by Brad Gooch
Yet his love is anger, and anger is his love
The lesson of the tale of the bear was care in choosing a friend whose spiritual insight was compatible, an important lesson for Sufis selecting their companions along the way.
Following through on his promise in the first book, Rumi included private memories of Shams, all of them camouflaged, and known to him alone, or to a few intimate disciples such as Hosam, who had been present for the original talks of the stranger from Tabriz. Only once does he make any kind of direct reference to Shams:
From love of Shams, I have grown weak
Or else I would give sight to the blind
Light of the Truth, Hosamoddin
Quickly heal them, and make the envious blind.
Yet the penultimate set piece of Book II, “The story about the ducklings raised by a hen,” is stocked with memories of Shams. During his time in Konya, Shams often spoke about his adolescence as a misunderstood mystic with this analogy: he felt he was a duckling raised by a hen. As he said, “Now father, I see that the ocean is my homeland. If you are of me, or I am of you, come into the ocean. If not, go back to your hens.” Rumi universalized Shams’s experience, as shared by all landlocked mystics:
You are the child of a duck, even if a hen
Held you beneath her wing, and raised you
Your real mother belongs to the ocean . . .
We are all seabirds. Only the ocean knows our language.
As a seabird himself, Rumi’s instinct was to soar, and his reflex in these books was to conclude with a lyric crescendo. In the first book, the epic hero was revealed to be Ali on the battlefield. In the second, following a catalog of ascending birds—falcons, nightingales, parrots, and peacocks—Rumi introduces his hero, an ascetic in the desert. Rumi classified the Masnavi as a “Shop of Unity,” and his ascetic, or mystic, lives beyond the differences that confused seekers in earlier stories, as he prays in a terrain without variation. Rumi had envisioned his solitary desert mystic in a separate robai:
Beyond belief and doubt is a vast desert
In the middle of this desert, we find ecstasy
When a mystic arrives here, he bows to the ground.
At the climax of the spiritual tale, a group of pilgrims, doubtless on the way to Mecca, pass by the mystic. Though the land is parched and dry, the mysterious, lone figure turns to them from his prayers, dripping with water from hands and face, his clothes damp. A perplexed pilgrim asks for an explanation, so the saint prays to Him who “opened the door to me from above” to reveal the nature of the place. Rumi at his most visionary then describes a shower of bountiful rain, the rain of love he felt was assured and was to become an even more effusive and unorthodox theme as the poem went on:
As he was praying, a beautiful cloud appeared
Like an elephant, spraying water from its trunk.
Suddenly a shower began pouring down
And settled in the ditches and the caves.
While the cloud kept pouring rain, like tears,
The pilgrims turned their faces to the sky.
CHAPTER 14
The Religion of Love
RUMI was living in a society of conventions, where the decades of life were assigned set significances—maturity was believed to arrive at age forty, which he respected when he waited to appoint Hosam to a leadership role, while sixty marked a graduation to the age of sagacity, the proper time for the consideration of last things. Almost immediately on completion of Book II, around 1266, Rumi and Hosam began work on Book III, which was finished in 1268, as Rumi was moving into his sixties, his own final decade. He was seizing on this ripe moment to express his increasingly radical and personal wisdom in as liberated, joyful, confident, and even reckless a manner as ever.
Rumi described his Masnavi as a “box of secrets.” With each installment of the expanding poem-in-progress, he was allowing the box to become further ajar, its contents more clearly and unapologetically exposed. By the late 1260s the Masnavi had become a public attraction and, like much about Rumi in Konya, a generator of debate. The orthodox were shocked by some of its theology, while even more sniping for its storytelling came from the intellectual Sufis in the lodge of Qonavi. Rumi described one such slur:
Suddenly a fool, from out the stable,
Poked his head, like a sarcastic old woman,
Saying, “This Masnavi is cheap and low
Just stories of the Prophet, on how to follow,
No mention of the loftier secrets of divinity,
Which cause the steeds of saints to gallop,
Or of the many stations of renunciation
Stage by stage up to union with God.”
