WHILE still a boy no more than six years old, Rumi, around the year 1212, traveled with his family to Samarkand. Located only 150 miles northwest of Vakhsh, in modern-day Uzbekistan, this most fabled capital of Central Asia would have been reached most directly by his father’s caravan crossing the Zarafshan mountain range into a region ruled by the Karakhanids, one of the Turkic dynasties in the region vying for its control. In Rumi’s later poems, such Turk warriors were often romantically frozen in time, nomadic on the steppes, and riding wild horses, as in one of his Ramadan poems:
Inside this month is a hidden moon
Hidden like a Turk inside the tent of fasting
Yet by the time Baha Valad and his family arrived in Samarkand, their new Turk rulers, like many such roving clans, had long ago abandoned their ancient, shamanic practices for more urbane and cosmopolitan lives while adopting, as well, the Sunni Islam of their subjects.
Samarkand was certainly the grandest, busiest, and most eclectic city the boy had yet witnessed, even more so than Balkh because of its crucial location at the crossing of several important trade routes, bringing traders and their curious goods from farther away. Samarkand was also at a poetic crossroads, one of the cities where innovative poems were first composed and sung a couple centuries earlier in the Persian his family spoke, rather than a more ancient, classical form. Samarkand tasted and sounded sweet to the young Rumi, though he would also experience within its walls some of the dark tumult released by the historical forces into which his family was now unwittingly traveling.
The first glimpse of Samarkand for any caravan crossing the Zarafshan River and making its way through surrounding peach orchards and tall cypress trees, irrigated by numerous canals, was the impressive Sharestan, the old district, commanding the highest ground above the city bulwarks—built in clay in pre-Muslim times. Circular in the Persian manner, and protected by a round wall, Sharestan could only be entered through one of the four royal gates: the China Gate to the east, with its many terraced steps, led down to the river. Visible everywhere were lead pipes on stone supports carrying water to most of the homes and the markets. Arcing overhead was the expansive pale blue sky described by one Syrian traveler, with a memory perhaps tinted by nostalgia, as “perpetually clear.”
Rumi’s family likely settled in a more modest but popular neighborhood nestled below the promontory, along the riverbank—flooded sometimes in spring, when mountain snows thawed, just south of the Kish or “Great Gate.” This newer, almost suburban area was protected by its own seven-mile, semicircular wall, which was pierced by eight gates. Here were clustered most of the wood and clay brick houses of an estimated hundred thousand families, so many with gardens that a guard looking down from the fortress of the Citadel might not see any buildings at all, just brick minarets and a forest of trees. Cutting through the district were flagstone streets converging onto the great marketplace Ras al-Taq, in the square that connected the neighborhood to the old city of Sharestan.
Fifty years later Rumi would faintly evoke this largely merchant neighborhood in the opening story of the first book of the Masnavi—the tale of the goldsmith of Samarkand, told not simply as a spiritual parable, but also with a feel for the texture of its setting, the sense of place that comes from being a resident rather than a mere visitor. The story turns on a pretty slave girl adored by a much older king. As she remains so wan and unresponsive to his advances, the king dispatches his trusted physician to diagnose the problem. Cleverly, the royal physician, taking her pulse, asks leading questions until a quickening occurs at the mention of “sweet” Samarkand, and of her own abduction from her beloved there:
Her pulse was beating normally and evenly
Until he asked about Samarkand, sweet as sugar,
Her pulse quickened, her face turned red and white
She had been carried off from a man of Samarkand, a goldsmith.
As the physician uncovered the secret of her illness
The source of all that pain and misery
He asked, “Where is his street, and which way?”
She answered, “By the bridge, at Ghatafar Street.”
Ghatafar quarter, with its small bridge, was located in the market district near Kish Gate, fitting for a goldsmith. And the couplet offers a rarity in Rumi’s verse: an address.
