ARRIVING in Aleppo in northern Syria to begin his studies at about the age of twenty-five, and moving on eventually to Damascus, Rumi took his place in an entitled “turbaned class” of scholars and their chosen students. This selective gathering of the religious elite was made all the more lively and competitive as Syria in the early decades of the thirteenth century was widely considered the heart of Muslim culture in the Arabic language. Here he could see once again the learned society of debaters with clipped beards, trailing turban tassels, and green academic robes with wide, long sleeves, which he first might have glimpsed as a boy in the courtyards of Nezamiyye College in Baghdad.
Yet education in Rumi’s time was also intimate and personal, a matter of a student being taken in hand by a teacher, or a small circle of teachers, and imitating their adab, or manners and style, as much as mastering a single field of apprenticeship. Dispatching his charge to Aleppo, Borhan was entrusting him with cosmopolitan choices, not only in interpreting religious law, but also in comportment, intellectual tastes, and moral conduct. With his disciple Salah, he accompanied Rumi as far as Kayseri, midway between Konya and Aleppo, where they stayed briefly with the governor, who was building Borhan his own madrase. Kayseri was the second most important city in Rum, as Sultan Alaoddin Kayqobad I had built his ornate Qobadiyye Palace on its lakefront.
As a married student, with an ascetic practice encouraged by Borhan, Rumi lived a circumscribed life, in a traditional student cell in the most famous of the colleges of Aleppo, the Halaviyye, which was converted into a mosque from a Byzantine cathedral a century earlier as revenge against the Franks for pillaging during the First Crusade. While Rumi was in Aleppo, around 1233, the Halaviyye was sliding into disrepair and barely used as a teaching facility. Such schools were as much dormitories, with charitable endowments for supporting residential students, as academies granting certificates. The situation was fluid as mosques evolved into schools, then changed back again, and Rumi was free to follow lectures at the Shadbakht Madrase or reading circles at the Great Mosque.
Much like Konya, Aleppo was flourishing in a rare phase of peace and prosperity. The previous Ayyubid sultan al-Zahir, a son of the famed commander Saladin who had founded an Ayyubid dynasty in both Egypt and Syria, had reinforced the oval Citadel in the center of town, added a grand entranceway, repaired the canal system, and built a palace, upgrading Aleppo into one of the most beautiful cities in the Middle East. His son al-Aziz, who ruled during Rumi’s school years, capitalized on the advantages of the city’s trading location on caravan routes linking China with Europe, bringing in revenues second only to Egypt. The wood-roofed bazaar was its trading floor, offering local specialties such as pistachios and the glassware that glimmered in Rumi’s later poems:
I’m the slave of hopeless time, until that time
The wine of unity shines in a chalice of Aleppo glass
Like the interlocking patterns displayed on its stone and marble walls and portals, Aleppo was a complex mesh of East and West, Christian and Muslim. Much of its prosperity came from shrewd trading agreements with Venice that allowed Venetian merchants to establish a colony in Aleppo, with their own trading post, baths, and church. In 1219 Francis of Assisi met in Egypt with the Ayyubid sultan and won an agreement for his “Monks of the Rope” to wander the Holy Land. During the time of Rumi’s stay, the first Franciscan friars began arriving in Aleppo to minister to Crusader princes and soldiers held prisoner in the Citadel. They swept through the streets in their rough, woolen robes, much like the robes worn by Sufis, with similar vows of poverty, and may have imprinted on Rumi the affinities between these two expressions of spirituality.
Rumi’s main teacher in Aleppo was Ibn al-Adim, a quick-witted and urbane scholar, historian, legal expert, diplomat, and calligrapher in his midforties, with a post at Shadbakht Madrase. Five members of his eminent Hanafi “old family”—including his father—had served in the powerful post of chief justice, or qadi, in Aleppo, since the tenth century. Ibn al-Adim was best known as a historian of Aleppo, and as a biographer of its leading citizens in his Biographical Dictionary, a massive, forty-volume who’s who of short vignettes, written by him in penmanship so fine that the sultan once summoned him to the palace to praise its beauty. He also wrote treatises on preparing perfumes, and on handwriting (practices, pens, and papers), as Arab intellectuals of his time were given to such encyclopedic “boundless compilation.” He did most of his writing on diplomatic missions for the sultan, when he traveled on a palanquin rigged between two mules.
