“Last year in a red cloak . . . this year in blue”
ONE day Rumi, in an energetic state, was walking down a street in the goldsmiths’ quarter within the commercial market district of Konya. When he happened to pass by the familiar, small shop of Salah, the sound of the steady hammering of the goldsmith struck his ear in a musical way. He responded to the percussive rhythms and, according to the story told by Sepahsalar, began to whirl spontaneously in the street: “When Salahoddin saw his sama and his movement to the rhythm of his beat, he did not stop his hammering, not caring about the damage to the gold. After a while Salahoddin stepped out of his shop to converse quietly with Mowlana.” As Sepahsalar recounted their portentous reunion: “Salahoddin polished his inner mirror by speaking with Mowlana.”
The two had known each other for twenty years, most memorably during the early days when Rumi and Shams first met and Salah opened his home to the two men, giving them a safe haven, while many of Rumi’s family and school, outside those walls, were growing irate and agitated. For his trust and sharing in a special time kept secret from most others, Rumi cherished Salah. On the afternoon he began whirling in front of his shop, he and Salah shared a magical moment of recognition rekindling the memory of Rumi’s first glimpse of Shams outside the inn at least six years earlier. Following this encounter, Salah became the second of the three beloveds central in Rumi’s life.
Salah was also a living link to Rumi’s original tutor, Borhan, and so to the spiritual legacy of the lost world of Khorasan and Rumi’s father. Both Salah and Rumi had been helped by Borhan, who recognized promise in Salah because of his close following of Borhan’s austere regimen in fasting and meditation. Salah’s daughter Fateme recalled an occasion in their home when Borhan pointed out the different temperaments of Rumi and her father. If the traditional teacher of the time passed on his very style and behavior to his students, Borhan spoke of splitting that legacy: “I passed on my eloquent speech to Jalaloddin, since he already had abundant spiritual power. I bestowed my beautiful spiritual state on Salahoddin, as he has no capacity for any form of eloquence.” No trait of Salah’s was more commented upon than his inarticulate manner of public speaking.
Rumi was a member of the Persian cultural elite, by dint of not only his family but especially his immersion in the rarefied university atmospheres of Baghdad, Damascus, and Aleppo. Salah, if he read at all, had never even attended a maktab, the elementary school emphasizing reading, writing, and Quranic recitation so important in Rumi’s life as a boy in Central Asia. Salah’s Persian and Arabic were broken. When he had returned to the fishing village of Kamele, following Borhan’s departure for Kayseri, Salah fit easily into the simple rustic life of his father, Faridun, and mother, Latife. He married and had several children of his own. Returning to Konya, according to Aflaki, he and Rumi then followed the separate paths laid out by Borhan: “As Mowlana was engaged in the study of the religious sciences, disputation, teaching and giving sermons, Salahoddin was striving in his goldsmith shop to earn a living while gaining power in his spiritual state.”
Closer in age to Shams than Rumi, Salah cut a fabulist figure of a wizened mystic in his shop. He was especially given to seeing colored lights and visions from a world made visible only with the inner eye, perhaps enhanced by the extremes of his fasting. “I see so many wondrous lights,” he told Rumi. At other times, he would say, “I have seen an ocean of white light,” or “I see an ocean of dark blue light,” or “I see a green light and I see a yellow light. I see a smoke-colored light and behold, the ocean of black light has become agitated with waves.” When Sultan Valad asked his father if their renewed companionship was based on these hallucinatory visions, Rumi replied, “No, rather I love him because of his character and our special affinity.” In most of the poems that he began writing evoking Salah, Rumi stressed his otherworldly demeanor and his faraway gaze:
That lion-hunting deer, clearly from his eyes,
Roams another desert, beyond heaven and earth
Rumi was not shy about casting Salah as a substitute for Shams. The logic of the medieval Sufi notions of love and sainthood led to his understanding that the love in human hearts was universal and, therefore, similar. The life of the spirit required two hearts beating as one to work its alchemy. Rumi wrote transparently of his substitution of Salah for Shams, following their afternoon of dance and conversation outside his shop:
Last year in a red cloak, he rose, like the moon,
Only to return this year, in blue
The Turk you saw last year in Turkestan
Returned this year as an Arab
The same beloved, but in different clothes
He changed his clothes, and then he reappeared
The wine is the same, but in a different glass.
