. As suddenly as he had been overcome by lassitude, Hosam felt its release and went straightway to the madrase to propose starting up again just where he and Rumi had left off, “requesting the remainder of the Masnavi from the luminous heart of the Sheikh.”
Rumi assessed Hosam as having matured and was thrilled by his return. Wasting no time, he dictated a new prologue for him to write down, on the spot, starting again at the beginning—this time of Book II—with a date and gloss explaining the interruption:
The light of God, Hosamoddin,
Pulled back the reins at the summit of heaven
During his ascension, while seeking for the truth,
Without his springtime, buds would not bloom
When he returned from the ocean to the shore
The harp strings of the Masnavi were retuned
This Mas
navi has burnished every soul
His return was a day of beginning again
The date of the renewal of this great gift
In the year six hundred sixty-two
A nightingale flew away, then returned
As a falcon, hunting for mystical truths.
Mystic and scribe fell quickly back into their old way of working, with Hosam revising and adding vowel signs. As Aflaki confirmed, “There was no further delay up to the end of the book. Mowlana continually recited in unbroken succession and Hosamoddin wrote it down and repeatedly read out loud what he had written until the work was completed.”
His harp strings retuned, Rumi also realized a wish he had been harboring for some time—making Hosam the sheikh of his unofficial order. For the third time, Rumi elevated a chosen companion into a position of esteem, a position he himself might more naturally have held. The maneuver was loving and passionate, a reflection of the feelings in his heart, but also savvy, as he again put a barrier between himself and his followers, allowing more space for mystical abstraction and his own rapt devotion to prayer and dance. The difference between Hosam and the others was that he was accepted by most of Rumi’s students without as much conflict. Hosam was now forty years old—a respectable age for a religious leader—and had been espousing Rumi to his band of young men for years, attracting resources and a more diverse group of followers.
Passed over again, of course, was Sultan Valad, who described the transition without any evident slighted feelings, telescoping six years into a single poetic frame: “When Salahoddin left this world, Sheikh said, Hosam, the Way of Truth, you are the successor and caliph. The Sheikh seated him in place of Salahoddin and scattered light above his head. He asked all the followers to bow to him, and be humble before him, and obey all his commands with all their heart, and plant his love within their souls.” The exception in this smooth transfer of power was Sultan Valad’s wife, Fateme. She kept alive the jealousy and suspicion of her father, Salah, toward Hosam, resenting that her husband had not ascended to the position of leadership she felt belonged to him.
Rumi’s worship of his appointed beloved was always a challenge for the community. Shams had presented special difficulties because of his irascible temper and eccentricity. Salah, as a practically illiterate teacher, confounded every expectation of a school or Sufi lodge. Hosam was well liked and a natural leader since adolescence, but the social reversal was of an older man humbling himself before a younger man. Yet humble himself Rumi flagrantly did. Once when a group was setting out for a ceremony at a Sufi lodge, Rumi took Hosam’s prayer rug from the shoulder of a follower and carried it on his own shoulder, walking the entire way through the center of town. Shopkeepers and passersby recognized the gesture as proper for a well-behaved servant.
As with Shams and Salah, Rumi pushed his devotion to friendship to extravagant lengths. On one occasion, the Parvane held a gathering of ministers and prominent men at his home and invited Rumi, hoping for him to entertain in a spiritual key with choice words and perhaps bursts of lyric poetry and ecstatic dance. Noticing that Rumi was sullen and silent, the Parvane realized that he had not invited Hosam and sent for him. As soon as he arrived, being led in with a torch, Rumi jumped down from his rug on the dais to join him in the palace courtyard, exuberantly greeting him, “Welcome my soul, my faith, my light!” Aware of the Parvane, who was suspicious of the exaggerated compliments, Hosam explained, “Even if not true, once Mowlana says so, it is like this and a hundred times more!” Hosam understood—as had Salah, in his sense of mirroring—that the intensity of Rumi’s adoration could inspire the recipient to rise to the challenge.
Most of the more relaxing periods of visiting between Rumi and Hosam, especially during the warmer months, were passed in Meram, where Hosam owned a garden. Every year during the later decades of his life, Rumi spent forty days each summer at the hot springs of Ilgin, reached by wagon, about sixty miles northwest of Konya. He would teach his students at twilight next to a frog pond. Otherwise he often stayed with Hosam in Meram, a settlement where gardens and orchards were cultivated, just a carriage or mule’s ride from Konya. Here he would picnic with friends and enjoy listening to the splashing of its many waterwheels. Running water was believed to calm the spirit, and was used to treat the mentally ill in an Anatolian hospital built in Rumi’s lifetime in Divrigi, outfitted with watercourses emptying into basins. Yet watermills throughout the Middle East also made loud creaking noises. In their endless turning, and plaintive screaks, Rumi imagined lovers pining for each other, and for reunion with God:
Lovers are like waterwheels turning day and night
Restlessly revolving, endlessly moaning,
The turning of the wheel teaches those who seek the river.
