Rumi's Secret

by Brad Gooch

  On the evening of his death, Rumi’s body had been placed on a bench and washed according to Muslim practice by an imam, several of his companions helping with pouring the water. Early the next morning the coffin was carried on the shoulders of a group of friends and followers out of the madrase that had been the family home in Konya since the final years of the life of Baha Valad. At the first sight of the simple coffin, all the men of Konya, from whatever background, bared their heads, among crowds that included numbers of women and children. The procession was led by Quran reciters intoning verses, along with twenty groups of singers chanting poems that Rumi composed, and musicians beating kettledrums, and playing oboes, trumpets, and flutes.

  Most remarkable was the spontaneous appearance of religious leaders from all the other faiths practiced in town, as well as their faithful taking part. As Aflaki chronicled, “All the religious communities with their men of religion and worldly power were present, including the Christians and the Jews, the Greeks, the Arabs and the Turks. All of them in accordance with their own traditions walked in procession while holding up their books. And they recited verses from the Psalms of David, the Torah, and the Gospels, and made lamentation.” Sultan Valad remembered his father’s funeral, “The people of the city, young and old, were all lamenting, crying, sighing aloud, the villagers as well as the Turks and Greeks. They tore their shirts from grief for this great man. ‘He was our Jesus!’ the Christians said. ‘He was our Moses!’ the Jews said.”

  The occasion was marked, though, by frenzy and violence as much as by peace and joy. The beauty of the outpouring was interrupted when some of Rumi’s followers tried to push others away from a religious ceremony they felt belonged solely to them. “The Muslims were unable to beat them off with sticks and swords and blows,” Rumi’s grandson told of the occasion, as remembered in his family. “The crowd could not be scattered and a great dispute arose.” When the Parvane was informed of the disturbance some prominent monks and priests were summoned to explain their participation. Rumi had been spending more time in the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish districts than was realized, teaching and conversing. “Whatever we read in our sacred books about the prophets, we beheld in him,” one said. A Greek priest said, “He was like bread. Have you ever seen a hungry person run away from bread? You have no idea who he really was!”

  Because of the long pause until the dispute among the faiths was adjudicated by the Parvane, and then the stopping and starting as mourners ripped off the coffin cover, which needed to be replaced six times, their hysterics only partly successfully tamped down by Seljuk soldiers and police, the procession did not arrive at the rose garden cemetery until sunset. The harshness of the wintry day and the fading of the light added to a feeling of sadness infusing many of the Sufi leaders closest to Rumi, in spite of the affirming music and poetry. They took part one by one in the ritual known as the “Visiting Rite” of saying farewell to the corpse, where a master of ceremonies would proclaim their names, as if visiting a royal court. When the announcer called the name of Qonavi, he added many respectful titles. Qonavi later confided that he did not realize he was being called, as all of the effusive titles being listed sounded more fitting for Rumi.

  As a surprising revelation of the closeness that had developed between them, Rumi in one of his final deathbed wishes asked that Qonavi be entrusted with the leading role in the funeral service of reading the final prayers over his body before burial. During the recital of these prayers, Qonavi became momentarily dazed from grief. In the confusion of the day some had arrived late at the cemetery, and given Qonavi’s emotional distress, the Chief Judge Qadi Serajoddin repeated the burial prayer once more, or completed the prayer, if the distress of Qonavi had caused him to simply break off. Leaving the service in the dim light of that early evening, the Sufi poet Eraqi made his apt observation of Rumi, “He came into the world as a stranger, and he left as a stranger.”

  Rumi inspired visions, especially fitting, since he had been known as a boy who saw angels. One mourner later spoke of seeing rows of blue angels that day in the cemetery, and Kerra saw her husband transfigured into an angel with four pairs of wings. More restrained and precise, Hosam claimed he never dreamed of Rumi or even sensed his presence for seven years after his death, until he encountered him once walking in the Meram garden and Rumi asked simply, “Chuni?” “How are you?” “I saw nothing else,” said Hosam. Even less supernatural, but most evocative of the way Rumi spoke and saw things, was a dream shortly after his death by his friend Serajoddin, a Masnavi reciter, who dreamed of seeing Rumi hunched in a corner of the house, lost in contemplation. When the reciter asked him about his life in heaven, Rumi wryly answered, “Serajoddin, they have not come to understand me in the afterlife any more than they understood me in this world.”

