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.
Knowing that he was drawing closer to the finale of the poem, Rumi’s thoughts turned more often to its secret muse, Shams of Tabriz, the human sun now visible only in shadows cast on a wall. In death, Shams had merged with eternity, which was the presence of God’s love expressed in this world and in the world beyond death. Rumi took on this paradoxical mystery—of the sun and the Sun—in the tale of “The Poor Dervish and the Police Inspector of Tabriz”—its setting a clue. Spread over five hundred lines, the story concerned a Sufi dervish whose debts had always been paid by a kindly police chief in Tabriz, until the policeman died, leaving his treasure hidden. The dervish travels to “glorious” Tabriz only to discover that his true benefactor was God, the treasure, divine:
He gave me a cap, but You the head filled with intelligence
He gave me a coat, but You the tall figure to clothe
He gave me gold, but You the hand for counting
He gave me a horse, but You the mind for riding
He gave me a candle, but You the eyes for seeing . . .
He gave me a house, but You the sky and the earth.
The limits the debtor discovered in the police inspector of Tabriz were those Rumi had come to find were the human limits of Shams of Tabriz—he lit the candle of love for him, yet God imbued Rumi with the mirror reflecting the flame from Shams and other lights.
Within a few hundred lines of the completion of the Masnavi, and immediately preceding its ultimate “Story of the Three Princes,” Rumi breaks into a moving litany, a catalog poem of all of lovesick Zolaykha’s coded language, disguising her feelings for Joseph, the paragon of beauty in Rumi’s poetry—the story of the Egyptian lady’s love for the Hebrew slave is described in the Quran itself as “the fairest of stories.” Zolaykha’s dexterous ploy happened to match Rumi’s in expressing his feelings for Shams of Tabriz—often compared by him to handsome Joseph—and was a parable for his poetic task of coming closer to the truth by going in circles. In talking about such ineffable love, Rumi believed, the longer the detour the more sure the arrival:
And when she said, “The wax is melting softly!”
That was to say, “My friend was kind to me.”
And when she said, “Look, the moon is rising”
And when she said, “The willow is now green!”
And when she said, “The leaves are trembling”
And when she said, “How nicely burns the rue!”
And when she said, “The nightingale sang for the roses” . . .
And when she said, “Beat firmly all the rugs!” . . .
And when she said, “The bread is all unsalted!”
And when she said, “The spheres are turning backwards” . . .
When she praised something—that meant “His sweet embrace.”
When she blamed something—that meant “He’s far away!”
And when she piled up a hundred thousand names
Her desire and intention was always Joseph’s name.
Rumi had circled back to his dialogue with Hosam in Book I. He was confessing that all the while he was writing the Masnavi he had never stopped thinking of Shams. Just as Zolaykha meant Joseph with every word of hers, so Rumi meant Shams with every word, verse, and tale of the Masnavi. Since Shams had first awakened his heart to the transformative fire of love, the name of that sun also evoked the hidden name of God.
The Masnavi ends on an inconclusive note, almost midstory. Its final tale is fitting. The story of the three princes who fall in love with a portrait of a Chinese princess and travel to the royal court of a king in faraway Asia shares elements with the first tale of the Masnavi of the king and the slave girl of Samarkand. The story was yet another told to him—and finished—by Shams. Given their months of seclusion, most if not all the stories in the Masnavi might have originally been just such teaching stories Rumi first heard from Shams and wished to keep alive in his poem. Book VI ends on a quiet parable of a “window between hearts,” without any crescendo, so the epic seems to be a mosaic with a few pieces missing. For a poet with so little interest in titles or frames, dying off into silence was an appropriate enough statement. Some said, though, that Rumi had simply lost interest in dictating, in spite of requests from Hosam and Sultan Valad, as if he had descended or ascended into the distant calm that increasingly possessed him.
In the autumn of 1273 Rumi fell seriously ill. Among the closest of his companions had always been a prominent local physician, well regarded as a commentator on a five-volume Persian encyclopedia of medical knowledge, based mainly on the ancient Greeks Galen and Aristotle. Rumi had satirized Galen and the reliance on medicine in general in Book III of the Masnavi, his skepticism prescient, as this doctor was unable to diagnose the cause of his weakness, other than detecting excess water in his side. Nevertheless he remained next to Rumi to monitor his condition.
The unspecified malaise lingered for weeks and months, as Rumi’s bedside became the center of heightened concern and anxiety for his family, school, and all of Konya. Most frenzied and upset was his wife, Kerra. “You should have a precious life of three hundred years, no four hundred years, to fill the world with higher truth and meaning,” she pleaded with him. “Why, Why?” Rumi answered. “Am I Pharoah? What do I have to do with this world of dust? How can I find rest and peace in this world?” For three full days and nights he asked that no one speak to him, and he did not speak to anyone. When his wife finally came to him, and lowered her head, and asked about his health concerns and his pain, he answered, “I am thinking about my death, which will be occurring soon.” At that remark, she shrieked and was hysterical for several more hours.