Ibn al-Adim was a master of the basic sciences, explaining his quick ascent in the academic ranks, and was equipped to instruct Rumi in most areas of knowledge required for an advanced religious scholar: Arabic linguistics and grammar; dialectic reason and legal conflict; and the Quranic sciences. He gave indications of being a fellow traveler of Sufism, though he was too shrewdly political to proclaim such sympathies openly. (In the early years of his reign, al-Aziz had executed the Sufi leader Sohravardi for heresy.) Yet his father had called on his deathbed for the prayer beads of a Sufi saint, and Ibn al-Adim reserved a room in his own tomb for a Sufi, perhaps as a hedge against divine judgment. He espoused, if not always fully practiced, the virtues of poverty, solitude, and self-reliance.
While Rumi never absorbed his teacher’s passion for history, he was delighted by his exposure in Aleppo to the intricate joys of Arabic poetry. Ibn al-Adim was a minor poet. He wrote clever lines on slight topics, such as sighting the first white hairs in his beard. Yet he idolized those with “innate poetic ability,” and championed the poetry of the premier Arabic poet al-Mutanabbi, whose verses remained a lifelong pleasure for Rumi. During the eleventh century al-Mutanabbi had lived in the quarter of Aleppo where Ibn al-Adim’s family’s marble compound was located. Rumi’s favorites were al-Mutanabbi’s qasidas, often odes of praise for a patron, known for their technical virtuosity, though a surprising choice perhaps given their standard use of the tradition of braggadocio and praise of wine, power, and battlefield glory. Al-Mutanabbi wrote zestfully of “the play of swords and lances” and “the clash of armies at my command.” Rumi later scattered lines of al-Mutanabbi in his talks, and one of the Arab poet’s more famous openings—“A heart that wine cannot console”—entwined for Rumi with memories of school years in Syria, he transposed as a closing for a poem on spiritual wine:
We can look for the answer in Mutanabbi:
“A heart that wine cannot console”
In Aleppo, Rumi was also introduced to an active Shia community, especially visible during the festivals of the family of Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Mohammad, whose heirs are believed by Shia to be the rightful holders of the leadership of all Muslims. The Sunni rulers observed these festivals warily, while Rumi’s teacher, Ibn al-Adim, a member of the establishment, was described by his biographer as a “sentinel of the Sunni state.” On the Day of Ashura, mourning the death of Ali’s son Hosayn at the Battle of Karbala in 680, Rumi witnessed pious Shia weeping and beating themselves at Antioch Gate, the main fortress gate at the entrance of Aleppo. Thinly disguising himself as “A poet,” Rumi recorded this memory in Masnavi:
On the day of Ashura, all the people of Aleppo
Gather from day until night at the Antioch Gate . . .
One day a stranger, who was a poet, came along
On this day of Ashura, and heard their lamentations . . .
He went along, asking questions gently on his way,
“What is this sorrow? Whose death are they mourning?”
Though Rumi may not have been previously aware of this ritual, as Persians were mostly Sunni during his lifetime, his naïveté in rendering the experience was exaggerated, as he feigned discovering that the martyrdom being mourned had taken place centuries earlier:
Have you been asleep all this time?
You are only now tearing your garments in sorrow?
Rumi may have felt some shock as a young man, but revisiting the event, in his maturity, he was more intent on questioning sorrow as a response to death rather than joy:
Mourn for your own broken faith and religion
If your faith doesn’t see beyond this old earth
The second phase of Rumi’s advanced education took place in Damascus, where he likely traveled about a year later and had previously visited with his family during their original journey from Central Asia. While Aleppo was known as a trading and mercantile city, Damascus, in southern Syria, in the midst of a desert oasis, was both a commercial center and a holy city, the capital of the former Umayyad Caliphate, and one of the important departure points for hajj, especially for pilgrims traveling from points west. Because of the city’s religious history and geography, students of the Quran were welcomed and treated respectfully. The magnificent Umayyad Mosque, still enshrining the reputed head of John Baptist from its previous days as a Christian basilica, hummed all day with groups of students listening to their sheikhs read aloud. As Damascenes were not encouraged to read books silently or alone, the murmur of these many study circles was a kind of spoken music filling the courtyards daily from dawn until dusk.
