AS a gathering place for pilgrims from throughout the wider Muslim world, Mecca also served as a center of news and information, where Rumi and his family would have heard the latest in eyewitness reports, or twice-told rumors from various corners of the map. In 1217, the urgent talk among travelers from Central Asia concerned the threat of the Mongols. Since the time of the departure of Rumi’s family from Khorasan, tensions had only increased between Genghis Khan and Khwarazmshah, with word spreading of an onslaught that was taking place along the easternmost borders, nearer to Vakhsh and other outlying regions. The fate of those on hajj was unclear, and the decision open of whether to return to endangered cities such as Balkh or Samarkand.
After Mecca, Rumi’s family next appeared in Damascus, which required taking a route from Mecca back to Baghdad, and connecting near its Syria Gate with a western road, the entire journey lasting about two months. Not knowing whether war was imminent, Baha Valad would have been pushed to clarify his decisions about the future. A teaching post in Damascus, one of the core cities for Islamic intellectual life, along with Cairo and Baghdad, was desirable, but Baha Valad’s imperfect spoken Arabic may have been an impediment, as seamless eloquence was expected from public speakers. Damascus itself was also volatile. While the Crusades, launched by the Latin Catholic Church, were according to one historian a “sideshow” compared to the destruction about to be inflicted by Tatar armies, Syria was still checkered by this conflict—the ruler of Damascus at the time was al-Moazzam, whose father was off fighting the Fifth Crusade.
Baha Valad moved with his family, once again, this time from Syria to Anatolia—the Asian, or Asia Minor, section of modern-day Turkey—probably during the summer of 1217. Until this move, Rumi, about ten or eleven years old, had been exposed to diverse religious groups, but always in Muslim-controlled areas and with clear Muslim majorities. Anatolia was territory defined in the imagination of Muslims as the outer limits of their civilization, the borderlands of Christian Rome, or Rum. (The term “Rumi” was used sometimes as a synonym for “Christian,” this shadow meaning still clinging to the name when used for Rumi after his death.) From now on they would be living in cities where they were greatly outnumbered by mostly Greek-speaking or Armenian Christians, with Muslims in Anatolia estimated at just 10 percent of the population.
The city where they first alighted, Malatya, in southeast Anatolia near a juncture of the Euphrates River, was a garrison town attached to an eighth-century fortress, the first square of defense in a line of fortresses against the Byzantines extending to the Mediterranean. Yaqut described the town as part of Greek territories when he traveled through, yet the Seljuk Turks were apparently in charge when the family of Baha Valad resided there briefly. The climate of the large town wavered—between desert aridity and northerly precipitation—as did its religious persuasions between Christian and Muslim.
While in Malatya the boy Rumi had the second of his reputed meetings with remarkable men. Also living in town at the time was the Spanish-born Arab mystic Ibn Arabi, the grandest and most sublime thinker of the era, his speculations concerning the merging of Creator and Creation sometimes accused of being a pantheistic, heretical bending of the theology of a transcendent deity in Islam. Picking up pieces left behind in the writings of al-Ghazali a century earlier, Ibn Arabi created a synthesis of mystical thinking, an intellectual Sufism in hundreds of volumes, where he developed ruminations on abstruse matters such as a “science of letters” of God’s name, which had absorbed Sufi thinkers since at least the eleventh century. Although he taught in Damascus, Syria was enough of a war zone that he passed the years from 1216 to 1220 in Malatya.
As the story was told, a conversation had been arranged between the newly arrived Baha Valad and the greatest living master of Sufi theology. He brought along his son, yet when they departed, as with Attar, it was the boy who drew the attention of the great mystic. Watching young Rumi trail his father down the street, Ibn Arabi remarked, “Glory be to God! An ocean is following a lake!” Again, Rumi never spoke of such a meeting. Yet unlike his supposed encounter with Attar, Rumi as an adult had more ambivalent feelings about Ibn Arabi, as about all things highly intellectual or abstruse, and later in life even made a small joke at Ibn Arabi’s expense. He had walked into a hall where his disciples were discussing Ibn Arabi’s esoteric Meccan Revelations. Suddenly Zaki the Singer entered and broke into a joyful song. Rumi exclaimed, “Well now the Zaki Revelations are even finer than the Meccan Revelations!” And he began to whirl. His point was that music, poetry, and dance were more important than abstract ideas.