  Afterword

  IN just the six years since I retraced the steps of the young student Rumi in Aleppo, history had reminded me of its cruel and destructive powers. Arriving at the end of writing about the life of Rumi, I cast back to my early, significant meeting on a Friday morning with Sebastian in the quiet covered bazaar of Aleppo and wondered where he might be. By now the civil war that had begun nearly unnoticed that same week had created unimaginable catastrophe in Syria on the scale of the Mongol devastation in Rumi’s own time. I looked for and eventually found the card Sebastian handed me.

  I had no luck reaching him at the email or telephone number handwritten on the back of the crinkled card for the carpet store, though I did manage to find Omar on Facebook, through a mutual journalist friend. Omar had sold rugs in the same family business as Sebastian and was now living as a Syrian refugee in New Zealand. His uncle was the brother-in-law of Sebastian, but the uncle only knew of a last sighting, in England, of my accidental friend. “I feel sad about what happened,” Omar wrote to me in a message as poignant as it was brief. “I wish I can change but as you know we can’t.”

  All signs of Rumi might have vanished, too. He lived in just such a brutal time of destruction and tumult, hardly conducive to the preservation of delicate poetry and spiritual teaching. His death marked the end of an era, and his “setting” was simultaneous with the disappearance of the refined culture—and dominant personalities—of his time and place. Within four years, Rumi’s political alter ego, the Parvane, had been executed for treason by the very Mongols who propped him up for two decades, a fall from unreliable power that would not have surprised his spiritual mentor. In those same years Rumi’s counterpoint Qonavi died, his simple grave in Konya still identified by a wooden honeycomb of a tomb, open to the air, according to his wishes. Finding a pattern in the deaths of these three men, the historian of the Seljuks Claude Cahen has written: “All those who had been molded politically and intellectually during the period of Seljukid splendor had now perished together, and the former brilliance had vanished with them.”

  Rumi’s posterity, though, was fortunate in having leaders committed to his legacy in the right place at the right time. Following Hosam’s death eleven years after Rumi, his son Sultan Valad, succeeded by his grandson Aref, on whom Rumi had doted, became leaders of a more formal institutional Mevlevi Order—“Mevlevi” is Turkish for “Mowlavi”—with leadership passed down in royal fashion from fathers to sons. They sent emissaries around Asia Minor and the Levant to propogate the brotherhood. “Most of these orders peter out, after a bang with an exciting leader,” Professor Ahmet T. Karamustafa, an expert on Sufism at the University of Maryland, told me in a conversation. “No one follows up, and that is that. The Mevlevis ended up being pretty successful.” By the time of the Ottoman Empire the Mevlevis had become the establishment order, and the Mevlevi sheikh, a descendent of Rumi, delegated to gird any new sultan with a ceremonial sword.

  Fortune did reverse for the Mevlevis in Turkey with the Amendment of 1925, devised by the new secular president, Kemal Ataturk, banning all Sufi orders, as he feared their political power and disliked their musty reminiscence of the Ottoman past. The law
forbade the use of Mevlevi mystical names, titles, or costumes, impounded assets, and provided prison sentences for such practices. Yet two years later, in 1927, the Mevlevi lodge in Konya—which grew up around Rumi’s tomb, the Green Dome, built by Hosam with funds from the Parvane and Gorji Khatun—was allowed to reopen as a museum, which it remains: visitors can see robed mannequins posed in a dervish’s daily round.

