by Brad Gooch
A technicality more important to Hosam than to Rumi was his affiliation, like Shams of Tabriz, with the Shafii School of jurisprudence, as opposed to the Hanafi tradition. In Sufi practice, a master and his disciple were always of the same school. Hosam lowered his head and said, “I wish from this day to belong to the Hanafi School, as Khodavandgar is a follower of the Hanafi School.” Rumi was absorbed by then in his religion of love and the mosque of the heart and had little interest in such divisive legal issues. “No, no!” he answered. “What is proper is that you remain in your school, and follow it, but that you travel our mystic path, and guide people on our road of love.”
The gatherings for Rumi’s talks, transcribed under the supervision of Hosam, were continuing, though they often evolved into discussion groups or question-and-answer sessions regarding the burgeoning Masnavi as the poem was being circulated. On one occasion, a student asked for an explanation of a few of its more perplexing lines:
Oh brother, you are nothing but your thoughts
The rest of you is merely skin and bones
If your thought is a rose, you are a rose garden
If your thought is a thorn, you are fuel for the fire.
Rumi explained that what is seen or heard is secondary to the more essential force of thought, which is the invisible creator of words and actions, like the sun in the sky:
Although the sun in the sky is constantly shining, it is not visible unless its rays strike a wall. Similarly, if there is no medium of words and sound, the rays of the sun of speech cannot be seen.
In these talks, Rumi explored the practical relevance for the lives of those who were drawn to him and his increasingly unorthodox madrase of the “religion of lovers”:
People work variously at all sorts of jobs, crafts, and professions, and they study astrology and medicine, and so forth, but they are not at peace because they have not found what they are seeking. The beloved is called delaram, or “he who gives the heart repose,” because the heart finds peace through the beloved. How then can it find peace through anything else? All these other joys and goals are like a ladder. The rungs on the ladder are not places to rest but for passing along.
In a surprising departure from the enlightened and ethereal tone of many of his remarks, Rumi announced one evening that he had been weighing in on current political difficulties with the Parvane, lecturing him on his appeasement of the Mongols rather than allying himself with the Muslim Mamluks of Egypt. He had obviously not lost his alertness to politics nor to the side of himself capable of being engaged and partisan:
All this I said to the Parvane, I told him, “You have united yourself with the Tatar, whom you aid to annihilate the Syrians and Egyptians and so to lay waste the realm of Islam. What was supposed to be a cause for the expansion of Islam has become the cause for its diminishment. In this state, which is a fearful one, turn to God. Give alms to the poor so that He may deliver you from this evil condition, which is simply fear.”
He reserved special anger for students he felt were too prone to falling under the spell of the Parvane and his sumptuous lifestyle. Especially irritating was a group sent on a mission to Kayseri, who returned talking about the delicacies and tasty dishes they sampled at the imperial table. Cuttingly, Rumi said, “Shame on the companions for their exaggerated praise of the stuff of the table, and for being proud and saying, ‘We ate such and such.’ You who beheld fine fat foods, get up to look at what is leftover in the toilet.”
The aging sage appeared most often in a delighted state and was refreshingly otherworldly in sightings around town. One day as he was walking in the bazaar, a Turk was offering a fox skin for sale to the highest bidder, calling out, in Turkish, “Delku, delku,” meaning “fox.” Rumi held his heart, and whirled, repeating, in Persian, “Del ku? Del ku?” meaning, “Where is the heart?” When a Turkish jurist presented him with a list of abstruse legal questions while he was sitting alongside a moat next to the Sultan Gate, reading a book, he called for a pen and inkwell and dashed off exemplary answers without consulting any authorities. He also liked leaving messages on public spaces. As he had once written on his son’s tomb and Shams’s door, he ordered verses that he first composed in ink on paper to be inscribed on the gate of the little garden of the madrase.