No one may say to them this river is ever still.
Many fond memories by followers of Rumi date from these retreats in Meram, as he was otherwise mostly secluded in Konya. One told of the time a group of travelers from Bukhara sought Rumi in Hosam’s garden, and a close woman friend, who often stayed up late into the night talking with him, brought out a tray of homemade desserts. “If you asked for the banquet table of Jesus it would have descended for you in this house,” said Rumi, referring to a story of Jesus feeding the hungry with food from heaven. (This woman “kept constant company” with another follower of Rumi’s, who also held sama sessions locally in her home.) Especially coveted by Rumi’s extended family of wife and children from two marriages, as well as Salah’s widow and children, was the white honey from Hosam’s garden, which was used in medical potions. Rumi felt comfortable in Meram, and whenever he went missing, which happened frequently, he could most reliably be discovered praying alone in the Meram mosque.
During all the seasons of the year, though, whether in Konya or Meram, Rumi and Hosam kept up their unflagging work on the poem, which Rumi was imagining might grow so lengthy as to need to be carried by forty mules. Rumi paused every so often in the poem to exult in Hosam. Midway through Book II, he stopped to duly credit him:
Come light of God, Hosamoddin,
Without you no plants grow in this dry soil
Hosam could be just as extravagant in his praise of the importance of the poet and his poem to which they were both committed. More than once, he reported having a dream in which the Prophet Mohammad was reading the Masnavi with great interest and approval.
The writing of the Masnavi was not solely a production undertaken by Rumi and Hosam in privacy—though it was often so. Rumi also composed with listeners gathered, as oral performance was an important quality of its rhythmic power. Unlike sama gatherings, these sessions required absolute silence, as the teasing out of meanings from fables, and their weaving, was a delicate procedure. Implied in the poem were hints of occasions when witnesses fell asleep, while the creation evolved within the deep silence of the insulating stone pillars and heavy roof of the main hall. Rumi was anxious to make sure that these recitations were not seen as mere entertainment. He discounted himself as a poet to his followers—a bit disingenuously, given his skill and lifetime love of poetry:
When friends come to visit me, I am worried that they will be bored, so I recite poetry. Otherwise why would I have anything to do with poetry? I am vexed by poetry. There is nothing worse for me. I do poetry the way someone puts his hand into tripe to wash for guests because they have an appetite for it. That is why I must do so. A man has to look at the town where he is living to see what goods the people need and what kind of goods they wish to buy. People will then buy such goods even if they happen to be of the lowest quality.
Casting himself as a humble merchant, peddling second-rate wares, Rumi also spoke of the disparagement of the art of poetry by religious long beards in his native Khorasan, which may have been true in orthodox circles, but certainly not in the highly poetic culture generally, or by his father, who often quoted Sanai and other poets:
What am I to do? In our country and among our people there was nothing mor
e disgraceful than being a poet. If I had remained in our native land, and wished to live in harmony with their tastes, I would have done only what was desired of me, such as teaching, writing books, preaching, fasting and performing pious deeds.
Even if a reluctant poet—and a self-deprecating one—Rumi either took exacting pains with the structure of the Masnavi, or a lifetime of rigorous intellectual activity manifested itself spontaneously. The second book matched the structure of the first book, and both set the template for the books to come. At about 3,800 lines, the second volume is almost the same length as the first. Both contain about a dozen core stories, which are broken up by digressions and expostulations, and are fed into by less complex anecdotes. The sections are also introduced by rubrics, Kalile and Demne–style, probably inserted by Rumi or other scribes later, such as “How a king tested two slaves he had just purchased.”
While neither book settled into a single succinct theme, Book I conformed loosely to the Sufi genre of a pilgrim’s progress, where a soul progresses from the pain of separation from God, like the mournful reed flute, longing for reunion, to the divine illumination experienced by Ali. The stories of the second book center more on the split between appearance and reality, with the spiritually undiscerning always mistaking surface for essence, and so succumbing to painful or deadly moral errors: a Sufi leaves his cherished donkey with a servant who swears he needs no instruction in caring for the animal, which nearly dies of neglect; a king entrusts his falcon with an old woman who clips its claws to try to domesticate the royal bird. Most darkly comic, was the tale of the man who befriends a bear that winds up swatting a fly on his friend’s face with a giant boulder:
A fool believes the love of the bear is true