“The face of the sun is Shams of Tabriz”
A stranger appeared in Konya on November 29, 1244. About sixty years old, dressed in a cloak fashioned from coarse black felt, and wearing a simple traveler’s cap, he checked into one of the inns managed by the sugar confectioners or the rice sellers within the market district, not far from Rumi’s school. His name was Shamsoddin, or Shams of Tabriz, and he was a singular outlier mystic in a period of history crowded with extreme religious seekers, especially active in the wake of the Mongol invasions. From decades of restless travel throughout all the religious capitals of the Muslim world, he had earned the nickname “Parande,” or “The Flier.”
Ignoring the social etiquette that Baha Valad had followed so strictly, Shams bypassed the Sufi lodges, where he could easily have found subsidized room and board. Instead he chose to remain incognito in a merchant inn, disguising himself as a commercial businessman, even putting a giant lock on his door to insinuate that he was carrying valuable wares that needed to be safeguarded, though inside was nothing but a straw mat. In conversations with Rumi later written down by students, including Sultan Valad, Shams remembered being asked, “Aren’t you coming to the madrase?” and answering, “I’m not a debater. I’m a stranger. The inn is the right place for strangers.”
Most likely during the first week of December, Shams and Rumi suddenly met. At the crest of his prominence as a religious teacher and jurist, Rumi was on his way from one of his teaching appointments at the Cotton Sellers Madrase and was passing by the inn where Shams was staying. He was riding a mule and surrounded by a posse of students, walking on foot, holding his stirrups, adding an aura of celebrity similar to the retinue of Razi in Herat during Rumi’s childhood, though on a smaller scale. In place were the symbols of his scholarly status he wrote about later in a self-deprecating tone:
My turban, my robe, and my head
Are worth less than a single penny
Slicing through all the jostling, his black cloak wrapped tightly about him, Shams grabbed the reins of Rumi’s mount. The conversation that ensued was a hasty theological exchange. As Shams later recalled:
The first words I spoke to Mowlana were: “Why didn’t Bayazid follow the example of the Prophet and say, ‘Glory be to You!’ or ‘We have not fully worshipped You?’” Mowlana perfectly understood the full implications of the problem, and where it came from, and where it was leading. It made him ecstatic because his spirit was so pure and clean, and shone in his face. I realized the sweetness of my question only from his ecstasy. Before then I had been unaware of its sweetness.
The issue that Shams was raising pivoted on Bayazid Bestami, an Eastern Iranian Sufi mystic of the “drunken” school, who exclaimed, “Glory Be to Me! How great is My Majesty!” Like Hallaj’s “I am the Truth!” Bayazid’s unorthodox hymn of praise, seemingly to himself, could be interpreted as evidence of a mystic having lost all sense of self. To ordinary ears, he was risking blasphemy by merging his human identity with the divine. Shams was asking Rumi how such a high state of rapture should be compared with the Prophet Mohammad, who had spoken of being raised to the highest heavens, and yet, more humbly, prayed, “We have not known You as You should be rightly known.”
“Was Bayazid greater or Mohammad?” pressed Shams.
“Bayazid’s thirst was quenched by a single mouthful, and he was satisfied, and claimed he was no longer thirsty,” answered Rumi. “The water jug of his understanding was filled with a single sip. His house received light that fit the size of its single window. But Mohammad’s quest for water was immense, consisting of thirst upon thirst.”
Some reported that Shams “fell in a swoon” at Rumi’s response, though it was fairly standard in the Muslim catechism: Mohammad was the greatest of all men. Yet Shams and Rumi had gazed at each other, and this exchange was far more disruptive. A recurring theme in the literature of romantic love and Sufi mystical love was this deep gaze. Not only Layli and Majnun exchanged amorous looks, so did Sufi masters and their true disciples behold each other. Writing of this extraordinary meeting, Sultan Valad used all the rich language and imagery of ecstatic love to describe his father’s first glimpse of Shams. Rumi “saw the veil pulled away from his face” and “fell in love with him.”
Describing their meeting months later, among a circle of interested students, Shams did not spell out Rumi’s parsing of his leading question. Rather he simply remembered responding to his pure spirit, shining face, joy at finding a kindred soul, and a tenor of sweetness. A through-line in Rumi’s poetry, too—following from this flash of a meeting—was the certainty that recognition occurs beyond speech, language, and thought:
For lovers, the beauty of the beloved is their teacher
His face is their syllabus, lesson, and book
Whether in a faint or awake, Shams was led immediately afterward by Rumi to the Madrase Khodavandgar. In seclusion, the two spoke more openly, and their intimate discussion was compelling enough for Rumi to decide that he wished to follow its thread even further. He also realized such an exploration would be impossible in the burgeoning school that was doubling as his home and a busy harem for his wife, children, and extended family. So he decided that same day to decamp. As Aflaki described the next of the startling developments: “After that Mowlana grasped his hand and they departed.”
Rumi took Shams back into the market district, to the street of the goldsmiths, to the shop of Salah, who had been such a devoted follower of his tutor Borhan. After the death of Borhan, four years earlier, Salah returned to his fishing village, married, had several children, and then moved back to the capital city to set up his permanent home and shop. Though an illiterate workman, he had an enthusiastic spirit that Rumi trusted, as had Borhan. In the past few years, whenever Rumi delivered one of his celebrated public sermons, Salah was said to have shouted fervent yells of assent. Rumi’s intuition proved correct, as Salah responded warmly to the unusual newcomer from Tabriz.
Rumi and Shams lived together in near seclusion in a room of Salah’s house for at least the next three months. The rapidness of their bonding was shocking, but not without foreshadowing, as the vehemence of Rumi’s seizing at an escape from his daily round, as well as his future eviscerating of his former way of life, all indicate that he was ready for a major change. He later claimed to have had some premonition of a figure like Shams. Since shams is the Arabic word for sun, Rumi used imagery of the sun to express his feelings for the man. His poems would be saturated with this sunlight, as he revealed:
I already held a sweet image of you in my heart
When at that dawn, I first truly felt the sun
While Rumi may have had some inkling, Shams claimed the two had actually met once. The place was Damascus; the time, sixteen years earlier. Shams later spoke in his talks of remembering Rumi, as a student, a sort of prodigy, talking in public about the unity of souls: “I remember Mowlana sixteen years ago. He was saying that creatures are like clusters of grapes. If you squeeze them into a bowl, no difference remains.” He greeted him with “Salam,” in a public square. Rumi did not pay much attention, yet Shams, older and wiser, quickly perceived the glimmer of Rumi’s true potential: “From the first day that I saw your beauty, attraction and kindness towards you filled my heart.”
