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 on
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 worried 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.
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!”