Signifying the growing claim of Salah on his heart, Rumi began dropping his name into poems. He introduced him tentatively at first in lines referring to a “goldsmith,” or a “crucible,” much as he first camouflaged Shams’s name in the Arabic word for “sun.” He finally mentioned Salah directly in a poem that still carried the name of Shams as its takhallos, soon enough advancing to advertising his name as a new takhallos in many of the over seventy love poems inspired by him over the next decade:
The grace of Salahoddin shone in the midst of my heart
He is the candle at the heart of the world
I am nothing but the basin where his wax drips
Some of these poems came to express an intimacy and beauty equal with those to Shams:
At the end of time, no one will help you
Only Salahoddin, only Salahoddin,
If you’ve learned the secret of his secret
Don’t breathe a word. Let no one know.
A lover’s chest is a fresh, flowing stream
Souls float on its waters, like sticks and straw
When you see his face, don’t breathe a word
Breathing will only fog the mirror.
A sun rises from within the lover’s heart
Filling the entire world with light.
Because these were quite different men, if Salah replaced Shams as Rumi’s spiritual axis, then the resultant poems to Salah registered a change of mood from the Shams years. Gone was the fiery sun, threatening to singe or burn if too closely approached. Salah was a mirror in which Rumi saw a reflection of his own face, or a candle softly lighting a room, a deer, a gold mine, a lily, or a rose. The tenor of these poems was tender and warm. Salah was not Rumi’s intellectual equal, and did not provide him with sharp challenges and debates, yet neither did he lay traps of disturbance, constantly raising the punishing, if salutary, threat of separation. In his simplicity, his ability to mirror rather than enflame, Salah had a soothing effect, allowing Rumi to regain some semblance of balance and sanguinity. Aflaki writes of them engaging lightly in “eshq-bazi,” a sort of “amorous playfulness.”
Compared with Shams, a respectful formality also persisted between them. Everything was not always eshq-bazi. Rumi later shared a memory of Salah with students, making a point about etiquette while revealing their almost comic propriety:
It happened to me that once in the bathhouse, I was acting with excessive politeness toward Sheikh Salahoddin, and he was being excessively polite toward me. As I complained of his politeness, the thought occurred to me that I was overdoing my own humility and that it would be better to reveal my humble nature gradually. First you rub someone’s hands and then his feet until little by little he becomes so accustomed to it that he no longer notices. You should not make him feel awkward, but rather match courtesy with courtesy. Whether showing friendship, or anger, you need to proceed by gradual steps.
Unlike Rumi and Shams, the pair never vanished for long periods into a timeless cocoon. Rumi was often in seclusion, but usually in solitary prayer and reverie. From the time of Shams’s final disappearance, he kept about him a nimbus of distinct separateness, a mysterious otherness, and a touching aloneness, which was never completely dispelled.
The shock for Konya and the Madrase Khodavandgar in this newfound focus on Salah was Rumi’s decision to raise the humble goldsmith to the exalted rank of his successor. Sultan Valad labeled him the nayeb, or deputy and successor of Rumi—in the law schools of the time, a precise rank and position. As professors would hold more than one academic position—Rumi held four different posts when Shams appeared on the scene—their nayeb would teach some of their classes, and deliver sermons in their stead, for a small fee, paid from the professor’s salary, with the promise of future promotion to a full position. Salah did begin such preaching, as Aflaki reports that Rumi had given up delivering sermons ever again, except for one final occasion, when Salah coaxed him to elaborate on his own instruction. This appointment of a nearly illiterate local merchant to a position intended for the nuanced articulation of refined theological points was a forced variation on the usual expectations, if not an outright mockery of the entire system.