  Equally difficult to eradicate was Rumi’s sublime whirling meditation, allowed to reemerge publicly in the guise of a folk dance in the 1950s. Present at its first “performance” in Konya on the anniversary of Rumi’s death in December 1954 was the scholar Annemarie Schimmel, who traveled from Ankara, where she was teaching. “Late in the evening we were brought to a large mansion in the center of the old town, in which armchairs had been set out for the noble guests,” she recalled. “With amazement we observed as a group of elderly gentlemen unwrapped mysterious parcels out of which emerged flutes, rababs, tambourines, even dervish caps and gowns. . . . For the first time in twenty-nine years the men began to perform the mystical dance together . . . at once they found their way back to the old rhythm of the ‘heavenly dance.’” While officially cast as performers, the dervishes performing the whirling dance in Konya are now popularly understood to be spiritual practitioners attuned to the resonance of the sama, though in the more formal and elegantly choreographed version developed by the Mevlevis during the Ottoman period.

  When I visited Konya for the memorial sama ceremony in December 2010, this public rehabilitation was well under way, helped by the election of Prime Minister Erdogan, whose electoral base was centered in the politically conservative Konya region, known as the “Quran Belt” of Turkey. Mistakenly turning down a wrong hallway in the vast saucer-shaped venue where the ceremonies took place, I was startled to be confronted by a security detail with oversize automatic weapons. As the prime minister addressed the thousands gathered for the event, I could make out the words “Rumi” and “Turkey” repeated in close juxtaposition. Rumors circulated that the Iranian president would be attending, too, though he did not finally appear. (Rumi had figured in Iranian-Turkish political relations decades earlier when Ayatollah Khomeini, exiled to Bursa, in Turkey, before becoming supreme leader of Iran, reportedly wished to make a pilgrimage to Rumi’s tomb but was prevented for refusing to remove his clerical garb.)

  Such geopolitical relevance for a distant poet of love might appear improbable. Rumi had warned endlessly about the danger of engaging with politics and position:

  Animals grow fat from eating grass,

  People from power and fame

  Yet the momentum of his words and poetry has proved as self-propelling—if as unlikely—as the success of his whirling dance and Mevlevi Order, and his double legacy as earnest saint and world-class poet has proved potent. Thousands of elegant couplets by other poets, from a rich moment in Persian poetry—like strings of pearls, as one of their own critics described them—have faded, too. Yet by accident and devoted design, Rumi’s lines are reproduced daily both in the original and in modern translations. (I’ve added to the dense stream with daily tweets of my collaborative translations of lines of his poems.)

  The threads connecting us back to his original poetry are at least as fragile as those tying us to him as a spiritual figure, and were just as susceptible to snapping. Rumi’s voice first registered in the West, faintly, only in the eighteenth century, when a young Austrian ambassador in Istanbul, Jacques de Wallenbourg, translated the Masnavi into French. More enduring were forty-four ghazals translated into German by Friedrich Rückert around 1820. One critic spryly characterized a translation of Rückert’s: “This poem smells of roses.” Hegel admired the verses for the pantheistic philosophy he believed he detected. Schubert and Strauss set a few to music as lieder. The classic English “orientalist” scholar R. A. Nicholson produced a grand and enduring translation of the six volumes of the Masnavi, which began appearing in print in 1925. His students at Cambridge University reported that he would weep during his Masnavi lectures. Nicholson’s office was decorated in the oriental style, and he would toil over his lifework while draped in long Sufi robes, with a tall, round Mevlevi hat set atop his head.

  Rumi’s words have found receptivity in the “ear of the heart”—as he put it—through translations in dozens of languages, though not uniformly. His poems have been most popular on the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent since the early fourteenth century and in Afghanistan, where recitation is probably closest in pronunciation to Rumi’s own speech, as Afghani Persian has barely changed since medieval times. While Rumi is currently popular in Israel, his poems are less so in Arabic countries, as they are associated with Persian and Iran. Equally ironically, when the Rumi scholar Foruzanfar was studying as a young man in Mashad, in eastern Iran, he had difficulty finding texts of Rumi, as this “Sunni poet” was considered superfluous reading for the many Shia seminary students.

  Something of the American heartbeat has always quickened to Rumi, beginning with the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who retranslated lines from the German of Rückert:

  Of Paradise am I the Peacock,

  Who has escaped from his nest.