The friendship between Rumi and Shams was intense from the start, and often difficult to define. Shams did not fit the pattern of a traditional sheikh, as he never received a cloak from a Sufi master, the standard ceremony of commitment, and so was not part of an established lineage. (He claimed to have received a cloak in a dream directly from Mohammad, as Attar claimed to have received his cloak in a dream from Hallaj.) With Shams, who was nearly twenty years his senior, Rumi’s attitude was that of a pupil. Yet Rumi was already a spiritual director and teacher. Shams complained once about this lack of clarity: “I need it to be clear how our life is going to be—brotherhood, friendship, or sheikh and disciple. I don’t like not knowing. Is it teacher and pupil?”
During the period of withdrawal in Salah’s house—a sort of chelle, for two rather than one—Shams was directing Rumi toward a new way of being in the world, and he followed. “Before me, as he listens to me,” said Shams, “he considers himself—I am ashamed to even say it—like a two-year-old before his father or a new convert to Islam who knows nothing. Such submission!” While Shams refused labels, he was well within the malamatiyya tradition of the fools of God—his mission, to free Rumi from the weight of his own dignity. So he devised tasks such as dispatching him to the Jewish neighborhood to buy wine and carry the pitcher through the streets. Konya had a tavern frequented by Armenian Christians, and Shams said: “Let’s go see the women in the tavern. Let’s go to church, too, and look in.” Such neighborhoods became romantically spiritual for Rumi:
The tavern keeper became my heart’s companion
Love turned my blood into wine and burned my heart
Shams grew keen to dismantle Rumi’s reliance on his talent for using words to spin arguments and spellbind audiences. “Where’s your own?” he demanded, if Rumi was quoting too many proverbs, or poems and tales. “Come on, answer!” Like Kerra, irked by the incessant lamplight while he read, Shams was bothered by Rumi’s poring over pages of his father’s manuscripts. He once barged in while Rumi was reading, and shouted, “Don’t read! Don’t read! Don’t read!” Aged disciples informed his biographer Aflaki that Rumi told them, “He firmly commanded me, ‘Don’t read the words of your father any longer!’ Following his instruction, I stopped reading them for some time.”
Shams also disapproved of the fashionable poetry of Rumi’s favorite Arabic poet from his schooldays in Aleppo, al-Mutanabbi. Besides his father’s writing, Rumi loved to read verses of al-Mutanabbi in the evening. Shams said to him, “That is not worthwhile. Never read that again.” Rumi ignored his warning until, one night, falling asleep reading the poet, he had a nightmare in which Shams grabbed al-Mutanabbi by the beard and dragged him forward, saying, “This is the man whose words you are reading!” Al-Mutanabbi, scrawny with a tiny voice, begged, “Please release me from the hands of Shams and never read my book again!’” Another dubious poet read by Rumi was al-Maarri, a blind Syrian, melancholy—like Khayyam—about life’s quick passing: “How sad that man, after wandering freely through the world, is told by fate, ‘Go into the grave.’” (Even Shams was known to recite a line or two of al-Maarri now and then, but he thoroughly disliked Khayyam for speaking “mixed-up, immoderate, and dark words.”)
Rumi and Shams were not entirely isolated during their stay at Salah’s home, just insulated from conventional responsibilities. Both Rumi’s wife and Sultan Valad visited, and were drawn into some extreme tests of loyalty, obedience, and liberation, sprung by Shams. Rumi allowed his wife to be unveiled in front of Shams, an exposure reserved for family members, which would have been a difficult transgression for her. When Shams asked for a beautiful boy to serve him, Rumi presented Sultan Valad, though Shams thoughtfully declined, saying that the young man was more like a son to him. Missing was Alaoddin, Rumi’s second son, who was following an orthodox path, with plans to become an esteemed religious figure like his father. Shams posed a threat to his ambitions to carry on the family name, and Alaoddin was appalled by his influence. These dynamics among family members—lining up in response to Shams’s presence—remained set from that first encounter, with Alaoddin always sorely judging from outside.
The only other intimate allowed into the charmed circle was Hosamoddin Chelebi, a nineteen-year-old from a good middle-class Konya family of Kurdish origin, from Urmia in Azerbaijan, who had grown enamored with Rumi’s way of teaching. Hosam’s recently deceased father was Akhi Tork, his name indicating that he had been a leader of an akhavan organization, a fellowship of craftsmen, laborers, and merchants, like early guilds. This brotherhood (akhi could mean “my brother”) overlapped with a wider fotovvat movement to which even the caliph belonged, combining chivalric morals with Sufi mysticism and a touch of vigilante power, as its members wore uniform vests and trousers. At the time, the streets of Konya were full of such young men, often long-haired, with glinting daggers slipped into their ceremonial belts, protective yet intimidating.
Hosam was welcome because of his mild temperament. He was intuitive and empathetic, as he was said to feel the pains of his friends in his own body. He was considered a handsome paragon of decent behavior and, like Salah, was drawn to asceticism from an early age. Most importantly, for Rumi, Shams expressed great fondness for the young man. Shams’s judgments of character became Rumi’s judgments, and the circle forming around Shams would remain the nucleus of his own world. Decades later, Rumi described Hosam, in an affectionate letter to him, as “both father and son to me, both light and sight.” With the death of his father, Hosam was looked upon as the leader of the group of workingmen, and key in aligning these new followers with Rumi, just as Alaoddin, and other traditional pupils of Baha Valad, were growing disgruntled.
Shams had an aggressive, domineering manner that could seem extreme to many. Unlike Rumi, a public speaker practiced in politic turns of phrase and graced with the ability to charm, Shams was guileless. He avoided small talk: “I rarely speak with people.” His speech was spare, yet musical and expressive in its rhythms and its simple, moving imagery, occasionally like Rumi’s mature poetry. He disapproved of the gap between Rumi’s speaking in public and the voice he heard when they were alone. “He has a beautiful manner and speaks beautiful words, but don’t be satisfied with those,” he warned a group of students. “Beyond them is something else. Seek that from him.” He claimed, “He has two ways of speaking, one is circumspect, and the other, honest.”