During the onset of his illness, Rumi was not entirely bedridden and sometimes walked about the madrase in a frail manner. Unchanging was his certainty that he was going to die, and his preparing those close to him for the eventuality, as well as setting its tenor with good humor if not outright eagerness. When he sighed from pain while hobbling in the courtyard, his favorite cat mewed and howled. “Do you know what this poor cat is saying?” Rumi asked. “It says, ‘During these days you will be setting out towards heaven and returning to your original homeland. Poor me! What am I to do?’” (When this cat died a week after Rumi, his daughter, Maleke, buried it near him.)
Earthquakes were common enough in Anatolia, but during that fall a particularly powerful quake occurred, interpreted by Rumi’s followers as connected to his condition. In a joking way, Rumi agreed, saying the earth was hungering for a juicy morsel and would soon be satisfied by his corpse, yet no harm would come to the town. He informed his friends that most of the prophets and mystics departed from the world in autumn or the dead of winter, “when the earth is like iron.” Weighed down by worry about a lingering debt of fifty dirham, he tried to repay with gold filings. When the creditor forgave his debt, Rumi said, “Thank God I am delivered from this horrible obstacle!”
Soon he was confined to his room, a pan full of water set by his bed for him to dip his feet into and sprinkle his chest and forehead, as he had begun to be racked with intense fevers. Hosam and Sultan Valad were usually nearby. Visions and dreams abounded among those gathered, at least in later retellings of the events of those days by those present. Hosam told of being seated at the top of the bed with Rumi’s head resting on his chest as they saw a handsome young man materialize in front of their eyes. When Hosam asked his name, he identified himself as Azrael, the Angel of Death. “What excellent, perceptive sight to be able to see a face such as that!” Rumi weakly exclaimed.
One by one the notables of the town visited to pay their respects. Leading them was Qonavi, whose earlier haughtiness toward Rumi had long since dissolved and been replaced by an admiring respect. The godson of Ibn Arabi appeared quite disturbed and began to pray for Rumi’s healing: “It is hoped that recovery will take place. Mowlana is the soul of mankind. He deserves a full recovery.” Rumi quickly snapped back, “Let those words be for your sake! When there is no more than a thin shirt between lover and beloved, do you not wish the shirt to be removed so that light may be joined with light?”
On another occasion the Chief Judge Qadi Serajoddin visited Rumi, his judgments in favor Rumi’s sama practice crucial in his having been able to safely complete the Masnavi and teach, dance, and play music for the glory of his religion of love. Hosam was holding a cup filled with a medicinal potion in his hand, in the hopes that Rumi would drink some. Rumi paid no attention at all. “I placed the cup in the Qadi’s hand hoping Mowlana might take it from the hand of so great a person, but he refused,” said Hosam. When the Qadi departed, Qonavi again entered. “He took the cup from my hand and offered it to Mowlana,” recalled Hosam. “After taking a few sips, Mowlana gave it back to him.” A friendship and trust had deepened between them in spite of their philosophical differences, like that between Shams and the cynic Shehab in Damascus.
Hosam was there as always to copy the poems that Rumi kept producing to the end, his lucidity intact except when the fevers became too high. Rumi was well used to reciting poems in extreme states, from ecstasy in the midst of whirling to exhaustion in the middle of the night. His theme on his deathbed was the joy of death, which became the occasion he was addressing, always with the message that love rather than fear was the single choice if you did not wish to lose the only life that mattered. As a patriarch and mystic who achieved some joy and peace he was able to sing convincingly of the happiness and release of death in a set of poems unmatched on the daunting theme:
When you see my coffin being carried out
Don’t think I’m in pain, leaving this world . . .
When you see my corpse, don’t cry
I long for that time, and for that reunion
When they bury me, don’t cry
The grave is but a veil for eternity
When you see the setting, wait for the rising.
Why worry about a sunset, or a fading moon?
You think you are setting but you are rising
When the tomb encloses you, your soul will be released.
He also recited lines that would eventually be used for the inscription on his tomb. Its takhallos, or signature, was Shams of Tabriz, which had been replaced by Hosam, yet such a circling back to his original muse might have been his point. Rumi was increasingly summoning the name and presence of Shams on his deathbed. His happiness and excitement at death were made more real by imagining its resolution as a joyous reunion with Shams, as well as with the light of the sun, and the source of both, God:
Don’t be sad at God’s festival
My chin is shut, within the grave, asleep
While my mouth tastes bittersweet love . . .
I will never rest, until my soul flies
To the towering soul of Shams of Tabriz.
Distraught from watching his father succumb to this illness, and spending sleepless nights nursing him, Sultan Valad also became ill. As Aflaki reported, “Sultan Valad had become extremely weak from limitless service, deep sorrow, and lack of sleep. He was constantly crying, tearing his clothes, and lamenting. And he did not sleep at all.” Rumi said, “Bahaoddin, I am happy. Go, lay your head on your pillow and get some rest.” He then a wrote a poem that fit the moment, this “last ghazal that Mowlana composed,” alluding once again to Shams, the name cloaked inside of his dying poems:
Go. Lay your head on your pillow. Leave me be!
Let me wander in the night, ruined and afflicted.
I am alone in waves of passion, all night until dawn
If you wish, come, have mercy, if you wish, go, be cruel.