The casting of his main character as an artisan was not apt for just the neighborhood of Ghatafar, but for all Samarkand, where commerce was king. Rumi would later include lots of imagery of bazaars piled high with products, drawn mostly from Konya—he was taken by the bazaar as a symbol of the seductions of material life, sensuous, though finally evanescent. Yet during the time his family visited Samarkand, the immense square of Ras al-Taq, just steps away, offered exposure to shopkeepers and artisans more lavish than anything he might ever again have known.
Throughout the city, but especially near its chief bazaar, two thousand stations were set up for obtaining iced water, kept chilled in tiled fountains, copper cisterns, or clay jugs. In spite of some of the stricter rules of Islam against representation, lifelike statues of animals had once been arranged about the square as a folly, as recorded by one tenth-century geographer: “Astonishing figures are cut out of cypresses of horses, oxen, camels, and wild beasts; they stand opposite the other, as though surveying each other and on the eve of engaging in a struggle or combat.” Still milling in Ras al-Taq in the evenings, by oil lamplight, were storytellers, snake charmers, and backgammon players.
Samarkand products carried mystique. Looms spun red and silver cloth, as well as brocades and raw silk. Coppersmiths hammered gigantic brass pots. Craftsmen fashioned stirrups, harnesses, and goblets. Farmers grew walnuts and hazelnuts. Famous worldwide was Samarkand silk paper, originally a product of China. Handmade from the bark of mulberry trees, the smooth paper—dyed in many colors, using henna, rosewater, or saffron—had a sheen almost tactile in the sheets scattered throughout Rumi’s poems, as he exclaimed: “Spread out the paper and break the pen. The wine-server has arrived!”
Still being sung in Ras al-Taq Square when Rumi was growing up were the odes of Rudaki, lovingly recorded on those sheets of fine Samarkand paper. This tenth-century innovator in “New Persian” poetry, the language and style in which Rumi would write all his works, was born in a small village near Samarkand. Rudaki became one of the first to write poetry in Modern Persian, its alphabet in phonetic Arabic script—very close to contemporary Farsi—rather than ancient Pahlavi Middle Persian ideograms. He had begun by versifying tales from Kalile and Demne and went on to compose in all genres used by Persian poets from then on. Rudaki was said to have invented the robai quatrain form based on a jingle he heard chanted by children as they were rolling walnuts down the streets of Bukhara—the nearby twin city of Samarkand, famous for its library, and twinned by Rumi in his poetry, too:
Sugar comes from Samarkand, but his lips
Found sweetness in Bukhara, so he stayed
Rudaki’s lyrics remained humming in Rumi’s mind throughout his life, like the songs of childhood. Sometimes he borrowed lines directly, taking a half line from Rudaki’s elegy about a friend for his own elegy for the mystic poet Sanai: “The death of a great man is no small matter.” The most famous of Rudaki’s poems was a ballad composed to convince the king to return home to his court in Bukhara after summering in Herat, lured by a wide variety of grapes for fine wine. As the story went, by the last strum of Rudaki’s lyre, the king had already mounted his horse for the return trip. “Now stirs the scent of the Muliyan brook,” Rudaki sang, “the memory of dear friends.” Rumi adapted the line, giving a more romantic and spiritual sense to its longing for home and companions:
Now stirs the scent of garden and gardener
Now stirs the scent of the beloved friend
Not all of Rumi’s memories of Samarkand, though, were filled with melodic odes and lively marketplaces. Soon after his family’s arrival, still around 1212, he had his first brush with a frightening siege, by none other than his father’s nemesis, the Khwarazmshah, who felt ready and powerful enough to annex this most attractive of the capitals of Central Asia. Using as his excuse the supposed mistreatment of his daughter, one of the wives of the Karakhanid ruler, he massed soldiers at the city walls and conducted an aggressive three-day siege. This was Rumi’s earliest recorded memory, and he relived the events years later, in a talk to students, dwelling on the plight of a lady he remembered watching, and interpreting the scene, in retrospect, with more than a boy’s maturity:
We were in Samarkand and Khwarazmshah had surrounded the city, with his soldiers in ranks. In that neighborhood, there was an extremely beautiful lady, without compare in the entire city. I kept hearing her say, “Oh God, how could you let me fall into the hands of tyrants? I know you would never permit such a thing, I trust you.” They looted the city, and were taking everyone captive, including the lady’s maids, but nothing happened to her. Even though she was very beautiful, no one even looked at her. So you should know that whoever trusts in God will be safe from all harm.