The first solid patron of Baha Valad in Anatolia was Bahramshah, the prince of Erzincan, and his wife, the princess Esmati. Their capital was located at the upper end of the Euphrates Valley, where Rumi’s family soon undertook yet another journey, of two hundred miles, to northeast Anatolia. Erzincan was a large and primarily Armenian Christian town. Such towns often provoked the ire of visiting Muslims, who expressed indignation at all the wine, pork, and religious processions. Wishing to avoid these alien practices, Baha Valad insisted that his own school be established nearby in the more sober town of Aqshahr, and there he apparently was set up in the winter of 1218, in “Esmatiyye,” named after his royal patroness, teaching general classes, rather than a strict Hanafi law curriculum, with a soft edge of Sufi mysticism.
This minor shah of Erzincan was already accustomed to patronizing Persian cultural figures such as Baha Valad. He had earlier supported the production of a long didactic poem, Treasury of Secrets, written in the style of Sanai, by Nezami. A court poet of Azerbaijan, Nezami had also written the most famous romance in masnavi couplets, Layli and Majnun, a classic tale of the unrequited love of Majnun, a Bedouin youth, his name meaning “Crazy,” driven insane by his intense devotion for the delicate Layli. This star-crossed pair remained in Rumi’s imagination as his favorite fictional lovers, and he later sainted suffering Majnun as the quintessential Sufi “martyr of love” for God:
Majnun, embrace the Layli of night
Night is the time for divine solitude.
Layli is night, and the day is ahead, Majnun.
At dawn, wisdom will light the curls of her hair.
About a year had passed since Rumi and his family had been on hajj in Mecca. During this time Baha Valad, and anyone else from Khorasan, was anxiously looking and listening to discover recent news of the situation there. No one was truly settled anywhere. Yet the reports brought by travelers were increasingly dire, and any future plans of Baha Valado eventually to return were quickly demolished, their sojourn in Anatolia looking more permanent. If Rumi’s family set out on their quest as pilgrims, or even as emigrants, within the next few years they wound up as displaced refugees. Rumi later brought to life the feelings aroused by hearing of the chaos caused by this greatest of historical disruptions:
Day and night I’m thinking of you
In these bloody days and nights, how do you feel?
As this fire fell into the world
In this smoke of the Tatar army, how do you feel?
By the time Baha Valad was finally settled in his new school in Aqshahr, the Khorasan region, where he had left behind his aged mother, as well as oldest son and daughter, was registering serious activity, sparked by a small border incident. Rumi later told this history, with accuracy, as he knew the terrain and players intimately. As a boy, he had seen the Asiatic faces of the traders in Chinese silk and camel cloth, silver and jade, and his father had early identified the unreliable character of the Khwarazmshah:
Some of them who used to come as traders into the territories of the Khwarazmshah would buy muslin to clothe themselves. The Khwarazmshah prohibited them and ordered their traders killed. He also taxed them and barred his own merchants from traveling to their lands. The Tatars went humbly before their king, wailing, “We have been destroyed.” The king sought ten days to consider the matter and went into a deep cave, where he fasted the ten days, and he beseeched and prayed. A cry came from God, saying, “I have heard your plea. Come forth and be victorious wherever you go.” They came out and under God’s command they were victorious and conquered the world.
This provocation, retold by Rumi, occurred in 1217, when Genghis Khan, eyeing Khwarazm as a lucrative trading partner, sent his ambassadors to negotiate a trade agreement and followed them with a caravan of 450 merchants carrying luxury goods. As the caravan crossed into present-day Kazakhstan, just north of Rumi’s childhood home, its governor, a relative of the Khwarazmshah, seized the goods and killed the merchants, as spies. Genghis Khan sent envoys to demand retribution. Instead, Khwarazmshah beheaded one envoy and returned the others, their beards insultingly shaved. Verifying Rumi’s account, the contemporary Persian historian Jovayni reported that Genghis Khan ascended a mountaintop to pray, and descended, “ready for war.” He dramatically added that the rash acts would wind up having “laid waste a whole world.”