During these intensive first three months together, the range of conversation between the two men was wide, and Shams did not hold back from exposing Rumi to all his beliefs and practices, acting as if these moments together might never be repeated. Shams especially encouraged the honest, heartfelt Rumi. His was entirely a religion of the heart. “Practice is practice of the heart, service is service of the heart, and devotion is devotion of the heart,” he told him. To illuminate Rumi’s heart, he felt the need to shake him loose not only from his father’s writings and al-Mutanabbi’s poetry but also from all the language and philosophy that had been his support and the basis of his fame in early adulthood. Consistent with some strains of Sufi thought, Shams saw words and logic as “veils,” hiding Rumi from the truth. Of the Greek philosophers, he preferred Plato because he “laid claim to love.” As Rumi would write of this radical reorientation:
When your love enflamed my heart
All I had was burned to ashes, except your love.
I put logic and learning and books on the shelf.
To replace thinking in words, especially the words of others, Shams rapidly introduced music, sung poetry, and dance into Rumi’s life, through the practice of sama. Technically meaning “listening,” sama applied to listening in the scholarly reading groups that Rumi had attended in Damascus, when a certificate, or ijazat al-sama, was granted for having heard a book read aloud. In many Sufi circles, though, sama came to mean a session of listening to music and poetry, sometimes accompanied by a whirling dance. The Great Kerra had taught Rumi as a boy to sway his arms to music. Shams, within weeks of their having first met, instructed him more fully in whirling—teaching him to literally spin loose of language and logic, while opening and warming his heart:
When all the particles of the air
Are filled with the glow of the sun
They all enter the dance, the dance,
And never complain of the whirling!
Shut away in private with Rumi, Shams soon became a compulsive topic of gossip throughout Konya, much of it malevolent and suspicious. The result of their sequester at the home of Salah was chaos and anxiety for Rumi’s family and seminary students. Both groups relied on Rumi, not just for moral guidance but also for their livelihood and support as the patronage for his madrase trickled down. As Sultan Valad dramatized the passing of the staff of leadership, his father’s pupils had sworn allegiance to Rumi, saying, “We will seek wealth and gain from you.” So Shams was disparaged as a bewitching sorcerer, casting a spell on their local saint, or an unlearned “Towrizi” from Tabriz. (“Towrizi” was another term for “Tabrizi,” in a local spoken dialect of Persian.)
Actually Shams was neither a sorcerer nor uneducated, yet he was not in the habit of sharing many of the details of his eccentric and extraordinary life. In their three-month period of intimacy, though, shut away in Salah’s home, Rumi did begin to learn his life story, as Shams told of decades passed as a lonely sojourner, seeking the truth, but often confronted with the pain of being misunderstood. While on the surface the conditions of their two lives contrasted highly, like Rumi, Shams had been driven by a longing rarely satisfied. The revelation of this shared quest and mutual dissatisfaction only ignited further their spiritual and intellectual romanticism, and sealed Rumi’s final commitment.
Like many others in this era of chaos and high mobility, Shams traveled long distances before arriving in Konya, having grown up in Tabriz, in eastern Azerbaijan, where he was born sometime around 1180. Similar to Balkh or Samarkand, though farther west, situated in a fertile province between modern-day Turkey and the former Russian Transcaucasia, Tabriz was an important Persian market on the main trade routes between India and Constantinople. The city was also pinpointed in lore as the location of the Garden of Eden. Rivers to its north and south flowed into the Caspian Sea; nearby was the salt lake of Urmia, and the hometown of Hosam’s family. Rumi never visited, though he spoke knowingly of “the rose-garden district” of the “glorious imperial city.”
Like most commercial cities of the era, Tabriz was constantly changing hands, a contested chip in power struggles. When Shams was a boy, the Turkic ruler was Atabeg Abu Bakr, described by him as “towering over everybody, and surrounded by armed guards an entire arrow’s flight around.” Similar to the Seljuks, the Atabegs favored Persian as their primary language, and art and culture flourished. Tabriz, too, was culturally closer to the cities of Central Asia. In 1220, the unchecked Mongol invasions of Khorasan reached the city. For urging resistance to the non-Muslim Mongols, Shams praised its ruler as the “greatest of the age,” though by the time Shams arrived in Konya to meet Rumi, Tabriz was securely part of the Il-Khan Dynasty of the Mongol Empire.
Both Rumi and Shams wrestled with the authority of father figures, but in opposite manners. Rumi had tried to imitate and please his revered father, while Shams, apparently an only child, from early on struggled with his own father, Ali ebn Malekdad, for lack of understanding and for being pampering and overprotective. “The fault is that of my father and mother for they brought me up with too much kindness,” Shams oddly complained. Shams’s father worried over signs of spiritual zeal in his unusual son, who had not yet reached puberty yet was already hearing preaching whenever he could, and fasting for at least a month at a time. “You’re not crazy,” his father said, “but I don’t understand your ways.” Shams felt as if he were a duck egg laid by a common hen. Like Rumi, at the same age, he was sure he saw “angels and higher and lower worlds. I assumed that everybody saw what I saw. Then I found out that they could not see it.”
His father’s “spoiling” was partly a response to the exceedingly sensitive spirit that he recognized in his introverted son. In Tabriz, stray cats often jumped in windows to swipe food from cloths on the floor, and were duly beaten off with sticks. Even if one of these cats broke a dish of milk, Shams’s father spared it because of his son’s delicate sensibility. Instead he would say, “This is destiny! This is a good omen!” In the fifteenth century, Dowlatshah, writing a Lives of the Poets in the Timurid court in Herat, recorded for the first time stories that had been passed down of Shams as a beautiful boy, with a temperament considered by some “effeminate,” supposedly proved by his skill as an embroiderer in gold, a handicraft learned from tarrying with the women in the harem.