Rumi’s bonding with Salah was a response to his need for a kindred soul. As Sultan Valad recalled him saying, echoing his own ghazal: “He said, ‘That Shamsoddin I was talking about has returned again! Why am I sleeping? He just changed his clothes and returned.’” But he was also being artful and strategic. Rumi no longer wanted to be in a position of daily authority. He preferred to be left alone. Salah was the figure he put in place as a buffer between him and his ever-needy group of students. As Sultan Valad recorded the blunt—even harsh—words of his father, passing on his official leadership role: “Dedicate yourselves to Salahoddin. I am not in the mood for being a sheikh, for no bird can match flight with my wings. I am happy with myself. I need no one. Having others around me, like flies, bothers me. From now on just follow Salahoddin—seek him with all your heart and your soul, and like him, walk along the straight and narrow path.”
Either intentionally or by chance, by appointing Salah, Rumi was beginning to tamper with the fundamental nature of the former madrase, and to attract a new and potentially much larger and inclusive group of followers. Salah was able to appeal directly to the local working-class Greeks and Turks, rather than only to the more select religious class of Persian and Arabic émigrés. His mispronunciation of words, which so horrified many of the educated class, would have been reassuringly familiar to his fellow laborers. Salah even had trouble with the word “al-hamd,” or “praise,” in the “al-Fatiha,” the opening sura of the Quran recited at the beginning of all five daily prayers, as well as a number of other Arabic and Persian words. To cover for him, as well as make a point, Rumi began mispronouncing these words in the same manner as Salah. “Words have been changed by people in every age since the beginning of creation,” he argued. His raising up of Salah solidified his reputation as a lover of all people, opening spirituality to everyone, not only to those who had special religious training and education.
If Salah was Shams reborn for Rumi, he reinvigorated some of the old conflicts around Shams for those traditional members of the madrase, especially the remnant of the disciples of Rumi’s father. They began their lamenting again, even wishing for the return of Shams as the lesser of two evils, the devil they knew: “Again envy spread among the distrustful. Again, the hypocrites gathered together. Again, jealousy was boiling up, because they were drowning in their delusions. They said to each other, ‘We were freed of the other one, but now we fear that we are entrapped again. This one is worse than the first one. . . . At least he was articulate in his speech, and well-spoken, with knowledge, intellect, language and writing. . . . This one does not know writing, or science, or rhetoric. He does not have any worth or value for us. He is an ordinary person, and foolish. He does not know good from evil. He was constantly day and night in his shop hammering, so much so the neighbors closed their doors and windows from the noise.” Much of their resistance was based on issues of class. Salah had actually received deep spiritual training from Borhan and was perceived by Rumi as a true successor to Shams, yet they were blinded to these virtues because he was less articulate and had not read widely.
Rumi had no patience with criticism of Salah, especially given the history of complaints against Shams. He had learned a lesson in conviction and was now indifferent to pressure from others, whether princes or students, family or strangers. For all his starry distractedness, he had an inner rudder by which he was now navigating, its course known to him alone. Ebn Chavosh, a friend of the goldsmith, went behind his back to inform Rumi of grumblings around town claiming Salah amounted to “nothing,” and that his counsel was corrupted by mixed motives. Rumi was swift in his dismissal of both messenger and message, in a disquisition on the wise compassion of Salah, delivered mostly in Arabic:
As a matter of principle Ebn Chavosh should guard against backbiting with regard to Sheikh Salahoddin—both for his own good and so that this dark covering might be lifted from him. Why does Ebn Chavosh think that so many people have abandoned their homes, fathers and mothers, families, relatives, and tribes, and worn out the iron in their boots traveling from “India to the River Sind” in hopes of meeting a man who has the aroma of the other world? How many people have died from regret because they were unsuccessful in meeting his equal? In your own house you have encountered such a man in the flesh and yet you turned your back on him. This is both unfortunate and unwise.
Rumi trusted his heartfelt instincts. He also understood himself to be living in a spiritual world of mirrors, as much Sufi thought conceived of the sort of affinity he was experiencing with Salah through the imagery of light and reflection, candles and mirrors. The heart of the beloved was a mirror in which the lover saw himself, and saw his reflection dignified by a shared light. True enlightenment only took place in a relationship:
Without a mirror, you can’t see your face
Look at your beloved. He is your mirror.
This bouncing light created “flashes” (as Ahmad al-Ghazali described) of divinity in humans, in a physics of love, and in the natural world, mirroring divinity, when properly seen. Engaged in this optics rather than logic, the saint merely reflected. As Rumi wrote:
I’m a mirror, I’m a mirror, I’m not a debater—
You only see me if you turn your ears into eyes.