The ensuing, punishing invasion lasted four years, until Genghis Khan, in his sixties, returned home to Mongolia, leaving behind in ruins the grand cities that Rumi had known as a boy—Bukhara, Samarkand, Balkh, Herat, Merv, and Nishapur. As Jovayni described the vanguard of the descent of the Mongol forces on Bukhara—a signature display of sound and fury—the townspeople “beheld the surrounding countryside choked with horsemen and the air black as night with the dust of cavalry, and fright and panic overcame them.” Genghis Khan himself rode into the town that for Rumi “stands for the true source of knowledge,” halting to ask if the mosque, the biggest edifice, were the sultan’s palace. He ordered imams to feed his horses, using the libraries as stables, and Quran stands as mangers for straw. One survivor succinctly reported, “They came, they sapped, they burnt, they slew, they plundered, and they departed.”
From Bukhara, the Mongol armies proceeded through the fertile Zarafshan valley to attack Samarkand, an operation far more brutal than the siege Rumi had witnessed as a boy, just eight years earlier. Mongol numbers were augmented by a forced march of prisoners, the weakest dropping from exhaustion. Outside the walls of the city, these prisoners were disguised as soldiers, with every tenth one holding a flag, so that the citizens of Samarkand imagined a force many times larger. Genghis Khan entered by the northwest gate, dividing thirty thousand of the skilled artisans among his sons and kinsmen, and then killing a sizable portion of the population. The lustrous new Cathedral Mosque, built by Khwarazmshah after his own siege, was bombarded with hurled pots of flaming tar.
The cavalry then retraced the same route from Samarkand to Balkh that had likely been traveled by Rumi’s family. Termez— where Rumi’s tutor Borhan stayed behind—was shown no mercy. Jovayni recorded that “all the people, both men and women, were driven out onto the plain and divided proportionately among the soldiers in accordance with their usual custom; then they were all slain, none being spared.” In Balkh, where members of Baha Valad’s family were perhaps still living, any fortifications and walls, as well as mansions and palaces, were obliterated, and the killing fields of Termez were replicated: “Wild beasts feasted on their flesh, and lions consorted without contention with wolves, and vultures ate without quarreling from the same table with eagles.”
Nishapur suffered the most numbing treatment of all the cities in this prolonged exercise in bloody revenge and tactical empire building. An arrow shot from the city ramparts during its defense killed Tokuchar, the son-in-law of Genghis Khan. The conqueror allowed his widowed and pregnant daughter to exact the revenge. In April 1221 she decreed death for all except four hundred craftsmen, including dogs, cats, and any living animals, and ordered the skulls of the corpses to be piled into three pyramids—for men, women, and children. A few accounts numbered Attar among these dead, seemingly fitting for this subtle and melancholy poet who described himself as “the voice of pain.”
For the three years leading up to the Mongol invasion, the geographer Yaqut had been staying happily in Merv, where he was researching his travel books in its many libraries. “But for the Mongols I would have stayed there and lived and died there,” he wrote, “and hardly could I tear myself away.” When the Mongol attack was imminent, Yaqut fled to Mosul. Soon afterward the invaders burned down all of its libraries, and smashed the dams and dikes so that the oasis reverted to a desert swamp.
Yaqut then joined an exodus of displaced Persians on the clogged roads heading west toward Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia. Caravans now included escapees from Khorasan, crossing paths with returning hajj pilgrims. In Baghdad, lodging was in short supply, and housing difficult to rent, as the displaced attempted to find places to stay. In a letter penned shortly after his escape, Yaqut, in an effusive, elegiac court style, mourned the palaces he had witnessed “effaced from off the earth as lines of writing are effaced from paper, and those abodes become a dwelling for the owl and the raven; in those places the screech-owls answer each other’s cries, and in those halls the winds moan.”