Shams told Rumi of a search for kindred spirits that led him first to the lively Sufi neighborhoods of Tabriz—the Sorkhab quarter to the north, where many Sufis were buried in tombs at the foot of Valienkuh, or Saints’ Mountain, and, to the south, the Charandab quarter. The density of Sufis in these neighborhoods was so high that the souls of saints in the cemeteries were said to rise on Friday nights, form groups of red and green doves, and fly to Mecca to encircle the Kaaba. Nearly seventy Sufis were clustered about one charismatic leader, who built a Sufi lodge in the Sorkhab district and taught a popular form of devotion based on mystical states rather than on studying books. Many Sufis in Tabriz favored this simple, unlettered approach, of the type described by Rumi:
The Sufi’s book is not made of words
It’s nothing but a heart, as white as snow
Shams said to Rumi, of these inspiring local figures, stimulating so much excitement and growth, “There were people there in comparison to whom I am nothing, as if the sea cast me up, like waves tossing up driftwood. If I am like this, imagine what they were like!”
He told of gravitating, while still a teenager, toward Sheikh Abu Bakr Sallebaf of Tabriz, who headed a Sufi lodge in the Charandab district. A maker of wicker baskets by trade, his followers tended to be drawn from the working-class fotovvat movement and were often threateningly more loyal to him than to the rulers. “There were dervishes staying with Sheikh Abu Bakr,” remembered Shams. “When one of the assistants of the vizier would come to see him, the dervishes would show reverence to the sheikh a hundred times more than they had before the official arrived.” Sallebaf did not bother with all the Sufi trappings, such as bestowing cloaks. Either from this sheikh, or another passionate local Sufi, Shams learned the whirling practice that he was teaching to Rumi: “With such a love, the passionate companion seized me in the sama. He was turning me around like a little bird. Like a husky young man who hasn’t eaten for three days and suddenly finds bread—he grabs it, and breaks it apart hastily. I was like that in his hands.”
As with most of his mentors, though, Shams finally felt misunderstood, or underestimated, and stepped back from unconditional loyalty. He later confided to Sultan Valad, “I used to have a sheikh by the name of Abu Bakr in the city of Tabriz and he was a basket weaver by trade. I learned much about godly friendship from him, but there was something in me that my sheikh could not see and that nobody ever saw. Only Mowlana has seen it.” Unlike Baha Valad when Rumi had visions of angels, Abu Bakr cautiously forbade Shams to talk about his visions. In turn, Shams was suspicious of the practice of Tabrizi Sufis of begging for a living. So he set out from home on a protracted quest that lasted four decades and took him on a scribbling route through the Middle East. A highly motivated seeker, he traveled to Baghdad, Mecca, Damascus, Aleppo, and many Anatolian cities, meeting on his journey with most of the prominent Sufis of his day.
Shams supported himself on the road by working odd construction jobs, teaching the Quran to children, or weaving trouser ties. Due to the frail look that came from his indefatigable fasting, he was often passed over for hard labor crews, to his disappointment. “They chose everybody else but left me standing there,” he recalled. He was more successful as an elementary school instructor and appreciated the humility of the position. He recognized one of Rumi’s disciples as having once seen him as a teacher and not acknowledged his presence. “You used to come to the school and saw me as a mere teacher,” accused Shams. “But how often an unknown person does us a service.” He was proud of having taught a stubborn boy to memorize the Quran in three months, though he appeared to have done so with the help of a liberal use of strict beatings.
Eventually he found his way to Baghdad, the center of Sufism, some years before Rumi passed through with his family. Shams belonged to the Shafii School of Islamic jurisprudence, more common among Sufis than the Hanafi interpretation followed by Baha Valad, Rumi, and many from Central Asia. Shafii judges based their legal decisions as much as possible solely on the blueprint of the life and practices—or sunna—of Mohammad, often by using analogies. Shams and Rumi discussed one of the basic Shafii legal texts, written by an early professor of the Nezamiyye College in Baghdad. Yet their slightly different legal orientations never seemed to matter overly to either of them. “If Abu Hanifa saw Shafii, he would pull his head towards him and kiss his eyes,” said Shams, of the founders of the two schools. “How can God’s servants disagree with God?”
Likely having stayed at the Daraje Sufi lodge on the western bank of the Tigris, Shams told of being involved briefly with the Turkish Sufi Kermani, the leader of an order in Baghdad and Damascus. Kermani was one of the more vivid and outrageous of the Sufi figures of his time. Very much in the school of Ahmad al-Ghazali, who glimpsed flashes of divinity in the faces of beautiful boys, Kermani was notorious for tearing open the cloaks of beardless young men during sama dancing and pressing his chest against theirs. He was also rumored to have undone some of their turbans in the heat of whirling.
Although Kermani was decades older, Shams was not intimidated. One evening he came across the mystic staring into a bowl of water, and asked what he was doing. “I’m looking at the reflection of the moon in a bowl of water.” “Unless you have a boil in your neck, why not look at the sky?” Shams questioned, sarcastically. “Maybe you should see your doctor to be cured so that you can see the real thing.” His intent was to refute the practice of looking for divinity reflected in human beauty rather than directly in God. Nevertheless, Kermani invited Shams to become one of his close companions. Shams insisted that he first “drink wine with me in the middle of the bazaar of Baghdad.” Unlike Rumi, who at least bought wine for him publicly, Kermani refused, and Shams moved on.
In Damascus, Shams gravitated toward the renowned Sufi Salehiyye district, at the base of Mount Qasiyum, near Rebva, its panorama evoked by Rumi in the Masnavi using a popular Arabic proverb, which counseled maintaining perspective on life’s trials:
When you see grief, embrace it lovingly:
Look on Damascus from the top of Rebva
According to Shams’s own dating of his first passing encounter with Rumi, he was in Damascus around 1230, if not before or after. While Rumi may have had some contact with the circle around Ibn Arabi, Shams appears to have become a serious student. He spoke of a “Sheikh Mohammad,” who is thought to have been the visionary Andalusian Sheikh Ibn Arabi, to whom he had likely been referred by Ibn Arabi’s friend Kermani. “He was a mountain, a true mountain!” praised Shams. “He was such an exalted scholar, and he was more knowledgeable than me in every single way . . . a seeker of God.”