The ultimate beloved reflected in this purified heart was understood to be God: “Take a polished heart to God so that He may see Himself.” For Rumi, he and Salah were two such mirrors, gazing into each other, their affinity inexplicable in words or thought. The polishing took place together and involved maturing through union and separation. Rumi’s passion around Salah was driven in part by his embrace of these concepts, and this vision of a world of ricocheting light and love compelled him for the rest of his life.
Rumi’s deputizing of Salah not only reverberated in his community but also in his family. The decision had the greatest impact on Sultan Valad, especially in the absence of Alaoddin. Sultan Valad wrote in detail of this phase of his father’s life, the memories vivid because he was by then a grown man in his midtwenties and a close observer of the dynamics described—rather than the teenager who tried to make sense of the disruptions caused by the even more inexplicable Shams of Tabriz. He was also alertly engaged, since he had been viewed universally as the inevitable successor to Rumi.
One day Rumi summoned his son and said, “Look at the face of Salahoddin. That king of truth carries such insight!” Sultan Valad agreed, though a bit unenthusiastically, pointing out to his father, “Yes, but only in your eyes. Not in the eyes of ordinary people.” Rumi pushed his argument that Salah was the embodiment of Shams, insofar as he carried for him the essence of love: “This is Shamsoddin the King, just without a horse and saddle.” While Sultan Valad hinted delicately at his disappointment, his entire life had been predicated on obeying and pleasing his father, and so he capitulated to his wishes. “I see him the way you do,” he reassured Rumi. And his father gave his clear command, “From now on follow Salahoddin. Follow that true kin.” “Whatever he commands me, I will do,” Sultan Valad vowed. “I am at his service with all my soul.”
Salah felt the need to assert his position more strongly with Sultan Valad. Either coached by Rumi, or on his own volition, he pressed for an oath of loyalty, saying to Rumi’s son, “If you become my disciple, commit to me with all your heart and soul.” Sultan Valad responded, hedging slightly to allow a higher status to the previous favorite, Shams: “Oh king, no one can match you in this age.” Another sign of loyalty Salah shrewdly demanded was that Sultan Valad stop delivering sermons, which reminded Rumi’s followers of his articulateness and fueled resentments: “My friend, stop preaching. From now on, only speak of my goodness. . . . I want to be sure that you are all mine.” Sultan Valad swore, in the highly florid medieval Persian manner: “Day and night, I will turn my face towards you. You are the king and I am the servant. Whatever you want me to say, I will say. Wherever you wish to send me, I will follow your orders.”
Salah spoke with Sultan Valad about the agitation he knew was growing in the community, familiar to them from the time of Shams. He explained his promotion in rank using the metaphor of the mirror, which dominated Rumi’s understanding of their relationship: “They are upset because Mowlana made me special, above everyone else. But they know not that I am but a mirror. The mirror does not reflect itself. In me, he sees his own face. So how could he do otherwise but choose me?” Salah was more adept than Shams at dealing with the rough-and-tumble of violent threats. Sultan Valad never wrote of any murder plots against Shams, but he did discuss a conspiracy directed at Salah, who was brusque in his response: “When this news reached the king Salahoddin . . . he laughed loudly, and said, ‘Those blind men, they are lost unbelievers. They are not aware of the power of the truth that nothing moves without God’s command, not even a straw.’”
Rumi not only commanded his son to submit to Salah, but he also soon arranged for him to marry Fateme, Salah’s eldest daughter. In his time living at the home of Salah with Shams, during their first intense seclusion of three months, Rumi had grown close with Salah’s family, including his wife, Latife; his mother, also named Latife, who lived in the house after her husband’s death; Fateme, about ten years old at the time; and her younger sister, Hediye. Latife and her daughters were allowed before Rumi “with their faces fully unveiled,” as he was considered mahram, or part of the family. He once exclaimed, of his bonds with them, “Fateme is my right eye, and her sister Hediye is my left eye.”