The poet’s brash defense was to compare his inspired verses to the holy Quran:
When the Quran came down
Disbelievers were just as sarcastic and mean,
Saying, “These are just legends and myths,
Without any depth or lofty speculation
Something little children can understand
Nothing but lessons about right and wrong.
The story of Joseph and his long, curly hair
The story of Jacob, the passion of Zolaykha
It is simple and plain, and everyone understands
Where is the exposition in which intellect gets lost?”
God answered, “If this seems so simple to you,
Try composing a single chapter in the same style.
Let the spirits of heaven and the men of earth
Try writing a single verse in this ‘plain’ style.”
Many were protective of Rumi, and tried their best to keep him from straying too far into dangerous territory and to shield him from the most serious charges of innovation in religious matters. Rumi did little to bolster their helpful cause. Once a companion informed Rumi that when interrogated by a suspicious religious scholar, “Why do they call the Masnavi the Quran?” he had corrected him. “It is a commentary on the Quran.” Sultan Valad recalled, “My father remained quiet for a moment and then exclaimed:
“You dog! Why is it not the Quran? You ass! Why is it not the Quran? You brother of a whore! Why is it not the Quran? Truly contained in the words of the Prophets and the Friends of God are nothing but lights of divine secrets. The speech of God has sprung up from their pure hearts and has flowed forth upon the stream of their tongues. Whether it is Syriac or the Fateha prayer of the Quran, whether in Hebrew or in Arabic.”
He grew convinced that all divinely inspired speech, including the poetry of the Masnavi, in whatever language or format, was equal, whether from the living or the dead.
At the outpost of such skirmishes with tradition was Mansur al-Hallaj, executed in Baghdad for his heretical pronouncements, the most famous being “I am Truth.” In these later years, Rumi adopted Hallaj as a personal saint and his infamous self-blessing as a favorite inspiration for teaching. Defending the Sufi’s possibly apocryphal statement, Rumi grappled with his own experience. He explained Hallaj’s paradox to students:
People think that to say “I am Truth” is a claim of greatness, but it is actually extreme humility. Anyone who says, “I am God’s servant” is really claiming two existences, his own and God’s, while the one who says, “I am Truth” erases himself and gives up his own existence as nothing. When he says “I am Truth,” he means, “I do not exist. Everything is He. God alone exists. I am utter, pure oblivion. I am nothing.” There is more humility in this than any claim to greatness.
He spoke approvingly of the remark, on another occasion, inviting its embrace by others:
Everyone who exhibits some form of perfection and beauty, whether through actions or words, and has pride and grace, may actually claim, according to their own state and condition, “I am Truth”!
The figure of Hallaj and his pronouncement “I am Truth” haunt the last few books of the Masnavi, like a faint clue to a mystery, or a motto for any knowing mystic:
When Hallaj said, “I am Truth,” and kept o
n
He throttled the necks of the blind
When the “I” vanishes from our existence
What remains? Consider this thought.
Nothing was more rousing to Rumi both as mystic and poet than the contemplation of annihilation and the erasure of self and all the mundane details of life, including the need for speech and language. He wished to whirl them away. This ecstatic freedom was embodied in Hallaj, and many of Rumi’s more exquisite robai quatrains, which he was writing late in life, evoke him:
He dove into the sea of his own oblivion
Then pierced the pearl of “I am Truth”
As an early Arabic Sufi poet—Rumi often retold Hallaj’s parable of the moth drawn by a passionate love for a flame—Hallaj could be found subtly mixed with imagery of books:
I am the servant of those who know themselves
Who free their hearts from error at each moment
Composing a book from their own essence and traits
And making the title of that book, “I am Truth.”