Yet Shams’s warm praise of Ibn Arabi’s scholarly knowledge was not the entire story. As with all his teachers, relations were occasionally contentious due to Shams’s defiant attitude. The two of them discussed many intricacies of prophetic sayings and related Quranic passages, a sort of Muslim version of the Talmudic scholarship of Jewish rabbis. Shams, though, was disappointed that they did not engage in more extended sparring. “Sheikh Mohammad used to give in to me, and not debate,” grumbled Shams. “Yet if he had debated, there would have been more benefit. I needed for him to debate with me!” He would accuse Rumi, too, of refusing to debate with him satisfactorily. Obviously tireless, Shams wore down his debating partners. “You crack a powerful whip!” wryly joked Sheikh Mohammad, yet he always referred to Shams endearingly as his “son.”
Off-putting for Shams was his opinion that Sheikh Mohammad did not “follow,” or imitate the Prophet Mohammad faithfully enough. “He was compassionate, a good friend. He was a unique human being, Sheikh Mohammad, but he did not follow.” This “following” was a charged issue in debates among the Sufis of Anatolia. Shams’s original question to Rumi when they met had pointed toward it. Wherever Rumi fell in this argument, his odes to Mohammad were certainly inspired by heights of adoring passion, which would have been shared by Shams. Rumi wrote of Mohammad in the mode of love, often returning to the account in Sura 54 of the Quran on his splitting the moon:
Our caravan leader, Mohammad, the pride of the world
The moon was split in two, by seeing the beauty of his face,
The moon, with its good fortune, gazed on his humility . . .
Look into my heart, split, like the moon, at every moment.
For such tender logic, Rumi became a “pearl” to Shams, and Ibn Arabi a mere “pebble.”
Shams also grew close in Damascus with Shehab Harive, a materialist philosopher from Herat, where he had been a prize student of Razi. Shehab relied on logic, analysis, and reason, and dismissed revelation, miracles like the splitting of the moon, or bodily resurrection as fables for common folk. Theirs was an unusual friendship that should never have been if the logic that Shehab found so irrefutable were applied. In the scholastic ferment of Damascus, Shehab was sought after for his brilliant arguing that God has no free will, backed up by the certainty that “intellect makes no mistakes.” “For me, death is as if a weak man has been loaded down with a sack tied to the neck,” he said. “Someone cuts the rope, the heavy load falls, and he is released.”
Years later in Konya, Shams was still arguing in his mind with his old friend Shehab. He told Rumi, “I would say, ‘I don’t want that God. I want a God who has free will. I seek that God. I would tell him to destroy that God of whom he spoke. . . . If the whole world were to accept that from Shehab, I still wouldn’t!” Yet Shams and Shehab were brought together by their aloof dispositions, their sharp misanthropy and stubbornness, and each other’s appetite for ceaseless debating. “This man is congenial,” said Shehab. Likewise Shams said, “I felt at ease when sitting with him. I found ease there.” He wittily added, “Though Shehab spoke blasphemy, he was pure and spiritual.” Tellingly, for Shams, their mutual affection outweighed any philosophical differences.
Contrary, difficult, and unpredictable, Shams debated and refuted his way through the emerging intellectual centers of Anatolia, as well. Traveling north from Aleppo, he spent time in Erzurum and Erzincan, where Baha Valad had taught in his “Esmatiyye” school for four years; Sivas; Kayseri, where Borhan passed the final years of life; and Aksaray, unusual in the region for having been organized by the Seljuks as a purely Muslim model town, a hundred miles northeast of Konya. Typical of Shams’s arguments was a disagreement with a scholar in Sivas. Annoyed that Shams contradicted him in public on a fine point about man’s knowledge of God’s essence, the scholar said, “You are asking old questions.” “What do you mean ‘old?’” Shams snapped back. “It’s aching with newness! Is this what passes for lecturing these days?” A number of eminent teachers refused to take on Shams as a private student because of his abrasive manner.
Having trouble finding his place within this well-ordered society of saints and scholars in the medieval Islamic world, Shams’s individuality kept interfering. His conversation was flecked with mentions of challenging texts of law and spirituality. He resided in a madrase college in Aleppo for fourteen months. Yet he never felt comfortable among either the legal scholars or the Sufi dervishes. Of his ambivalence, he said to Rumi, “At first I wouldn’t sit with jurists, I sat with dervishes. I used to say, ‘They’re strangers to dervishes.’ Then I began to know what it is to be a dervish and where they were coming from, and now I would rather sit with the jurists. At least the jurists have taken some trouble to learn. The others simply brag about being dervishes.”
Shams did have one trusted guide—his heart. He did not reject teachers one after another on the basis of a consistent theological stance as much as on feeling and intuition. Within his crusty exterior still beat the heart of the sensitive boy from Tabriz, which remained the source of his discernment. “Whenever you see someone whose character is expansive, speaking broadly and patiently, and blessing the whole world, so that his words open up your heart, and you forget this narrow world . . . he is an angel from paradise,” he counseled Rumi. “Whenever you hear in someone’s words anger and coldness and narrowness, you become chilled by his words. . . Whoever discovers this secret, and puts it into practice, pays no attention to a hundred thousand of the sheikhs.”
Shams told of visiting Konya on previous occasions. On his first visit, he found three dirham coins, marked as currency of the Seljuk sultan, on the road to a main gate, leading toward the town square. Kayqobad I was the first Seljuk sultan to mint gold coins, but Shams obviously found an ordinary one. Each night he would buy a half piece of fine white flatbread and give away an amount equal of its cost to the poor. When the money was used up, he departed once again for Syria. His visit in the fall of 1244 was more intentional. He later said that he had a dream in which God promised to answer his prayers, and to make him at last the companion of one saint, “in Rum.” Shams had arrived in Konya with strong hopes of reaching the end of his long and solitary road, and his meeting with Rumi clearly seemed to him the fulfillment of that prophetic dream, just as Rumi had revealed the premonition that he felt was surely being realized in Shams.
Sometime in 1245 Rumi and Shams emerged from the winter of seclusion that followed their first meeting. They returned to the Madrase Khodavandgar and began to take part in a curtailed manner in the life of the community. Making short work, though, of the longings of many family members and students for a complete resumption of normalcy, the two quickly disappeared behind closed doors within the madrase for yet another intimate encounter that lasted six months—to the astonishment of those left again counting the days against an uncertain ending to the strange silence that had fallen over the school, without any classes or sermons being delivered by their youthful patriarch.