Over about four years, in his midtwenties, Rumi studied in Damascus in one of the Hanafi seminaries, probably the Moqaddamiyye Madrase, near the Bab al-Firdaws, or Gate of Paradise, where he could stay in an outer building, free of the nighttime regulations overseeing entrances and exits that were enforced on younger students in the inner buildings. Of his studies of one important Hanafi text, he later recalled, “In my youth I had a friend in Damascus who was a companion with me in studying the Hedaya.” He also seems to have attended sessions of a famed Hanafi scholar from Bukhara, who was teaching at Nuriyye Madrase. All public classes were highly formal, modeled on behavior in a mosque, with a nearly sacred space cleared about the lecturer, so his rug and cushion were left untouched. As one manual prescribed proper student etiquette: “Do not look at anything but the teacher, and do not turn around to investigate any sound, especially during discussion. Do not shake your sleeve. The student should not uncover his arm, nor should he fiddle with his hands or feet or any part of his body parts, nor should he place his hand on his beard. . . . Nor should he try to say anything funny or offensive; and he should not laugh except out of surprise. If something overcomes him, he should smile without giving voice.”
Though student life was rigorous, Rumi loved his time in Damascus. He often called Damascus the “City of Love,” punning on the word for love, “eshq,” tucked into its Arabic name, “Dameshq.” He even wrote his single example of an ode to a city for Damascus, not only as homage to the capital, but also to Arabic poetry, where such love poems to cities abound, especially to Baghdad. Only Samarkand comes across in his writings with such verve and close observation. He exuberantly opens his city poem:
I’m madly in love, and crazy for Damascus
Damascus, where I left my heart and soul
Rumi catalogs the most prominent of the thirteen gates to the medieval city:
Separated from friends, I stand alone at the Barid Gate
Beyond the Lovers’ Mosque, in the green fields of Damascus . . .
Far from the Gate of Joy and the Gate of Paradise
You’ll never know what visions I’m seeking in Damascus.
His references are often built on inside jokes that only other visitors to Damascus at the time would fully understand. The Ayyubid sultan, during his stays in town, liked to play polo in the Verdant Field hippodrome, where Rumi imagined his own head as a swerving ball:
I want to roll through her Verdant Field, like a polo ball
Struck by polo sticks, towards the main square of Damascus
A large Quran commissioned by Caliph Uthman was kept veiled as a relic in the mosque:
Let me swear an oath on Uthman’s holy book
The pearl of that beloved, shining in Damascus
The soft border between Muslims and Christians was nowhere more evident than in Damascus, even in these waning days of the Crusades. Many Christians and Jews lived in the capital, though neighborhoods were segregated by religion, with gates clanged shut at the dusk curfew, and beliefs worn on the sleeve: under a legal dress code, Christians wore crosses, and Jews a yellow or red shoulder rope. Syria was the historical center of monasticism, and Rumi was said to have come across a group of forty desert fathers, or hermit monks, on his way from Aleppo. The Quran was understood to say that Jesus stayed on the hill of nearby Rebva, and Damascenes hoped to witness his resurrection at their Eastern Gate:
Let’s climb Rebva, as if we’re in the time of Christ
Like monks, drunk on the dark red wines of Damascus
The Bab al-Faraj, or Gate of Joy, evoked by Rumi stood just east of the Salehiyye, or the Righteous District, outside the walls of the old city at the foot of prominent Mount Qasiyun. This neighborhood had grown in the past few decades and was crowded with mostly Sufi hostels and learning centers, explaining Rumi’s exclamation “On the Mount of Righteousness is a mine of pearls!” The most illustrious of those pearls, of course, was Ibn Arabi—who Rumi may or may not have met in Malatya a decade earlier. Ibn Arabi lived the final phase of his life in Damascus and was buried in a tomb in Salehiyye. Whether Rumi was included in his reading circles, he was certainly aware of the famous mystic. Definitely in attendance at readings of his voluminous texts, as Ibn Arabi was still producing them, though, was his godson Qonavi, with whom Rumi had a gradually evolving friendship later in Konya. Some of Ibn Arabi’s readings aloud were meant for Qonavi’s ears alone. Rumi saw venerated in the person of Ibn Arabi a sublime and knowledgeable approach to spirituality as an elite science available only to initiates with rarefied experience. Though tempted by Ibn Arabi’s approach, he was never entirely committed.