The numbers of dead were wildly exaggerated at the time, with suggestions of casualties in the hundreds of millions, far beyond the population of any cities in Central Asia. (Even some modern scholars, though, have confirmed the possibility of a 90 percent extermination rate among the Persian population in Khorasan, constituting racial genocide.) If a percentage of the victims were spared for deportation as skilled slaves, Genghis Khan was uncompromising in his systematic destruction of cities, as well as lead piping and irrigation systems, turning farms and orchards back to grazing lands for his herds. Voicing a general pessimism in the society, one contemporary historian opined that the Mongols were “the announcement of the deathblow of Islam and the Muslims.”
Yet as Genghis Khan was establishing his brutish militarist state in Central Asia—an absolute threat to the religion of Islam—curiously resilient were the mystical practices of Sufism, already established in the western provinces and revivified by these Khorasani immigrants, including Baha Valad and his family. Sufi lodges became welcome cultural outposts of refinement, where sheikhs, or spiritual leaders, offered messages of hope and transcendence, friendship and love, as well as musical concerts, poetry, and dance, evoking rapture. Sufi orders, loosely similar to Western religious orders, were beginning to multiply and would become more formalized in the next decades and centuries. As the German Middle East scholar Annemarie Schimmel summed up the contrast: “This period of the most terrible political disaster was, at the same time, a period of highest religious and mystical activity.”
The full force of the Mongol campaigns would be concentrated in two aggressive phases—the first, the conquest of Central Asia, and the second, commandeered by the grandsons of Genghis Khan, marked by incursions into the Middle East and Anatolia in the 1250s. A newly configured world map spread contiguous Mongol-controlled territories from Korea to Hungary. From the age of ten until his death, Rumi coped with the turmoil caused by this churning realpolitik of the Mongols. Yet either ignoring, or because of, the pain and suffering caused to his family and community, as an adult, Rumi stuck resolutely to his surety of an “invisible hand” in these dark historical events:
While everyone flees from the Tatars
We serve the Creator of the Tatars
He framed the issue even more starkly for his circle, often immigrants from Khorasan, writing, “If you’re afraid of the Tatars, you don’t believe in God.”
In the final phase of his life, Baha Valad—now nearly seventy years old—found the acceptance, even acclaim, which had eluded him during his earlier years. He might well have discerned divine providence at work—and communicated to his son this understanding of otherwise tragic events. His choice of location in Asia Minor was not random, as he moved as an itinerant preacher from city to city, and patron to patron, working his way always closer to Konya, the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, ruled by Sultan Alaoddin Kayqobad I, which he may have first visited as early as 1221. And of course the timing of this late-life migration had allowed his family to escape possible execution by the world conqueror known, by then, simply as “The Accursed.” He and his family spent the next seven years in the center of Anatolia before finally arriving in Konya, and Rumi passed from a boyhood spent traveling to young manhood.
Within four years of arriving in Erzincan, by 1222, Baha Valad was finally on his way, with his family, to the more central city of Larande, well inside the realm of the Seljuk sultanate. The daughter of the shah of Erzincan had been married to Kaykaus I, the Seljuk king, and may have smoothed the way for Baha Valad with members of the royal family. Originally one of dozens of nomadic Turkic clans in Central Asia, the Seljuks were nearing the apogee of a two-century hold on power in the central Islamic lands. In 1055, the Great Seljuks had taken control as “protector” of the Abbasid Caliphate; in 1077, the Seljuks in Anatolia defeated the Byzantines, at the Battle of Manzikert near Erzincan, almost to their own surprise, giving them sway over much of Asia Minor.