The onslaught was relentless enough for Khawarazmshah to emerge as the new ruler of Samarkand and fierce enough for him to live on in Rumi’s poetry for his weaponry and violence: “The word is an arrow, and the tongue the bow of the Khwarazmians.” Any victory for Khwarazmshah marked a setback for Baha Valad. Yet no record exists of the family fleeing Samarkand, or even leaving soon afterward. This change of power at the top was assimilated by a city well used to such shakeups. Life went on, and in some ways the city became even more lustrous, as Khwarazmshah memorialized his victory by building a cathedral mosque and a lofty edifice of a palace.
The impression left by Samarkand in the poetry of Rumi was certainly warm, tender, and nostalgic—a wide-eyed appreciation shared by many other Persian poets:
Join together the fractured bits of your intellect with love
So you may become as sweet as Samarkand and Damascus
He often talked about his entire homeland as “Khwarazm,” which included Samarkand, now subsumed within Khwarazm, and more than once remarked on its beautiful people:
Someone said, “No one falls in love in Khwarazm: there are so many beauties that as soon as you see one and become infatuated, you see another even more beautiful, and forget about the first.” If you don’t dare fall in love with the beauties of Khwarazm, better fall in love with Khwarazm itself, which has many inner beauties.
He associated both the city and his homeland with this inner beauty, outlasting even the striking beauty of the people on its streets, and holding a quality heartfelt and enduring.
By the time of the siege of Samarkand, six-year-old Rumi was old enough to attend one of the maktabs, or elementary schools, attached to the local mosques. While no sure record exists of Rumi enrolled in any of the maktabs of Samarkand, stories of him as a pupil in learned settings come from Sharafoddin Samarqandi, an eminent citizen of the city, as well as a follower of Baha Valad. Sharaf liked to tell of Rumi as a nine-year-old—three years after the siege of Khwarazmshah—asking tricky questions of the local scholars, but being too polite to contradict his elders when they were mistaken. “He went to exaggerated lengths in respecting the religious scholars,” Sharaf reported. Sharaf’s wife was also devoted to Baha Valad, and first taught Rumi a juvenile version of sama—meditating while listening to poetry and music—though he only went as far as “waving his hands about.”
Whether Rumi’s knowledge of maktab schooling came from Samarkand, Balkh, or elsewhere, the experience of this early education was nearly standard throughout Khwarazm, as the curriculum was controlled through the network of mosques. Most subjects were related back to knowledge needed for better reading the Quran. Here Rumi would have learned the technique for properly intoning the holy book and studied the lives of the prophets, and sayings of caliphs, imams, and companions of the Prophet Mohammad. Many proverbs were set to verse for easy memorizing. Yet language, mathematics, and science were taught, as well. As with Quranic proverbs, Arabic lessons were versified into catchy lines matching Arabic terms with Persian definitions, including vocabulary from astronomy or geography. The popularity of such maktab schools helped explain the high literacy rates of the medieval Islamic world, said to have surpassed medieval Europe.
Like love and religion, school, for Rumi, was blurred into the world according to his father. In the Masnavi, Rumi draws a naturalistic scene of a mother and father quarreling over sending their son to school. The mother wants her child to stay home:
That anxious mother complains to her husband,
“My child has grown thin from going to school.”
The disciplinarian father forces him to school, his tough love identified with the intellect:
Stay away from that mother and her worries
A father’s slaps are better than her sweet pastries.