Along with dazzling verbal performances and abstruse examinations of religious thought, Rumi was surrounded in Damascus by a scholarly culture that valued rank and fame. Books were stacked according to importance, with the Quran on top of any pile. Seating at lectures radiated out from the sheikh in decreasing order of status, as he was faced with his most eminent guest, judged by knowledge, age, piety, or fame. Of these qualities, fame weighed most strongly, the making of a name, especially a name beyond Damascus or, even better, Syria. Sources of the time noted that one young scholar “flashed his merit like a bright star rising on the horizon,” and, of another, “his name flew to fill the regions”—values far from Rumi’s later yearning for a nameless sort of oblivion.
Following nearly five years of study in Aleppo and Damascus, having saturated himself in steep and difficult texts, and having been exposed to some of the most renowned religious scholars of the day, Rumi, about thirty years old, returned to his teacher of teachers, Borhan. Rumi sought to integrate the last and most important missing piece in his education, held out by Borhan as the ultimate achievement—advanced lessons in spiritual practice designed to unlock interior practices even more demanding and essential for his future responsibilities than the academic exercises mastered in Syria.
Their meeting likely took place in Kayseri. The sultan’s governor had constructed by then the madrase where Borhan was based, though he still made the trip of about two hundred miles to Konya regularly. When Rumi arrived, the governor invited him to stay in his palace, but Borhan, channeling the words of Baha Valad, warned Rumi that schools were the proper place for scholars to reside. The name of the town reflected its grand past history as a Roman capital, and Rumi punned on the naming of Kayseri, or Caesarea, after the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, when alluding to Borhan:
When our Caesar is in Kayseri—
Don’t keep us waiting in Elbistan
The brunt of Rumi’s joke, Elbistan, was a smaller Anatolian city on the road to Syria.
But their reunion might have taken place anywhere, as Borhan was now stressing the inner world with his pupil. In the tradition of the historical Sufi movement, Borhan trained Rumi in exercises of asceticism, especially fasting. Borhan had been dedicated to fasting all his life. During this period, he wrote in his notes of the exemplary effects of fasting on the soul: “The thinner the shell of the walnut, the fuller is its nut, and the same for the almond and pistachio.” He had advised his disciple Salah that even if he found himself unable to perform other devotions, he should never neglect fasting. Such self-denial was meant to instill martial discipline, as well as to wean the practitioner off the ordinary values of the world. The ultimate “fasting of the elite” meant the desire for God alone.
From this intensive season in Kayseri, Rumi never relaxed his stance on fasting, a habit he pursued with passion, almost thrilled, becoming as identified as Borhan with the practice. In Book V of the Masnavi, he would lift off in an inspired hymn to fasting:
Don’t eat straw and barley, like donkeys:
Graze on flowers of the Judas tree, like musk deer in Khotan
Only graze on clove, jasmine, or roses,
In Khotan, with your beloved companion . . .
The stomach of the body pulls towards the straw-barn
The spiritual stomach pulls towards fields of sweet basil.
If spring is the favorite season in Rumi’s poems, Ramadan, the month of fasting from dawn to sunset, obligatory for able Muslims, became his cherished religious observance:
Congratulations! The month of fasting is here!
Have a good journey, my companion in fasting.
I climbed to the roof, to see the moon,
With my heart and soul, I longed for fasting.