Arriving when he was about fifteen years old, Rumi truly came of age in Larande, or modern-day Karaman, sixty miles southeast of Konya. The hilltop town was full of gardens, fountains, and sweet peaches, which he later said could set a whole town smiling:
Today a hundred beautiful faces are smiling in Konya
Today a hundred peaches are arriving from Larande
This pleasant association fit the experience of his family, particularly his father. Baha Valad’s patron was the local governor, who built him an entire school on the main square in town. Baha’s orientation as a Sunni Hanafite with Sufi leanings fit with the broader agenda of the Seljuks, as they had been part of the military force behind a “Sunni Revival” of the Abbasid Caliphate, and had originally been converted to Islam by the heartwarming preaching of the Sufis. This formula worked especially well in trying to win over the local Greek Christians, rather than a hardline legalism. (Larande also included many Christian Turks, who were writing Turkish using a Greek alphabet.)
Most of Rumi’s adolescent education took place in these learned settings arranged for his father in such Anatolian towns. In spite of any juvenile resistance to primary school lessons, he had grown into an avid pupil, curious and studying widely, absorbing all manner of religious, scientific, and literary texts. The basics of his classwork were meant to prepare him for a life of preaching, teaching, and judging. He studied Arabic grammar and prosody; commentaries on the Quran; accounts of the life and sayings of the Prophet Mohammad; and Sharia, or religious law. He also studied history, philosophy, mathematics, and a favorite Persian science, astronomy, its scientific instruments for precise measuring and stargazing recurring in many of his later lyrics:
The sky is an astrolabe, while the truth is love
When I speak, spin your ear towards my meaning
Turning seventeen in Larande, Rumi was wed, in 1224, to Gowhar, in a ceremony that bore all the marks of a traditionally arranged marriage. As the daughter of Sharaf of Samarkand, the deceased patron and disciple of Baha Valad, and his widow, the matriarch now known as the Great Kerra, Gowhar had been close to Rumi since they were both learning their alphabets. She had traveled with her mother in the harem of the caravan all the way from Samarkand, and, like Rumi, had grown from a child into a young adult over the course of the eventful decade—rare memories, which they shared. Almost immediately, they had two sons: Bahaoddin Mohammad, later known as Sultan Valad, born in 1226, and named with his grandfather’s full name, and Alaoddin Mohammad, named for Rumi’s older brother, who possibly died during the long journey.
Rumi was keenly observant of the process of giving birth, and the transformation of a wife into a mother, his empathy palpable in the Masnavi, where he writes of pregnant women trembling at each spasm, or chewing on clay lumps to help ease their birth pangs:
In childbirth every mother suffers aches
As her baby tries to break out of prison.
The mother cries, “Where is my refuge?”
The baby laughs, “Salvation is here!”
He graphically rendered the first demanding phases of child rearing, when he devised an analogy for his students about God’s transformative patience with spiritual immaturity:
God is able to do all things. . . . When a child is newly born he is worse than a donkey. He puts his hand in his filth and then his hand in his mouth to lick. His mother slaps him to prevent it. When he pisses, he spreads his legs so that the pee doesn’t drip on his leg. . . . Yet God is able to turn a baby into a human being.
And he tenderly recalled a mother’s breastfeeding moments at the side of a baby’s crib:
Unless the baby in the cradle cries and weeps
How does the anxious mother know to feed him milk?
From earliest childhood, Rumi’s two sons were a tumble of conflicts. Even the order of their births has never firmly been established. Sultan Valad was named after his grandfather, a distinction signaling a firstborn, especially as Rumi’s father was about seventy-five years old at his birth. Yet one contemporary biographer recorded that Alaoddin was one year older. Less ambiguous would be Sultan Valad’s place as his father’s favorite, not only his child but also his disciple, revering his father as Rumi had revered and tried to emulate Baha Valad. So sibling rivalry was ever roiling between these brothers—a source of pain for their father, who sketched all boys’ games as combative:
Wars are like the fights of children,
Meaningless, thoughtless, and petty
They aim at each other with wooden swords
But their goals and purposes are futile.