The mother is impulsive, the father, noble reason,
At first, difficult, but finally a hundred times easier.
While still living in the harem with his mother when he began classes, and alert to the world of women—as indicated by his close observation of the plight of their female neighbor during the siege—Rumi aspired mostly to become a man exactly like his father.
Traits of Rumi as a boy in school for the first time among other boys included many of the qualities to be expected, though with some surprises. He was a natural student and focused on his teachers, as might be expected of the son of a serious imam. He was also predictably precocious. The boy whose playmates were convinced he had disappeared to tour other realms with angels stood out in a classroom setting. More surprising was a suggestion from the adult Rumi that he had been a bit of an unwilling student, perhaps even a prankster, and preferred his imaginative realms to the studious.
When he was later teaching his own students, Rumi occasionally summoned his maktab memories for examples of model teachers. Rumi’s father was a disciplinarian and a great believer in strict observance of protocol. Yet Rumi from an early age was drawn to kindness as the most effective teaching tool. Second only to Quranic recitation in elementary school had been handwriting lessons, a subtle skill with Arabic cursive script, and he recalled most fondly one penmanship teacher, clearly gentle in his pedagogy:
At first, when the child shows his handwriting to the teacher, the letters are all slanted and wrong. But the teacher, patiently and skillfully, says to the child, “All the letters are good! You have written them very well. Very good! Very good! You have only written this letter the wrong way. You should write it like this. And also that letter is incorrect. It’s like this.”
Rumi never bragged of any exceptional signs of adolescent intellectual power, yet he did allow himself to etch a portrait of a boy in the third person that might well be understood as a self-portrait, a tactic he coyly used several times in the Masnavi. In a slight detour, while writing a scene set in a school, he meditated on gifted children, arguing the Sunni philosophical position that all minds are created different, against the claim of some philosophers that all minds are created equal and that differences occur later because of education, a sort of nurture over nature argument. Rumi brings to life, as his example, a young prodigy, already wise beyond his years, self-possessed, with a knowing manner:
The opinions of a young boy
Without much experience in life,
May arise from thoughts that an old man,
Full of years, might never comprehend.
Rumi’s vignette has a knowing ring, and the boy he describes is recognizable in the anecdote passed down from Sharaf of the pupil refuting the “cleverly subtle” scholars.
In one of the funniest tales in the Masnavi, a group of boys in a maktab—hardly seeming to be entertaining thoughts beyond their years—plot how to escape the grind of work being assigned by a demanding teacher. One cunning pupil decides to use the power of suggestion to convince the instructor of an illness during the core maktab class of recitation of the verses of the Quran to learn to give each letter and vowel its due:
The cleverest boy in the class made a plan
To tell the teacher, “You look so pale.
I hope you are well, but you’ve lost all color.
I’m wondering if it’s the weather, or fever.”
The teacher began to have his doubts.
Then the clever boy told another, “Do the same.”
After all thirty students express concern, the teacher hurries home and stays abed, shivering. Rumi’s glee in the prank obviously came from siding with the students and made believable an even more direct confession of his younger self resisting classwork:
Your love of mother’s milk didn’t last
Your hatred of going to school didn’t last
The heart of this education, though, for Rumi, both young and old, was the Quran, the sacred text of Islam, recited by the Prophet Mohammad in Mecca and Medina in the seventh century, as holy verses memorized and transcribed in mostly rhymed Arabic prose. The Quran was divided into suras, or chapters, eventually arranged in order from longest to shortest. While Rumi could be comical or even rebellious about maktab lessons, he was never ironic about the Quran. Everything about the temperament and family of this sensitive child primed a mesmerized reader and listener. If his ears burned hearing the tales of jackals or lions in Kalile and Demne, the accounts in the Quran were narrative “husks” that included moral “kernels.” Later in life, he grew even more fascinated by the model of Mohammad, the ordinary merchant chosen as the messenger of the words of God put down in the Quran, whose personal qualities were nearly erased by divine inspiration—“A window through which we see the Creator.”