When I looked up, my hat fell off,
My head was set spinning by the king of fasting!
Fasting became a reminder for Rumi of memories of Borhan, as few anecdotes about the displaced mystic of Khorasan failed to link him with his habitual practice. Fasting was also Rumi’s introduction to the consolations of “tightening the belt.” He was learning that things were not what they seemed, and that empty stomachs held “hidden sweetness.”
Like the scholars of Damascus, the mystics and Sufis had their own ranks and an organized ladder of mystical practices that indicated status in the spiritual world. More extreme than regular fasting but essential was the completion of a forty-day trial in sealed isolation from the world known as chelle—from chehel, Persian for “forty.” This period of solitude and subsisting on bread and water was a sort of vision quest, conceived as an inward hajj, or desert experience, owing its origins perhaps to the Syrian hermit monks, such as those Rumi met on his way to Damascus. Borhan arranged Rumi’s retreat, sealing him into total seclusion, and then helping him with interpreting his insights afterward.
A chip of remembrance, likely from this retreat, appears in Book V of the Masnavi. This time, rather than “a poet,” Rumi casts his younger self as “a certain man,” but his exact recording of one disorienting nightmare was quite personal, nearly surreal:
During the chelle, a certain man
Dreamed he saw a pregnant dog on a road
Suddenly he heard the cries of her puppies
Though they were in the womb, invisible . . .
Puppies howling in a womb, he thought
“Has anyone ever heard of such a thing?” . . .
Interpreting dreams was a problematic challenge—for medieval Muslims especially, a religious problem. Isolation only exacerbated Rumi’s confusion, blurring his waking:
When he woke from his dream and came to himself,
His astonishment grew greater at every moment.
During the chelle, there is no other solution to problems,
Except for being present to God the Almighty.
So he began to pray, and heard a wise voice interpreting his bizarre dream imagery:
At that moment, he heard a mysterious voice,
Saying, “That is a symbol of the yelping of the ignorant,
Those who have not pierced the veil and curtain,
But with blind eyes are speaking aimlessly.”
Rumi emerged from his chelle with a personal experience of having heard a voice that he felt was available to him for guidance. He could hear wisdom, not just in reading circles, or from lecturers, but also in meditation, and he could copy down the words, as in dictation. In trying to measure the gap between human and divine, such an encounter was revelatory.
After instructing Rumi in the wisdom tradition shared with him by Baha Valad, and encouraging him even more insistently to study his father’s notebooks, Borhan began to decline. During his last few years Borhan was sometimes in Konya, but he kept returning to Kayseri, possibly wishing to withdraw so that his charge could take on a leadership position alone. In Kayseri, Borhan showed poignant signs of loss of the strength, mental focus, and near athletic prowess in self-discipline that marked his prime years, though his behavior was also taken as evidence of saintliness, of having moved beyond the ordinary restraints of religion. When he led prayers in the mosque he spent long stretches of time—rather than minutes—in bowing or standing poses. When some members of the congregation complained, he apologized, “Some madness continually overwhelms me. I am not fit to be your prayer leader.” The plea only made him more revered and followed, as he was now understood to be as humble as he was wise.
Most striking was the transformation of the rigid ascetic into a corpulent gentleman as he relaxed his tight regimen. Borhan once heard a voice commanding, “Undergo no further hardship!” He now obeyed this voice. A grand lady, who had become his disciple, teasingly asked why he had given up fasting and was not practicing his five daily prayers. “Oh child, I am like a load-bearing camel,” he replied, comparing himself to an emaciated camel at journey’s end being fed a few grains of barley. When his patron, the governor, grew concerned about his unkempt appearance, he snapped, “So I came into the world for the sake of doing my laundry? Leave me alone!” Rather than feats of fasting, Borhan focused on his love of pickled turnips for indigestion. In old age, he began behaving with some of the carefree joy of the holy fools for God of Nishapur.