Like Hallaj’s fluttering moth, Rumi circled the flame of truths that were inexpressible, or only expressed at great cost or danger of being misunderstood. Yet by the time he arrived at writing the third book of the Masnavi, and in talks written down by scribes, he was more baldly and directly stating his challenging secrets. He clearly felt that divine inspiration was universal and reflected in the mirror of the hearts of living saints, and he implied that he had experienced just such immolation in the divine spirit of love. Modeled on the story of the composition of the Quran by Mohammad, Rumi recited his Masnavi in an inspired state and imagined he was a mere instrument like a reed flute:
Be empty! Sing like a flute, full of passion.
Be empty! Tell secrets with your pen.
Rumi and Shams first discussed such matters while they were in seclusion, and the force of these revelations had changed his life remarkably. Yet Shams was even more adamant about “following” the Prophet Mohammad, and he strongly rejected Hallaj and his involuntary shout “I am Truth!” In his embrace of Hallaj, Rumi appeared to have gone beyond even Shams in the radicalism of his ideas about God and man. He no longer stood in anyone’s shadow, having fully realized his own voice. Although he stayed faithful to Sunni practice, and the Masnavi is filled with Muslim piety, the logic of a religion of the heart led him beyond denominations and religions to a universal vision:
The mosque inside the hearts of holy men
Is a place of worship for everyone. God is there.
He sang of a “religion of love,” and a “religion for lovers,” and its daring implications:
The religion of love is beyond all faiths,
The only religion for lovers is God
In Book III of the Masnavi he put this creed as simply and unambiguously as possible:
Since we worship the one God,
Then all religions must be one
While celebrating love and his religion of lovers with such exuberance and freedom, Rumi, though, was beginning to show signs of physical aging, and to share hints of his sense of the divergence of his stiffening body from his timeless heart, mind, and soul. As he wrote in Book III of the Masnavi, “My heart is a field of tulips that can’t be touched by age.” Other parts were more susceptible. Rumi had put his body through punitive trials of fasting and deprivation, and pushed himself with damaging nightly sessions of spontaneous composition and prayer. Of all the memories so carefully collected of his life from his disciples, none ever recalled seeing him asleep in his bed at night during these decades of his life. For the era, he was reaching life expectancy.
In a surprising aside in Book II of the Masnavi, Rumi had even departed from his usual invective against worldly pleasures and the lures of the senses. He mused on the strengths of bygone youth, when springtime was flourishing, and life was a rose garden in full bloom:
Youth is a garden, fresh and green
Easily yielding leaves and fresh fruit
Fountains of strength and passion flow
Making green the soil of the body
A well-built house with a high ceiling
Its columns straight and tall and standing free.
The ensuing caricature of old age as the head of a horse being forced into a halter was harrowing by contrast, as he listed the loss of moral strength as one of its infirmities:
The eyebrows droop and are almost white
The eyes dim, and wet with tears
The face wrinkled, like a lizard’s back
Speech is gone, as are teeth and taste
The day late, the path long, the mule limping
The shop in ruins, the business failing
The roots of bad habits having taken firm hold
And now the strength to dig them up lost.
Rumi was hardly as bowed by age as the decrepit figure of his meditation on the stages of man, yet he was marked with the lines and strains of a life lived forcefully at a steady pitch of intensity even if its main activities were composition, prayer, and meditation. He might well have thought of his teacher Borhan, who grew more carefree and joyful in his daily life at about the same time his body began to lose its former powers of endurance. Unlike Borhan, Rumi never relaxed his regimen of fasting and daily prayer, though he did relax the constraints of conventionally pious thinking and dogma to the extreme. With his gait of an elder combined with almost juvenile unchecked energy, no one in Konya was remotely like peripatetic Rumi.