Of all the women in the family, Fateme was definitely Rumi’s favorite. When she was still a little girl “because of the extreme affection he felt for her,” he began teaching her writing and reading the Quran—quite unusual for a girl of the period. So the choice of Fateme as a bride for Sultan Valad, now that she had come of age, was natural for Rumi. He was also accomplishing a spiritual version of a state wedding, merging their two families, with great hopes for a resulting baby, combining the strains of Rumi and Salahoddin. For Sultan Valad, the marriage was less ideal, and some hard days would lie ahead for the newlyweds because of his attitude. Never as visionary as his father, a marriage to the daughter of a goldsmith remained a social demotion for Sultan Valad.
Balancing any misgivings of his son, Rumi expressed nothing but ecstatic joy and happiness. He wrote at least two poems, either on the occasion of the wedding contract or the wedding celebration, or both, replete with mentions of “the Sheikh,” the father of the bride, and raining down upon them blessings from all the religious holidays at one time:
May the blessings that flow in all weddings
Increase with even more blessings, for this wedding,
The blessings of the Night of Power, and fasting, and the feast
The blessings of the meeting of Adam and Eve
The blessings of the meeting of Joseph and Jacob
The blessings of the vision of the heavens above
The blessings that cannot be put into words
For the daughter of the Sheikh and my eldest son.
In another of these nuptial poems, Rumi gives a glimpse of the celebrating that took place, full of the percussive drumming now central to daily life in his community:
Dance you saints! Whirl you righteous ones!
In the kingdom of the king of the world, lift our spirits!
With drums hanging from your necks, in the rosy nuptial bower
Tonight, full of tambourines and drums, the best of the best . . .
At this moment Sufis are gathering together out of joy
Glimpsing an invisible world, through my shouts of praise
A throng of clapping guests, clapping like the waves of the sea,
A throng of upright guests, like sharp arrows, bundled in a quiver.
By the time of the wedding of Fateme and Sultan Valad, Rumi was adrift in a continuous outpouring of music and poetry. He performed the five daily prayers, as no one was more assiduous at adhering to the religious regimen than his self-designated Sheikh Salahoddin. (Once when he left his robe outdoors in winter, Salah was said to have put on the frozen garment and rushed to morning prayers rather than risk any infringement of the letter of the religious law.) Yet Rumi was mostly living in an atmosphere of musical instruments and altered states brought on by whirling, fasting, and meditation, while sleeping only a few hours a night. The result was the accumulating creation of the rest of his nearly 3,500 lyric ghazals, written in fifty-five different meters, including obsolete classical meters. The creativity that had begun under the dramatic influence of Shams continued apace and expanded in its breadth throughout the 1250s.
An apparent source of this virtuosity was Rumi’s natural talent and knack for music. His favorite instrument to play was the rabab, which he customized for his purposes with a hexagonal box rather than the traditional square shape. His favorite musician, Abu Bakr Rababi, named for his mastery of the rabab, was remembered clearly enough to make his way into the histories. “His knowledge of music, which, in reality is the source of rhythm, provided Rumi with the necessary wherewithal and artistic skill to write poetry that has greater metrical variety than any other Persian poet,” concluded the Iranian scholar Badi al-Zaman Foruzanfar of Rumi’s technical skill, “and that is why a number of meters can be found in Rumi’s lyrics which are absent in the poetry of other Persian poets.”
His method of composition was often collaborative. Not only Rumi’s expertise explained his experimenting in different meters, but also the knowledge of the musicians around him, trying out different musical modes as Rumi took up the challenge to fit his words and messages to their rhythms and beats. If Shams had been the designated representative of sama and its evils during their time together, Rumi was left standing alone as its defender. “One day they asked my father, ‘Why is the sound of the rabab so strange?’” recalled Sultan Valad. “He replied, ‘It’s the creaking sound of the door of paradise that we hear.’” When a local religious eminence heard the remark, he quipped, “But we also hear the same sound. How is it that we don’t become as passionate as Mowlana does?” Rumi wittily responded, “God forbid! In no way! What we hear is the sound of the door opening, while what he hears is the sound of that same door closing.”