The dismay of those left behind was understandable. The connection between these two complicated souls could seem weird and inscrutable. Shams was acerbic at times and misanthropic, likely at any moment to reveal the sharp edges of his personality that had caused many sincere Sufi masters throughout the Middle East to keep their distance or back off entirely. Rumi was his foil, a man of great charm and affection in a position of power and influence, now risking everything to remain locked away in insulated confinement, allowing all that he and his revered father built so diligently to be endangered, family and students adrift, while he lost himself in the challenge of Shams.
Still their love was instantaneous and enduring. Shams had seen Rumi for who he was, and that look of recognition had begun to set Rumi free. No matter how many honors and accomplishments he accumulated, Rumi still felt encumbered by his position. Shams saw that Rumi was creative, a poet and a mystic, not a gatekeeper for rules. He encouraged him to find his voice, and so Rumi owed him his newfound heart. Likewise, Shams, for all his grumbled bragging about self-reliance, traveled for decades in search of someone who would recognize his own authentic self, his softer core. As Shams had told Sultan Valad, Rumi was the first to do so. The religious life for men of their day was often demanding and restrictive. Together they created a safer, lighter domain of their own. Both were old enough to know the value of their discovery, and wished it to last.
The only two visitors allowed during this time were Salah and Sultan Valad, who gained even more of his father’s affection to the degree that he supported his devotion to Shams. Even Kerra was now excluded from the room, kept apart from her adored husband, who she was used to fussing over for trifles—like warning him to chew a stick of straw to ward off bad luck because he had broken his belt. Yet although her marital and family life had been greatly disrupted because of Shams, she never spoke publicly against him. Likewise Shams occasionally spoke affectionately of Kerra and seemed to understand her predicament. “Kerra Khatun is jealous,” he said. “But hers is the sort of jealousy that takes you to paradise, not hell, and is truly part of the path of goodness.” Belying slurs against Shams as untutored, Sultan Valad later accurately wrote of him as a man of “learning and knowledge.” (Rumi likewise attested to Shams’s familiarity with “alchemy, astronomy, mathematics, theology, astrology, law, logic, and debate.”) Sultan Valad looked up to Shams as “beloved” and a spiritual “sultan.” In turn, Shams took a guiding role, teaching him the meditative sama as well as counseling the adolescent young man.
While Rumi was undergoing this major change of life with Shams, and evolving in his understanding of his vocation, the Seljuk Empire of Rum, outside the wall of their cell in the Madrase Khodavandgar, was undergoing an equally major disruption, though more a devolution, a loss of power and might. The Sultan Kayqobad I, the patron of Rumi’s father—having overseen an uninterrupted stretch of prosperity and cultural glister—died in 1237, while rumors circulated claiming he was poisoned by his son and successor, Kaykhosrow II. On ascending the throne, Kaykhosrow II married the daughter of a ruler of Aleppo, but soon revealed his predilection for Christian ladies by marrying his second wife, Tamara, or Gorji Khatun, a young Georgian princess who rose to the level of his consort and eventually became one of Rumi’s most ardent female disciples.
Unlike his father, a paradigm of wise rule, Kaykhosrow II had a sillier disposition and delighted in nightly cups of wine while being entertained with songs and clever quatrains. Having inherited valuable territory that included most of Asia Minor, Kaykhosrow II managed during his decade of governance to diminish Seljuk Rum to a kingdom in name only, his father’s empire never regaining its former grandeur. First among his challenges, caused by the populations displaced from Khorasan by the Mongols, were popular Turkoman Sufi preachers, usually called “Baba,” meaning “father,” by their followers, who preached against the power of the state and set rural Turks against urban Seljuks. These incendiary preachers riled both the Khorasani refugees and local peasants until Kaykhosrow II put down their insurrection with the help of Frankish mercenaries.
Even more destabilizing were Mongol forces on his eastern borders. In 1243 Kaykhosrow II assembled a large force to make a stand at the battle of Kose Dag, where the smaller Mongol army routed them. As panic spread through Anatolia, Kaykhosrow II escaped to the coast while his vizier negotiated a weak peace treaty, agreeing to payment of annual tributes of gold and silver to the Mongols in return for sparing Konya. By the time Kaykhosrow II returned to the capital, he had outlived his power, and Konya its political independence. (Shams’s praise of the Tabrizi ruler Shams Toghri for bravely standing up to the Mongols would have been heard as a putdown of Kaykhosrow II.)
Though a sense of floating anxiety that both Rumi and Shams knew well, from the encroachment of the Mongols into their native homelands, now permeated Konya, the streets into which they reemerged after their second retreat were still reasonably safe and unchanged from the earlier days of peace and prosperity before Shams’s arrival. Shams tended to thrive in one of two settings—locked away in seclusion, or wandering and seeing the sights. He claimed these contraries in his state were actually one. “Be among the people, but be alone,” he advised Rumi. “Don’t live your life in seclusion, but be solitary.” In Konya, Shams took his own advice, accepting that Rumi could not always be with him. “When I’m by myself, I’m free,” said Shams, with a dose of his usual sarcasm. “I wander anywhere and sit in any shop. I cannot take him along—a well-born man, one of the muftis of the city—to look in on every seedy place.” A favorite place for them to at least talk without disturbance was the rooftop of Rumi’s school, where they could look down in the bright light of a full moon on neighbors on warm nights sleeping on their terraces. Rooftops became sweet reminders for Rumi of these elusive private interludes:
Sometimes Love shone on the roof like a moon
Sometimes like a breeze, moving from lane to lane
Rumi and Shams did go walking together through the epicenter of Konya, its thriving market district, which especially fascinated their moral imaginations with its power to lure and seduce by playing on basic desires and fantasies. As Rumi later wrote:
The world is an illusion, and we are like merchants,
Trying to buy its moonlight, measured by the yard
They paused to watch gypsies, or lulis, who passed through Konya. With their music and rope dances, they excited interest and were given money. Sugar was sold in the apothecary shops in little brown bags, or wrapped in packets of paper, like candy. So Rumi later wrote of Shams:
Whenever I write the name of Shams of Tabriz
I sprinkle my favorite sugar into a paper wrapper
Both men were equally drawn to the disturbing as well as the pretty. Rumi was reminded by the butcher shops selling intestines of the cruel beloved of Persian love poetry, like a butcher, his hands bloodied with the livers of unrequited lovers. Fascinated by the dark shops offering bloodletting, near the herbalists, Shams reflected on its customers choosing to disappear into the darkness while “a sun has come up, filling the world with light!” More pointedly he suggested learned theologians would do better to “be like the poor Russian man, cloaked in sheepskin, wearing a tall fur hat, and selling sulfur matches.”