The final decade of his life also marked the final decade of Konya maintaining even a pretense of independence as the capital of a Seljuk Empire. Its most compelling spiritual figure, Rumi, felt unfettered enough to trust in a steady light at the heart of events as civilizations collapsed and maps were redrawn, while his counterpart in the political world—the Parvane—lived with increasingly complex problems and acted with greater desperation. A respite from the Mongol threat was promised by their first defeat—by the Egpytians at the battle of Ayn Jalut in Syria in 1260—shifting the Muslim power base from Baghdad to Cairo. Yet for the Parvane, machinations became more elaborate, as he engaged in a perilous game of playing the Egyptian Mamluks against the Mongols.
Internal politics in Konya were just as brutal. With power came paranoia for the Parvane. He grew convinced that the Sultan Roknoddin, who had been given of late to childishly imprudent language and stormy behavior, was plotting against him. So the Parvane took the proactive measure of having Roknoddin murdered at a banquet, in 1265, and in his place put Roknoddin’s son Kaykhosrow III, less than seven years old and obviously not a threat. Taking no chances, the Parvane then set himself up as the boy’s tutor and regent. Among those the Parvane termed Rumi’s “gossiping” followers was talk of Roknoddin’s fall as divine retribution for his having spurned Rumi in favor of the more rural Turkish Babas.
As distracted as Rumi might appear, he was still engaged with his family, and still shrewdly maintained an air of studied indifference toward political intrigues at court and in the Sufi lodges. In his family life, a rare incidence of Rumi becoming angry with his wife was provoked around this time by her interest in a group of flamboyant silk-clad traveling Sufi dervishes attracting great attention in Konya for walking on hot coals, swallowing snakes, sweating blood, bathing in boiling oil, whipping themselves, and making animal noises. They were members of the Refaiyya Order, known as far as Europe as “the howling dervishes” for their wild and loud sama performances. While Rumi was away in Meram on a day trip, a group of noble ladies came to Kerra to convince her to go with them to Karatay Madrase, where the dervishes were performing their circus magic. When Rumi returned that evening he was livid with her for attending a session of this troupe, though even Afalki reported that his upset arose “out of jealous anger.”
At most times, though, Rumi’s manner with his wife was tender and bemused, the testing of the Shams years replaced with mellow companionship. Kerra remained superstitious. When he traveled to Ilgin in the summer, she worri
ed that he might fall prey to the water monster believed to live under a bridge near a meadow he enjoyed. “How wonderful,” Rumi joked. “I have wanted to meet the lord of this river for years.” As her husband grew more impractical, Kerra became increasingly protective. When Rumi went to the bathhouse, she told his companions, “Take care of Mowlana because he pays no attention to himself at all.” They toted a rug and towel to spread for him in the cooling chamber. Whatever light eating and sleeping he managed was due to her insistence.
All of Rumi’s children were now grown and pursuing adult lives. Sultan Valad was closest, as he remained at Rumi’s side. His great disappointment was his wife’s lack of children, while Rumi also remained hopeful for grandchildren from the line of Salah. Maleke, the daughter of Rumi and Kerra, was still married to the miserly Konya businessman who had been enduring a losing streak in his petty trading deals in Sivas. Rumi tried to help his son-in-law by writing to the Parvane to request his exemption from the high road tolls and taxes along the way. Their son Mozaffar worked in the sultan’s treasury and government service until—to Rumi’s great joy—he decided to don the cloak of the Sufis.
Rumi’s main focus remained Hosam, who was not only leading the community and transcribing Rumi’s poetry and correspondence but also staying active in the spiritual politics of the wider Sufi community in Konya, one of the most vibrant at the time in the Muslim world. When the sheikh of another Sufi lodge died, Hosam took over leadership of that community after a letter-writing campaign on his behalf by Rumi, overriding objections by rivals. At an inauguration, after the issuing of a royal decree, violence broke out because of continued opposition, and knives were drawn. “Why do these men with donkey tails show such ingratitude for God’s blessings?” asked Rumi on his way out. Hosam eventually went on to be in charge of yet a third such lodge in Konya.