Borhan died in Kayseri in 1240 or 1241, in his midseventies. Following a conventional mourning period of forty days, a letter was sent notifying Rumi in Konya. A decade after the death of his father, this news had a similar impact. Rumi collapsed into the knowledge that he was again without fatherly support. He set out quickly with a band of disciples on a road he traveled regularly enough during those years to recall later all the stops on the way, while illustrating the difference between ritual and true spiritual progress:
The stages on the road from Konya to Kayseri are fixed and defined. They are Kaymaz, Uprukh, Sultan, and so forth. But the stages on the sea between Antalya and Alexandria are not fixed and defined. A ship’s captain may know them, but he won’t tell them to land dwellers because they would not understand.
Rumi visited the grave of his mentor and held a funeral banquet in his honor. Borhan’s books and notes were spread out for him to choose whatever he wished. He cherished these words and found in rereading them the connection so important in his growth over the past decade. As with his father’s writings, Borhan left Rumi not only hard ascetic rules, but also messages of love that were the soft core of his discipline of curbing impulses: “If you prick your foot on a thorn, you would leave all the important things aside, and wholly attend to it. You ought then to do the same for your brother.”
In his midthirties Rumi, finally, if inevitably, ascended to the leadership of his community. At the Madrase Khodavandgar, he was looked upon as the living embodiment of Baha Valad and Borhan. He walked the streets of Konya in the official garb of a religious scholar—wearing a cumbersome wide-sleeve cloak and a large turban, wound with one band unraveleld and hanging down his back. Although he never served in Konya as chief justice, or qadi, he held academic appointments at four separate colleges, all respected, including the Cotton Sellers Madrase, endowed by the guild of cotton merchants, and located on their street in the market district. His name appeared on lists of the most prominent doctors of the law belonging to the Hanafi School.
At about the same time as the death of Borhan, Rumi’s wife, Gowhar, also mysteriously died, with no record of the cause. Again, Rumi experienced the loss of an intimate link to his childhood in Central Asia as well as, most crucially, the mother of his two sons. Yet Gowhar’s mother continued to live in the harem and take special interest in her grandsons. Rumi soon afterward married a widow, Kerra, from a Roman-Turkish family in Konya, whose deceased husband Mohammad Shah had been an aristocratic Persian speaker from Iran. Like Rumi, Kerra brought two children to their marriage—a boy, Shamsoddin Yahya, and a girl, Kimiya. Over the next few years Rumi and Kerra had their own son, Mozaffaroddin Amir Alem Chelebi—Rumi’s third—and a daughter, Maleke. With these four young children, the harem grew even more crowded and busier.
Unlike his father, Rumi never kept multiple wives, and the widower and his widowed bride remained together for the rest of his life. Kerra was more vividly remembered than Gowhar, as theirs was not an arranged marriage, and she lived with Rumi during the period of his growing fame. Though he never wrote about Kerra directly, she was remembered by those in his inner circle and was later the source of some of the more magical and fantastical tales about her husband. Her choice to leave the aristocratic household of her deceased husband to marry a cleric pointed to spiritual leanings, underlined in Aflaki’s description of her as “a second Virgin Mary.” She was certainly superstitious, and was forever seeing jinn, or invisible, mischievous spirits. Early in their marriage, Rumi used to stand by a tall lamp stand at night, reading his father’s pages. She told him that the jinn complained to her of the bright light. Rumi smiled and three days later tried to mollify her. “After today do not worry. The jinn are my disciples and they are devoted to me. They will not cause any harm to come to our children or friends.”
Rumi’s bemused smile to Kerra, on news of the jinn, either patronizing, loving, or both, expressed some of the enigma of his attitude toward women and marriage, as well as the general ambivalence toward women in medieval society. Rumi often fell into a traditional classifying of men as strong and rational, and women as mercurial and emotional. He once even painted wives as purifying tests for their coarse husbands:
God showed the Prophet a narrow and hidden way to refine himself, and that was the path of marrying women, and enduring their tyranny, and listening to their complaints, and letting them order him around. . . . Character would only become purer through such patient forbearance.