Just as central as the bazaar in Rumi’s and Shams’s life in Konya were its many hammam, or bathhouses, particularly as Seljuks were enamored of fresh flowing water and made medicinal use of the countless mineral springs of Anatolia. They both frequented the hammam, singly and together. “I stop in every bathhouse,” reported Shams. Rumi was visceral in his fondness for the hammam and dwelled on each detail, taking in the nimbleness of the attendant stoking heat in the stove, or the cup for pouring water over the body, or the thick sultani soap. He was most fascinated by decorative paintings on bathhouse walls, often of heroes from the Shahname, and meditated on the difference between a painted heroic Rostam and a real warrior, between artifice and spirit, and the way light falling from a window in a dome animated these static figures:
The world is a bathhouse, its skylight eternity
Illumined by the window is the hero’s beauty
Following their freeing spell of withdrawal, Rumi did step back, tentatively, into his former life as a religious leader in the city, too. Remaining in his sights was Qonavi, the godson and designated deputy of Ibn Arabi. After Ibn Arabi’s death, Qonavi had moved north to Konya and was continuing the philosophical tradition of Ibn Arabi, filling in more steps of mystical knowledge in learned Arabic treatises. Rumi and Qonavi were about the same age, and before Shams’s arrival, Rumi attended his lectures. Yet with Shams’s influence, their ideas increasingly diverged, as Qonavi preached the path of knowledge, and Rumi performed the path of love. They came to represent the two antipodes of Sufi temperament in Konya yet remained respectful, if wary, colleagues.
Rumi returned to teaching as well, but with Shams doing most of the talking, or the two of them engaged in dialogue in front of a hall of students. Many of the more conservative disciples were horrified to find Rumi nearly silent, or deferring to the words and opinions of the strangely rambling mystic from Tabriz, who spoke at times in riddles or enigmatic non sequiturs. Like Rumi, Shams was an intellectual. Yet inspired by the “unlettered” Tabrizi mystics of his childhood, he had left learning behind, as if he had climbed a tall ladder that he then pushed away. Rumi likely assigned Sultan Valad to write down these sessions, as one of the surviving transcripts appears to be in his handwriting.
Instead of lecturing on logic and religious law, Shams preferred to speak vulnerably and tenderly of his friendship with Rumi. These public teaching circles became love fests as much as occasions for unpacking one or another abstruse topic. Shams modeled speaking from the heart rather than the more formal double-talk, hypocritically mastered, he grumbled, by Rumi, which made him so impatient. “We’ve met each other in an amazing way,” he exclaimed, with transparent joy. “It’s been a long time since two people like us have fallen together. We’re extremely open and obvious. The saints did not used to be so obvious. But we are also hidden and we do have our secrets. . . . I’m so happy to be your friend—so happy that God has given me such a good friend! My heart gives me to you—whether I exist in that world or in this world, whether I’m in the pit at the bottom of the earth or above the heavens, whether I’m up or down.”
He revealed, in this open setting, the ground rules of their friendship: “The first stipulation I made was that our life should be without hypocrisy, as if I were alone.” He insisted that he saw himself not as a sheikh but as a friend: “God has not yet created a human being who could be Mowlana’s sheikh. Yet I am also not somebody who can be a disciple. Nothing of that remains in me.” He compared his beloved Rumi to moonlight and, audaciously, to the qibla, pointing the direction to Mecca for prayer: “I wanted someone of my own kind so that I could make him my qibla and turn my face towards him. I was bored with myself. . . . Now that I have that qibla, he understands and grasps what I’m saying.” According to Shams, Rumi was a bolt of natural energy, dislodging the dam that caused his waters to stagnate: “Now the water flows forth smoothly, freshly, and splendidly. . . . I speak eloquently and beautifully. Inside, I’m bright and luminous.” He put much stress on the freeing informality between them both in public and private.
Shams not only spoke of his feelings, but he also acted them out, leaning over to stroke or take hold of Rumi’s hand. “Now rub my little hand,” he cajoled. “It’s been awhile since you’ve rubbed it. Do you have something better to do? Rub just like that for a while.” He rambled on in squibs of exalted poetry: “In the lane of the beloved there’s a kind of hashish. People take it and lose their minds. Then they can’t find the beloved’s house and they fail to reach the beloved.” And he testified to having finally found meaning, not in a set of ideas, but in their friendship. Truth, Shams implied, was face-to-face: “The purpose of life is for two friends to meet each other and to sit together face to face in the spirit of God, far from earthly desires. The goal is not bread or the baker, not the butcher shop or the butcher. It’s simply this very hour, while I’m sitting here at ease in your company.”
Shams examined theology, but his approach was untraditional, as he acidly put down the philosophers’ need to prove God’s existence. As Rumi recalled one incident:
In the presence of Shamsoddin of Tabriz, someone said, “I have proven the existence of God, indisputably.” The next morning Shamsoddin said, “Last night the angels came down and blessed that man, saying, ‘Praise to God, he has proven our God. May God grant him long life!’ . . . O poor man, God is a given fact. His existence needs no logical proof. If you must do something, then just prove your own dignity and your own rank in His presence. He exists without proof. Of this there is no doubt.”
Shams ridiculed scholars for quoting sayings of the Prophet and giving the source—a “chapter and verse” approach—rather than speaking from their hearts and citing God as the source. He skirted heresy with provocative comments: “I do not revere the Quran because God spoke it. I revere it because it came out from the mouth of Mohammad.”
Rumi, too, grew bolder about expressing his feelings for Shams in public. One day he was attending the inaugural ceremony for an important new madrase. Shams arrived late and he was sitting among the onlookers in the entranceway, where shoes were removed and stacked. Rumi sat with the prominent religious scholars, and a symposium was being conducted on a most pressing issue for them—“Which place is the seat of honor?” Echoing his father, while turning social decorum on its head, Rumi said:
The seat of honor for the scholars is in the middle of this raised platform. The seat of honor for the mystics is in a corner of their own house. The seat of honor for Sufis is next to the raised platform. But in the practice of true lovers, the seat of honor is next to the beloved, wherever he may be.