  A decisive event in raising awareness of Rumi even more in the United States occurred in the mid-1970s, when Robert Bly handed a copy of the scholarly translations of A. J. Arberry to the poet Coleman Barks, saying, “These poems need to be released from their cages.” The ensuing flutter of renditions in a free-verse American idiom has been vivifying, and often when someone says that they love Rumi they mean Barks’s versions. Barks took some heat for not knowing Persian—he works with a native speaker or from literal English academic versions. Yet Rumi has ever been a permissive muse. While less a publishing phenomenon than Barks, the German poet Hans Meinke, who died in 1974, wrote over a hundred odes in Rumi’s name, channeling his spirit, as Rumi had Shams’s:

  O Rumi, since I became you,

  The turmoil stopped . . .

  O Rumi, since I became you,

  North has become south and south has become north.

  I suppose that my frustrated wish to speak with Sebastian at the conclusion of my journey had arisen from a need to talk with him once again of his notion of Rumi’s “secret,” which helped guide me on my way and fortuitously turned out to be as significant to the mystic poet as to his readers and listeners. I’d come to agree with Sebastian that mystery was an essential ingredient in Rumi’s enduring power. Rumi spoke of serr often and in many contexts. This veil of secrecy was a virtue and an artistic style in the broader culture of the time. It was the atmosphere Sufi mystics and Persian poets breathed, as—a favorite metaphor of Rumi for lovers—fish swam obliviously in the ocean. Rumi, though, created an unmistakably personal version that resonates in our time beyond the others.

  The greatest and most guarded secret in Rumi’s life concerned the nature of his fiery and transformative friendship with Shams of Tabriz, “the sunshine of the heart.” Some have explained the torrent of passionate love poems that ensued when Shams disappeared from Rumi’s life as fitting into a tradition of devotion of disciple for sheikh. Yet Rumi and Shams—as well as other witnesses—emphasized the complexity of their relationship, its failure to conform to such a neat teacher-student model. While no evidence exists of an erotic component, Rumi chose to speak of their spiritual love in the mode of Persian romantic love poetry, and from weaving the two came his evanescent message. Most ironic in his current appeal in our age of telling-all and exhibitionism is Rumi’s conviction—especially in the Masnavi—that even the name of his beloved Shams must be steadily disguised.

  His poetry, too, operated from an aesthetic of secrets. Rumi spoke in code. Shams was the light of the sun, but so was God, and in speaking of the beloved he was also speaking of the unspeakable, or approaching the unspeakable, as the essence of God is love. His stress on the pain of separation applied to both human and divine as well. All Persian love poetry was built from a reservoir of stock
images: the young wine-bearer with black eyelashes; the nightingale in the rose garden; cypresses and narcissi, stars and moons. Yet in writing around and toward God, Rumi was writing, too, in the tradition of mystical poetry, including Sufis of the East, but also St. John of the Cross or John Donne of the West. Rumi would have agreed with Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” He used Shams as his takhallos but also Silence, or Khamush. The most successful poems for Rumi were failures. Nearing God, they collapsed into silence:

  Explanations make many things clear

  But love is only clear in silence

  The most practical of secrets for Rumi concerned his faith. Rumi was born into a religious Muslim family and followed the proscribed rules of daily prayer and fasting throughout his entire life. Yet equally devout Muslim Sufis, such as his beloved Hallaj, had been executed in centuries past, and discretion and speaking in allusive poetry became more than just a stylistic preference among them. At least once, legal charges were pressed against Rumi for his use of music and dance in religious practice, as they had been against Shams for wine drinking. In the Masnavi, Rumi grew bolder in making claims for a “religion of love” that went beyond all organized faiths. As Jawid Mojadeddi, who is currently embarked on retranslating into English the entire Masnavi, said to me, “Rumi resonates today because people are thinking post-religion. He came to see mysticism as the divine origin of every religion.” Rumi said as much, subtly, in verse:

  When you discover the source of sunlight . . .