In Larande, Rumi, now a married young adult, stepped into the position of preacher, occasionally taking his father’s place on the steps of the pulpit, where sermons were delivered in mosques, or in the seat of honor, in a college. In the medieval Muslim world, preaching was an art and a pillar of moral teaching, both entertainment and instruction. Rumi’s father’s delivery was fiery, a popular timbre. His grandson Sultan Valad told of him once throttling three sturdy camel drivers on the road to Baghdad. “They repented and begged forgiveness,” he said, comparing his grandfather to a lion. Such force came through in his sermons. He was saturated in the preaching culture of Khorasan, where sermons often ended on shrill warnings about judgment on the Last Day as weeping listeners, revival-style, came forward to repent of sins by having their heads shaved.
Rumi’s tone was already more dulcet and controlled. He did not preach fire and brimstone, yet he adhered to the basic model. His early sermons were traditional and fairly standard, opening with a benediction in Arabic rhymed prose, in the style of the Quran, praising God, His Messenger Mohammad, and Abu Bakr, the first of the four “Rightly Guided” caliphs venerated by Sunni Muslims. He then prayed for God’s intercession in a lyrical Persian that was full of crescendos—the language was understood in Anatolia by the many Persian immigrants as well as being generally used as the universal court language for business and ceremonies. In one sermon evidently delivered in Larande, he prayed for his father and mother, and for his “instructor,” another figure clearly involved in his sophisticated religious education. He then repeated, in Arabic, a saying of the Prophet—the text of his sermon—after which he switched back into Persian.
In periodic flashes, the later mystic and poet Rumi can be glimpsed in some of these early sermons—otherwise they were the works of a young man trying to conform to his father’s pattern. In one of seven surviving sermons, he borrows a metaphor from a long poem attributed to Attar, The Book of the Camel, but common enough in mystical literature—a Turkish puppeteer performs with seven veils, and at the end of the night, like the cosmic creator, breaks all of his puppets and stores their pieces again in the dark box of Unity. In his opening prayer, Rumi makes enchanting theology from this material:
The magician of the skies, from behind the curtain of imagination, brings forth a play of shimmering stars and gorgeous planets. We crowd around this theatrical spectacle, mesmerized, passing away the night. In the morning, death will arrive, and the performance of these shadow players will grow cold, and the night of our life will vanish. Oh Lord! Before the morning of death dawns, let our hearts grow cold towards this play so that we might escape in time from this crowd, and not fall behind those who have been traveling through the night. When morning dawns, may we find ourselves arriving within the wider precinct of Your acceptance.
Around 1229, Baha Valad finally received his invitation from the Sultan Alaoddin Kayqobad I to travel to Konya to teach and to live, with his family, at the Altunpa Madrase, the only madrase operating at the time in the capital. If Baha Valad hoped to realize his wish to be preaching in one of the more “glorious cities,” he was fortunate. The sultan was gathering together a court unequalled in the Anatolian Seljuk dynasty, with many Persian-speaking poets, artisans, administrators, and scholars, even if the atmosphere included wine drinking and harp playing, which Baha Valad abhorred.
Others were not so fortunate. Uprooted scholars, poets, and religious leaders, bereft of their former university posts or courtly sinecures, were arriving in Anatolia daily, and the court of Kayqobad I was murmured among them to be the most supportive refuge as they tried to recoup their livelihoods in the aftermath of extreme trauma. Just one example of a suddenly needy fellow scholar was Najmoddin Razi, a leading Sufi thinker, a generation younger than Baha Valad, who fled the Mongols to Kayseri in East Anatolia and quickly dispatched inscribed copies of his well-known writings to the Seljuk sultan, without the desired result of a royal invitation to Konya. Yet Baha Valad had luckily managed to salvage, even improve, life for himself and his uprooted family.
Before the Valad family departed for Konya, Rumi’s mother died and was buried in Larande. (The burial place of Momene, known as “Madar Sultan” by the Mevlevis, became a much-visited shrine.) By the time Rumi—now a young father and preacher— left Larande he had experienced not only a panoply of traveling, but he had also seen the stages of life played out, with the deaths of his mother and older brother, his marriage to a childhood friend, and the births of their two sons, who took their names from the older generations. Rumi would discover in birth, and the constant metamorphoses of the life cycle, his favorite metaphor for the inner life:
Like a baby in the womb, I am nourished with blood.
Everyone is born once. I have been born many times.