Kindness continued to stand out as a virtue for him, as was borne out by many testimonials. When a Christian, drunk on wine, wandered into a sama session, accidentally bumping into Rumi, some of his followers shoved the man. “He is the one who drank wine,” Rumi berated them, “but you are the ones behaving like drunken brawlers.” Preventing his companions from clearing a bathhouse pool of lepers and the sick, Rumi quickly took off his clothes, entered the water, and pourd the water they were using over his head. When a thief stole his prayer rug, he sent someone to buy it back from him at the bazaar to spare him embarrassment. Animals continued to be beneficiaries of his kindness, such as the ox some butchers bought intending to slaughter that he convinced them to set free, or a wild dog he saved from a beating on Hosam’s street.
While not overly careful in guarding his own health—other than relying on a favorite drink, julep of sorrel—Rumi had begun to add to his reputation, too, an instinct for natural healing. When a favorite disciple had a high fever, which the doctors could not treat, Rumi pounded garlic cloves into a mortar and mixed the paste with the man’s food, causing him to break into a sweat and recover. For a pupil complaining of falling asleep too often, Rumi successfully advised, “Extract the milk of poppies and drink it.” During one of his summer retreats in Ilgin, a disciple became grievously ill. Rumi ordered him lifted in his bedding and brought to the bathhouse, where he immersed him in the central spring water pool and dunked him repeatedly until he revived. The method worked, though, according to Aflaki, “No clever doctor ever used this strange form of treatment.”
Rumi and Hosam were proceeding at a steady and energetic pace through the composition of the books of the Masnavi, with about two or three years separating the creation of Books III, IV, and V, near the turn of the decade of the 1270s. Much of Rumi’s spiritual life since Shams’s departure decades earlier had circled about his beloved friend’s final lessons to him on the meaning of separation, which was the mystery at the heart of their friendship, as well as, explained Shams, central to the experience of love, both human and divine. Rising and falling in these later books was a meditation on death as the ultimate separation, the root of so much pain.
In Book III of the Masnavi, Rumi had not only identified himself as the unabashed preacher of love—as he wrote in one ghazal, “At the Festival of Unity, the Preacher of Love arrives.” He also turned to considering death as fully as love, if not as a form of love, as he moved closer to the horizon of his own life. Yet he was not composing in the violet mode of sad elegy—the somber hymns of the blue-winged angels in his weeping poems on the death of Shams or Salah. Instead his message was the joy and release of death. Fear of death was nothing but a reflection in the mirror of passing thoughts:
You flee from death because you are afraid
But truly you fear yourself. Consider this!
Your own face is frightening, not the face of death
Death is a leaf, but your soul is the tree
Every leaf grows from you, both good and bad
Every hidden thought, both pleasant and ugly.
The tenor of much of Rumi’s poetry in the Masnavi is cheerful and transcendent. The conviction behind this sensibility depended on his belief in the shifting qualities of the world, so that thoughts were not taken as fixed or unchanging. Soul or spirit or even attitude could recast or illuminate the perception of all experiences. As far as the psychology of approaching death, Rumi almost reflexively counseled its embrace rather than its fear—advice, given the timing, for himself as much as anyone. He chose to see the “limping” physical demands of his own aging as the fermentation of eternal love:
God created me from the wine of love,
I’
m still that love, even as death wears me down
As a mystic, Rumi had a more powerful and compelling incentive for dwelling on death in the final books of the Masnavi. He lived according to the belief that not only was the invisible world more real than the visible, but also that life after death was a release into a cosmic experience of infinitely greater light and love than experienced in the body. In the third book of the Masnavi, Rumi sings of death as a release, in one homespun simile after another. Life was like a steam bath you needed to exit for the sake of your heart, or like wearing tight shoes in the desert, or a confining womb after nine months had passed:
Squeezed in the womb like a baby
I am eager to move on, after nine months,
If my mother were feeling no labor pains
I might be left in this burning jail
But the pains of death are telling her
The time has come for the lamb to be born
So that he may graze in lush, green fields
Open wide the womb, the lamb is ready!