At that moment Rumi stood up and quickly exited the stage, making his way through the press of gathered dignitaries, and shockingly sat down in the far vestibule next to Shams.
Such behavior was endured because Rumi was so cherished by the town fathers. They were not so patient with Shams, and kept trying to find ways to weaken his position or drive him away. One day a delegation of these local notables showed up at Rumi’s school to raise the issue of Shams and wine drinking, which was forbidden in Islam, though famously a test case of rules and rituals among some Sufis. He was obviously at least understood to be drinking real wine, not just divine wine. So they asked Rumi the leading question, “Is wine forbidden or not?” His cutting reply was dismissive, as he showed that he refused to be intimidated by them, even using a Khorasani curse:
It depends who is drinking. If you pour a flask of wine into the ocean, the ocean would not be transformed or polluted, or darkened by the wine, and so it would be permitted to use its water for ablutions and drinking. But, without doubt, one drop of wine would make a tiny pool of water unclean. . . . My clear answer to you is that, if Shamsoddin drinks wine, for him everything is permitted, since he has the overwhelming power of the ocean. But for you—you brother of a whore—even eating a piece of barley bread should be forbidden.
Rumi appeared to acknowledge to them that Shams was indeed drinking real wine and presumably did not think of himself as a “tiny pool of water” rather than an ocean.
Shams did not help his position with the elders of Konya or with Rumi’s more immediate circle inside his school. He made enemies more easily than friends, as he began to act as a kind of secretary, chamberlain, even bodyguard, interceding, blocking access, and occasionally charging a small fee for audiences with Rumi: “What have you brought and what will you give away as an offering, so that I show him to you?” One day a visitor asked Shams, who was sitting in front of the door to Rumi’s private room, collecting money, “For your part, what have you brought since you ask something of us?” “I’ve brought myself,” Shams answered, dramatically, “and I’ve sacrificed my life for him.” To Rumi, Shams explained the taxes as a test: “One of them claims to love you from the bottom of his soul, but if I ask him for one dirham, he loses his mind, he loses his soul, and can’t tell his head from his feet. I tested them so they would understand a bit about themselves. But they began to revile me saying that I discouraged your followers.”
Such chafing words and deeds caused resentment to grow. “The lovely son of Baha Valad from Balkh has become obedient to a child of Tabriz,” complained one of Rumi’s followers, obviously from Khorasan, and perhaps among the cadre of men who had accompanied Baha Valad and his family on their emigration. “Does the land of Khorasan take orders from the land of Tabriz?” Other Khorasanis went about saying that the people of Tabriz were all “jackasses.” (These loyalists were eventually buried near Baha Valad in the imperial rose garden.) In his later biography in verse about his father, Sultan Valad recorded some of the harsher of their cascade of outraged comments to each other: “Who is this who stole our sheikh from us?” Paranoia mixed with jealousy as they accused Shams of “‘hiding him away from everybody else. Of his existence there was not a trace. We no longer may see his face. We no longer may sit at his side. He must be a magician casting an evil spell, mesmerizing our sheikh with his incantations.’”
These grievances were voiced often, and openly, and Shams was just as strident in defending himself in his teaching circles, with Rumi present. He easily quashed the argument of the Khorasani by saying that if a man from Constantinople possessed grace, it would be incumbent even on a man from Mecca to follow him. He mused aloud on the difficulties that the rough edges of his personality might create for others. “Mowlana has great beauty, while I have both beauty and ugliness,” he explained, perceptively enough. He recognized that his own gentleness was balanced with severity. But ugliness and severity, in Shams’s assessment, were elements of absolute honesty and frankness, the absence of hypocrisy. “I’m all one color on the inside,” he bragged. And he claimed to thrive on insults. “I am only troubled when someone praises me,” he goaded his critics.
Rumi occasionally joined in the argument, rebuffing those who complained that Shams was “arrogant, greedy, and doesn’t mix with us.” He counseled understanding:
You only say so because you do not love Mowlana Shamsoddin. If you loved him, you would not see greed or anything reprehensible.
Hidden in Rumi’s response was his cherished tale of Majnun and Layli. As he liked to tell the story, Layli was ordinary, her beauty only obvious in Majnun’s own loving vision. He clearly knew his love for the grating and sharp-tongued Shams confused them:
During Majnun’s time there were girls more beautiful than Layli, but they were not Majnun’s favorite. They said to Majnun, “There are girls more beautiful than Layli. Should we bring them to you?” He answered, “But I don’t love Layli because of her face. She is not just a face. Layli is like a cup in my hand. I drink wine from that cup. So I am in love with the wine that I’m drinking from her. You look only at the cup. You are not aware of the wine. If I had a golden cup, decorated with jewels and stones, and it contained vinegar, or something besides wine, why should I use that cup? A broken old pumpkin that holds wine is worth a hundred times more.”
Mostly, Rumi did not bother to argue. One time, on hearing someone begin to broach a criticism of Shams, he jumped up and shouted, “I’m not going to listen to this!” and exited the hall. At other times, he spoke so honestly of the depths of their friendship that he left little room for criticism in the wake of his blatant exhilaration and passion—articulating for them the eternal love at the core of their striking spiritual connection:
On the Day of Resurrection, when the ranks of the prophets and the categories of the Friends of God will be drawn up, and the believers of the Muslim community, troop after troop, will gather together, Shamsoddin and I, holding one another’s hand, will walk proudly and graciously into Paradise.
Rumi was remarkably confident about the great changes caused in his life by Shams, whose bold commands helped him not only to relax from reading his father’s words but also from copying the manner of life of his father, as much as he continued to respect him. He realized that he had been given an opportunity for a more expansive existence. Shams allowed Rumi to experience the heartfelt warmth that he would always associate naturally enough with the sun, from which creativity soon began to flow. As he wrote of this disruption, appropriately, ventriloquially channeling the voice of Shams:
You were silent and I made you a storyteller
You were pious and I taught you how to sing