Amid all this provoked and controlled ecstasy—in a society where personal gravitas was expected—while cultivating the delicate cult of friendship between men of God, Rumi still managed to be alert to the competing practical needs of his circle, especially his family. His most pressing concern, following the wedding of Sultan Valad and Fateme, was their married life together, which turned difficult quickly and continued to present challenges when Fateme did not bear her husband any children during their first few years. Quite possibly the aggressive behavior that Rumi’s wife reported witnessing from Sultan Valad toward family members in the harem was toward his wife, as Rumi was moved to write a supportive letter to Fateme, promising his advocacy:
If my dear son Bahaoddin is being mean to you, truly and with all my heart, I will withdraw my affections from him, and I won’t respond to his greetings, and he won’t be allowed to come to my funeral. Don’t be sorrowful, and don’t be unhappy, because God is by your side and He will help you. Whoever brings harm to you, if they swear a hundred thousand oaths that they are innocent, I will still find them guilty, because they are not kind to you and don’t appreciate you. . . . Do not hide anything from this father, but tell me in detail about whatever happens to you so that with God’s help I will be able to provide you the utmost possible assistance.
He likewise wrote a letter to his son, with whom he was more politic, almost gingerly in his approach, revealing his expertise at persuasion and tact. He made a case for his son to modify his behavior around his wife, while presenting an astute argument for respect toward women, an approach not always required of husbands at the time:
Because of the white hair of her father, and because of our family, I want you to treat her dearly, and every day and every night, treat her as if it were the first day, and every night as if it were the night of the bridal chamber. Don’t think that you have caught her and you don’t need to pursue her anymore, because that is the manner of superficial people. She is not the sort of woman who will ever lose her freshness. I swear to God that she has not complained, and is not sending any messages to me, either by hinting or by gesture. . . . I’m not going to tell anyone of this advice. This letter is a matter between us.
Rumi was similarly engaged in bringing about the marriage of the second daughter of Salah, Hediye, to the young calligrapher Nezamoddin, a scribe of the sultan and teacher of the young princes. The obstacle was the poverty of Salah, who had given up his livelihood as an artisan to take over full-time as the spiritual leader of Rumi’s community, as well as being his closest companion and deflecting as much business and workaday concern from him as possible. Yet the father of a bride was responsible for providing a dowry, an expense out of reach for Salah. Though living within the tight constraints of poverty, which sometimes weighed on his own wife and family, Rumi expended much energy in letter writing to procure jobs and loans for his dependents. And so he approached a female tutor of the royal princesses, and a “child” of Rumi’s, to take a request to the powerful and wealthy queen mother, Gorji Khatun.
The request met with a charmed response, as was often the case when the women followers of Rumi were involved. Gorji Khatun ordered her treasurer to conjure two or three clothespresses and prepare five outfits, as well as veils, hats, and jewels as accessories. According to Aflaki, “They collected rugs and curtains and delightful carpets from Georgia, Shiraz and Aksaray, as well as a tray, a pan, a cauldron, copper and porcelain bowls, a mortar, candlesticks and a complete set of kitchen utensils.” The value of the goods, transported to Rumi’s school on mules, was high, and he divided the value of the trousseau between the two sisters to prevent any hurt feelings. Rumi next began writing helpful letters on behalf of Nezam, whom he praised as “my dear child and an accomplished artist,” as well as “my eloquent, literary, competent, and honest son.”
As expected, Rumi created a nuptial poem for the wedding of Hediye and Nezam. These occasional poems are not among his most inventive. They are formulaic and—even if Rumi was not a patronized courtly poet—tailored to the expectations of his audience and their degrees of understanding. But these standard poems stood in clear contrast to the tortured odes that had poured out of him publicly and privately over so many years not even a decade earlier. Rumi truly did seem to have found some balance of mystic solitariness with the patriarchal pleasures of seeing his family grow and flourish into the next generation. The palm dates, cups of red wine, and streams of milk and honey in these happy matrimonial poems of the 1250s exude felt life. As Rumi sang that day:
May this wedding still be smiling like the angels
Today, tomorrow, and for all eternity . . .
May this wedding be fortuitous, beautiful, and acclaimed
Like the moon, and like the blue wheel of the sky.
I grow silent, unable to find the words to say
How radiantly my soul glows on this wedding day.