In a weirdly hypnagogic tale of a mosque where anyone who spent the night would die and of the lover who insisted on spending the night there, Rumi identified with the death-radiant lover, bragging of his recklessness in facing his own certain extinction:
He said, “My friends, with no regrets,
I have grown weary of life in this world
I’m a wanderer, seeking only pain and wounds,
Don’t expect sense from this wanderer on the road
I’m not a wanderer seeking my next meal
I’m a reckless wanderer, seeking death
I’m not a wanderer seeking to make money
But a nimble wanderer seeking to cross the bridge
Not to be found hanging around in shops and markets
But rather running away from my own existence.”
The tale of the lover in the mosque of death in Book III was interrupted—or illustrated—by a companion tale of a caged bird in a rose garden, visited by a flock of birds singing of their freedom on the wing, a message that causes the bird to lose its satisfaction with its gilded prison and to desire escape. Yet the bird stops itself from squeezing through its bars by the sudden appearance of a cat identified as “Death, its claws disease.” Fear of the cat of death turns the hopeful bird into a spiritual gray mouse:
The bird turned into a mouse, seeking a hole
After he heard the cat’s cry, “Stop!”
Just like a mouse, his soul was calmed
By finding a home in this world’s hole
He started building and acquiring knowledge
That fit into just the space of this small hole
He only learned trades that would work well
Within the confines of his small hole.
Braving—even loving—death was revealed to be the secret for living a fulfilled life. For Rumi, love and death were entwined in an embrace, while love and fear were opposites.
The crescendo to Rumi’s growing excitement about death as an expression of love and nonattachment was reached in a glorious hymn to death in Book V, which Rumi composed at the beginning of the decade of the 1270s, when he was sixty-three years old. He was now quickened with anticipation at the prospect of death and resurrection. The theme of transcending his mortal body had become inseparable from his religion of love:
When you hear them say, “That poor man is dead,”
You may answer, “I am alive, you just cannot see!
When my body was laid to rest, all by itself,
Eight paradises blossomed inside my heart!”
When the soul sleeps among roses and jasmine
What matter if the body is buried in dirt?
What does the sleeping soul know of the body?
Or care whether its grave is a rose garden or ash pit?
The soul has emerged into the sky-blue of the heavens
Crying out, to those below, “If only everyone knew!”
CHAPTER 15
Wedding Night
AS Rumi was walking one day, in bright daylight, his mind elsewhere, his shoe became stuck in the mud. He simply discarded it and proceeded barefoot. At other times, and other places, Rumi’s behavior was becoming similarly marked by absentmindedness, ecstatic absorption, or the freedom that came with advanced age and station. He once grew excited enough during sama that the knot of his drawers came undone, though he kept twirling only in a loose shirt until Hosam jumped up, clasped him in a tight embrace, and covered him with a cloak. Aflaki reported, “If a group of poor people begged from him, he would give them the cloak from his back, the turban from his head, the shirt from his body, and the shoes from his feet—and off he would go.”
Provoking an even more exhilarated response was the birth of his grandson, anticipated ever since the marriage of his son to Salah’s daughter at least fifteen years earlier. Born on June 7, 1272, Ulu Aref Chelebi arrived as a kind of miracle into Rumi’s life. Fateme had suffered many stillborn births, or children dying in infancy, and was taking drugs and making violent movements to eliminate the fetus, not wishing to undergo the ordeal of labor again. She was convinced her pregnancy was doomed. Hearing of these practices, Rumi sent a strong message to Fateme: “Do not do such things but keep to your pregnancy. Can it be that you feel so ashamed of our lineage?”
As soon as he received news of the birth of his grandson, even before the completion of the ritual rubbing of salt on the newborn, Rumi rushed to Fateme’s bedside. He gleefully scattered gold coins over the head of the mother, a blessing of good fortune, and asked whether he might take the baby. Receiving the baby from the midwife, he then wrapped him in the sleeve of his cloak and whisked him away. After spending some afternoon and evening hours alone with him, Rumi returned the baby that night to Latife, the mother of Fateme, with more gold coins tied in a loop wrapped in his sheet. Weeks later, when the baby was in his crib, Rumi lightly raised the covering veil and whispered, “Allah, Allah,” teaching him the mantra for prayer first taught to him by Baha Valad.