Over and over, the young Rumi heard the stories of prophets from the Quran that would form the raw material of his prayers, talks, and certainly poetry. Among his favorites were: Abraham, surviving Nimrod’s fiery furnace without being burned; Noah, whose restive son dies in the flood; Joseph, so handsome some Egyptian women slice their hands with their dinner knives while distractedly staring at him; Moses, whose rod turns into a serpent and swallows the magician’s wands; Mary, giving birth beneath a palm tree that showers her with ripe dates; the baby Jesus, gifted with speech in his cradle, and able to give life to clay birds with his breath; David, fashioning armor from iron chain-links; King Solomon, with his magic ring, like Rumi’s father in his dream, understanding the language of birds:
The flames were obedient to Abraham,
The waves bore Noah on their backs,
Iron obeyed David, and melted like wax
While winds were the slaves of Solomon.
Rumi later imagined the Quran as a rich fabric brocade woven on two sides—“Some enjoy the one side, some the other. Both are true.” And he saw these two complementary sides as a woman, both a mother and a wife, supplying different needs:
Her baby’s pleasure comes from her breasts and her milk, that of the husband from enjoying intimacy with her. Some are children on the path and drink milk—these enjoy the external meaning of the Quran—unlike those who have become mature and understand in a different way.
The Masnavi unfolds with long stretches of probing philosophical questions raised by the Quran, in sermonic style, and in parsed couplets. Rumi could be precise and legal in his musings on free will or determinism. But other parts of the poem reveal a more immediate, childlike response to the Quran as a boyhood book of wonder. In one such story of the Blind Man and the Quran, a visiting sheikh is confused by the prominence of the scripture on a shelf in the home of a blind man. At night he hears him reciting verses, and rushes out to catch him in the act, and to demand some explanation:
“Amazing, with your blind eyes
You recite as if you see the lines
You have touched what you are reading
You put your finger on the very word!”
The blind man explains that when he went blind he prayed to be able to read the Quran, as he was not a hafez, who had memorized the entire book. God granted him sight for the sluices of time when he read verses, and then—like magic—his eyes snapped shut again:
“That peerless King restores for me my sight
Like a lantern that brightens the dark night!”
During the decade between 1212 and 1221, most probably in 1216, when Rumi was nine or ten years old, the camel caravan of the family of Baha Valad set out again, this time in the direction of Mecca, the birthplace of the Prophet Mohammad and holy city of Islam, a required pilgrimage destination for every Muslim in reasonable health at least once in a lifetime. Theirs was a journey with no certain plan of return. All the accounts record their point of embarkation from Khorasan as Balkh—likely enough, given the family history. To travel from Samarkand to Balkh, they simply would have needed to double back alongside the Oxus River.
A natural crossing point to the Balkh side of the river was the fortress town of Termez, hometown of Rumi’s tutor Borhan, who had decided to remain there. In his midforties, Borhan was Rumi’s lale, a tutor assigned the special task of looking out for his well-being and spiritual education, and so was a warm and important figure in Rumi’s boyhood, surpassed in influence only by his father. Borhan was later fondly remembered for “always lifting Khodavandgar on his shoulders and carrying him around.” Rumi spoke of this tutor in the same glowing terms as he spoke of his father: “Go! Turn into pure light like Borhan-e Mohaqqeq!” And he remarked on his “ability to argue fine points well from his reading the masters.”
Borhan had become one of an intimate group of acolytes around Baha Valad, devoted to studying mystical practices in a sort of advanced seminar in prayers, visions, and dreams, which was not shared publicly. Of these practices, Borhan was particularly fanatic about fasting as a technique for self-discipline. In imitation of Baha Valad, he kept his own spiritual diary, where he wrote of the benefits of abstinence, so that his body might become “just like a glass through which the light of faith shines.” Rumi quickly absorbed these cues. By age six, he was supposedly able to sustain a fast as long as three or four days. So this sudden, absolute separation from his lale was not easy for the boy.