In other moods, he could be more sympathetic, as in his ode in the Masnavi to women:
A woman is a ray of God, heavenly and beloved
She is a creator, uncreated, from above
Rumi later argued against imposing veils on women and had many female disciples, whose Friday evening gatherings in one lady’s garden he was criticized for attending.
When his two older sons reached adolescence, Rumi sent them both to study in Damascus, a decision that distressed their maternal grandmother, the Great Kerra, as she would miss them greatly. He evidently thought highly enough of Damascus as the standard for religious education. Overseeing them on this trip was their tutor and guardian, Sharafoddin. Yet as both boys were now in their midteens, the combativeness of their childhood conflicts was only magnified. When they were younger, Rumi himself had mostly been away in Syria, leaving his first wife, Gowhar, with the problem of their bad behavior. Now the target of their rebelliousness in Damascus quickly became their tutor, and Rumi was upset at needing to write them a pointed letter, advising them to be more respectful to their elders:
Dear son Bahaoddin, and dear son Alaoddin. Don’t forget to be polite to this father, the father of your education and training, Sharafoddin. Don’t be rude, or judgmental, or abusive, and treat him as a father. I am indebted to this dear father Sharafoddin. I am hoping that my dear children will be patient and kind and generous with him, and talk to him in a very kind way, and when this father is angry, I want my children to make themselves busy with other matters, or go to sleep. I am waiting to receive some news, and I pray for my children to become more kind and hopefully very soon you will return home and make us happy.
Rumi was now flourishing in Konya, where he had become known for the power and popularity of his eloquent preaching. By the time he was seventeen and had returned from Syria, his son Bahaoddin, later known as Sultan Valad, would sit next to his father during these sermons, just as Rumi sat next to his father, Baha Valad. However, Rumi had such a youthful appearance that when the two appeared together in public they were often mistaken for brothers. Rumi was satisfying his patrons, the Sunni Seljuk rulers, as his public speeches displayed enough emotion and beauty to convert Greeks and Armenians, a desired outcome for the regime. He could later still summon the fervent emotion that his sermons had stirred among local Greek speakers, who did not understand much of their content:
I was speaking one day to a crowd that included non-Muslims, and during my talk they were weeping and going into ecstatic states. “What do they understand? What do they know?” someone asked. “Not one out of a thousand Muslims can understand this sort of talk. What have they comprehended that they can weep so?” It was not necessary for them to understand the words. What they understood was the essence of the speech . . . the oneness of God.
Seeing the response of audiences from the viewpoint of his father, as he sat beside him, Sultan Valad, too, recalled the excitement stirred by his gifted and warmhearted oratory: “Now that he stood alone, his greatness became more visible, in the eyes of the old, and the eyes of the young. Even among those who had kept their distance from him before.”
Yet Rumi was not wholly satisfied by this early success. Ironically he had achieved everything his father and tutor desired for him, and attained the goals and station considered most lofty by his society at a relatively young age. Ever since childhood he had been a bit of a prodigy, and always had a graceful power over those around him. These indicators of success were borne out by his talents as a teacher, preacher, jurist, and spiritual counselor. He traveled both outward and inward paths of education, yet he was feeling incomplete, inauthentic, not yet arrived at his destination.
Now in his late thirties, Rumi particularly puzzled over the limits of the learning he had accumulated with such exertion in Aleppo and Damascus—expending great effort was another virtue of the scholarly culture. He struggled, as well, with fame, the sort of important status recognized by the scholars. By his combination of the authority of learning with youthful charm and charisma, he attracted an eager retinue—if not quite the “ten thousand more” newly minted followers counted by Sultan Valad. His pleasure in this easy adulation was authentic, but so was a jagged shadow of doubt. Rumi began to feel uneasy about expectations being laid on him. He distrusted his need for notice of an identity he could not comfortably fit—a discomfort made worse by having no one to talk with about these unexpected doubts, no confidant. The vehemence of Rumi’s later attacks on intellectual preening and the traps of fame grew from experiences during this unexpectedly conflicted moment in his life. He admitted as much in a reflective robai:
For some time, like everyone, I adored myself,
Blind to others, I kept hearing my own name.