Rumi also took responsibility for naming the child. He instructed Sultan Valad that his name should be “Faridun,” the first name of the boy’s grandfather Salah. But he added, “You should address him as Amir Aref, the way Baha Valad called me Khodavandgar, and never said my actual name. Let my spiritual gift to him be my title, meaning that you may write his name as Jalaloddin Amir Aref.” He also marked the occasion with a poem that harked back to his formulaic wedding poems for Faridun’s parents:
The day he was born from his mother was Tuesday
In the year six hundred and seventy—Faridun!
On the eighth day of the month of Zel-Qa’de,
Two hours after noonday prayers—Faridun!
From the family and race of the Khosrows,
He was loved like Shirin—Faridun!
Descended from nobility in both his father and mother,
He came from Paradise, a beautiful angel—Faridun!
Rumi imbued him not only with a spiritual pedigree, but a Persian one, saturated in the epic love for Shirin of King Khosrow, “beautiful as the moon,” as he once wrote of him.
A Masnavi reciter—now an occupation, like Quran reciter—told of visiting Rumi and Hosam, when the grandchild was not more than a year old. “Suddenly I saw the door of the small garden open,” he recalled. “Amir Aref was seated on a little wagon and his tutor was pulling him. Mowlana stood up and placed the rope of the wagon over his own blessed shoulder and pulled it along and said, ‘I can be Aref’s little ox.’ Similarly, Hosamoddin stood next to Khodavandgar and grabbed the other side of the rope, and both of them pulled the wagon one or two times around the courtyard of the madrase. Aref laughed sweetly and screamed with joy. Khodavandgar announced, ‘Being kind to little children is a legacy for Muslims.’” Rumi then repeated a teaching from the Prophet Mohammad in the Arabic, “‘Whoever has a child, let him behave like a child himself.’”
When Aref was a bit older, Sultan
Valad was often startled when the boy entered a room, as he recognized mannerisms of Rumi in his son. Aref’s Quran teacher recalled that Sultan Valad told him, when the child was only six years old, “The moment Aref enters the door of the madrase, I imagine that my father has entered. His graceful gait, his delicate manner of walking, and his balanced movements are exactly the way my father walked. In my youth, I continually saw my father with these same characteristics and appearance, and Aref’s movements during sama are exactly like his.” Sama, within Rumi’s madrase at least, had become a regular family activity practiced by all ages.
Rumi’s stretches of skyward distraction, alternating with silly patches of playfulness during the infancy of his grandson, did not keep him from starting back to work on Book VI of the Masnavi, which he identified in its Prologue as the final book. He chose the number six as representing in Islamic medieval thought the six directions—the four cardinal points, plus zenith and nadir, which were a sort of moral height and depth:
Oh, Life of the Heart, Hosamoddin,
Desire for a Sixth Part is now boiling
Because of your magnetic wisdom
A Book of Hosam circulates in the world
Oh, Spiritual One, I dedicate to you
A Sixth Part, the ending of the Masnavi.
The sixth book revisits in its philosophical disquisitions the concerns of the earlier books with teaching questions, especially the debate that most absorbed Rumi, between a determinist submission to the will of Allah expressed in thoughts, feelings, events, and actions and the commonsense exercise of personal free will. As in the other five books, he reached back to his childhood for animal fables—from Kalile and Demne came the tale of the friendship of a mouse with a frog. More novel was his growing reliance in the last two books on raw material drawn from hazl poems, which featured bawdy, even obscene or profane language, and lewd scenarios. (When R. A. Nicholson later translated the Masnavi into English he rendered these sections in Latin to spare the general public material he considered pornographic.) In one such tale, a maiden uses a donkey’s equipment for her sexual satisfaction, which Rumi presents as a lesson on being in thrall to our animal nature. In another, a young man in a Sufi lodge builds a wall behind him each night to prevent being raped—an example of abuse of power in the religious life. Rumi was illustrating, to the dismay of some, that no material was too vulgar to be embraced within the rich universe of his book and of God’s wisdom and understanding.