The only cure for my pain is dying
So how may I ask him to cure my longing?
Last night I dreamed I saw an old man in the alley of love
He waved to me with his hand, as if to say, “Come to me.”
During Sultan Valad’s absence, Rumi addressed the question of his successor. Fateme continued to press for her husband to take the traditionally inherited position at the head of the family madrase and secure the place for their son, Amir Aref, as a kind of spiritual royal family. Again Rumi decisively deflected the chance to begin a lineage or form a more standard order. Some imams of Konya came to see Rumi and asked, “Who is suitable to succeed Mowlana and who has been chosen?” Rumi named Hosam. The question and answer was repeated three times. On the fourth query, they asked, “What do you have to say to Bahaoddin Valad?” Rumi answered, “Bahaoddin is a champion. He has no need of confirmation from me. He has no need to boast or make claims.” His eldest son accepted this decision as he had before, in silence, without public complaint.
No one left in the room was able to comprehend fully the length and breadth of Rumi’s expansive life. The companions who traveled with his family from distant Khorasan were now mostly buried near Baha Valad in the family plot of the imperial rose garden. None of his children had ever laid eyes on the Oxus River, the great natural divide separating the Balkh region of his birth, nor was it any longer possible for them to visit the capitals of his youth, Samarkand or Bukhara, as they had been destroyed as cultural centers by the Mongols, as had Baghdad. His mother remained buried in Larande, and the grave of his first wife was not included among the rest of the family. Some closest to him had known the remarkable Shams of Tabriz, but only Rumi understood the nature and extent of their months of intimate encounter that transformed him midlife from a respected religious leader into an audacious mystic and visionary poet. These experiences kept him a figure apart even in his approach to death. As everyone around him was grieving and sorrowful, he remained witty and serene.
Rumi took leave of his circle in a coherent manner with targeted words and messages, treating death as a teaching moment. He was especially understanding with Kerra, who would outlive her husband by nineteen years and during those years become a distinctive, eccentric figure in Konya, only leaving the house in the evening to go to the bathhouse, wearing a fur coat from Turkestan in the summer with a silk veil over her head, burning candles during the daylight hours, but much sought after for her reputed psychic powers. “Will there appear anyone like our Khodavandgar?” she asked inconsolably. “If there is, he will also be I,” Rumi answered. And then he added: “I have two attachments in this world, one to you, and the other to my body. When I leave my body, and join the world of Oneness, my attachment to you will continue to exist.”
Rumi consoled his companions with just such a message—the emanation of the manner of spirit he exhibited would be the same as his presence. Such a belief had animated his similar relations with the two successors of Shams, Salah and Hosam, whom he believed emanated and inspired the spirit of love and so were avatars of love: “Don’t be afraid when I depart, and don’t be sad, because the light of Hallaj, one hundred and fifty years after his death, revealed itself to the spirit of Attar and became his spiritual director. Whatever situation you are in, try to stay with me and to remember me so that I can show myself to you. Whatever clothes I may be wearing, I will always be with you.”
He concluded with practical life advice: “I recommend to you fear of God, both silently and publicly, neither eating too much nor speaking too much, avoiding causing any trouble or sin, diligence in fasting, continuous praying, the leaving behind of all passion and lust, patience in the face of injustice from all mankind, renouncing the company of fools and common people, and associating with the virtuous and the noble. Moreover, the best person is the one who benefits other people, and the best speech is brief and gives guidance.” He also taught those gathered a prayer to memorize and recite for the rest of their lives, beginning, “Oh Lord God, I draw breath only for Your sake.”
Hearing the finality in his tone, some of those in the room nevertheless pressed him to rest, take his medicine, and care for his recovery. “My companions pull me in one direction,” Rumi sighed, “while Mowlana Shamsoddin calls to me from the other direction . . . I am obliged to depart.” Closest to his pillow in the final hours was Hosam, his “pearl-shedding sea,” as he had exulted recently in the Masnavi. Turning to Hosam, his last words, in character, faithful yet whimsical, Rumi instructed, “Place me at the top of the sepulchral niche, so I may arise before everyone else.” At sunset on the evening of December 17, 1273, Rumi died in peace, having given repeated instructions that the night be treated as his Wedding Night, a time of joy and happy reunion with the beloved:
The bats of your senses fly into the sunset
While the pearl of your soul rolls towards sunrise
Rumi had planned his own funeral, reviving the basic design of the funeral Salah laid out for himself fifteen years earlier, a boisterous procession worthy of a wedding celebration, with singers, musicians, and dancers, as well as Quran reciters and imams. The burial of Salah had been controversial, a funeral unlike any witnessed in Konya until that time. Its issues had hardly disappeared, especially the shock of mixing joyous music and dance with a traditionally somber religious observance. Soon after Rumi’s death, Hosam was brought before the court of Qadi Serajoddin to once again defend the rabab from being outlawed, the chief justice ruling in its favor, simply in memory of his friend. Yet on the day of the funeral seemingly all Konya crowded to join in the vibrant ceremony expressly designed for them by a man popularly felt to be a holy figure or even a saint.
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.”