Other separations caused by his father’s decision to embark were equally difficult. Staying behind, most likely in Balkh, were his grandmother “Mami,” in her seventies, too aged for the rigorous and uncertain trip; his older half-brother Hosayn; his half-sister Fateme, who stayed with her husband; and, along with Borhan, the other figure Rumi missed most, looking back, his dear nanny, Nosob. When he wished to stress the need to count solely on God, he evoked the loss of this nurturing pair from his young life:
Closeness to anyone but God’s untrue,
Where now is the love of your nanny and your tutor?
Only God is your true supporter
His eminent family friend, and another mentor in his young life, Sharaf Samarqandi, had recently died—another separation. Since Sharaf had been a man of means, his widow used the remaining family resources to travel on the pilgrimage, too, with her daughter Gowhar. Both mother and daughter would grow in importance to the family over the course of this journey. Baha Valad later said of the widowed “perfect saint,” “My spiritual level and her spiritual level are the same.” By the time they neared the end of their travels, nearly a decade later, Gowhar had become Rumi’s first wife.
Whether paranoid or realistic, Baha Valad was always anxious about the risky politics of the region. While they were still living in Vakhsh, he feared that he would be imprisoned for his political opinions in an area far removed from his family and his followers, where no one could help him. During his time in Samarkand, the power of Khwarazmshah had grown, and his influence was everywhere. On the eastern borders, the first threats from Mongols had been felt as early as 1211, as this Asiatic power made border skirmishes from China. So the practical concerns of Baha Valad interlocked well with the requirements of his religion to make a trip to Mecca.
Baha Valad often wrote in his journal of yearning for quest and for movement—“When God is taking your body and your soul from East to West.” He would not have been disappointed in the larger caravan they now joined. In the first leg of their journey, as they trekked along the borders of Central Asia, countless other long trains of double-hump Bactrian, or single-hump dromedary camels and donkeys, were making their way across the deserts and plains ringed by snowcapped mountains, stopping in oasis towns surrounded by subtropical palm trees. Busy markets were crowded with merchants peddling melons or horses to travelers from a wide swathe of the known world—as Rumi would write when reaching to express geographical expanse, “from Rome to Khorasan.”
As a boy, Rumi absorbed the rhythm of these camels as they traced their shuffling lines in grass and sand, dutifully following the lead of their drivers, who steered with pegs of wood inserted in the camels’ noses, through which loops of rope were strung. He would later come to imagine himself as just such a camel, guided by reins held by love’s hand, “Drunkenly pulling your load, in ecstasy.” And he came to know by heart the tunes permeating everywhere on the trip, sung to pass the time or quicken the pace. Accompanied at each stride by the jingle of silver bells fastened near their camels’ ears, the drivers spontaneously broke into traditional songs—often love songs—only interrupted for the call to prayer. Most pronounced in these melodies was the nay, or reed flute, an almost mournful Persian instrument that became for Rumi an image of his art and soul.
Spaced a day’s journey apart along the way were the caravanserai, outfitted with a well and stables for animals, a prayer room, a small bazaar, and a gallery of guest rooms around a central courtyard. In the colder mountains, these inns were built of stone, with roofed courtyards to keep out rain and snow. On the warmer plains, they were constructed of compacted earth or brick with open courtyards. Such inns always evoked for Rumi transience rather than comfort, as he passed through so many growing up. Yet the tenor of his writing about this juvenile time of traveling was positive. He was moving farther from any maktab school, being taught by his father or others. And images of flutes and camels, caravans and inns, crescent moons and desert sands, along with the constant change would eventually be compressed into his great theme of nonattachment:
Our voices like the bells of a caravan
Or thunder when the clouds are full
Traveler, don’t leave your heart in the inn.