A few days before Nowruz, the Persian holiday marking the first day of spring, in March 1246—about fifteen months after appearing in Konya and upending Rumi’s life—Shams abruptly disappeared. He departed Konya without any warning, leaving behind Rumi, who became startled, confused, and distraught. Influencing his quick exit was the rising volume and intensity of anger from Rumi’s followers and, perhaps, Rumi’s ambivalence about Shams’s insistently pressing him to abandon his former life entirely.
Sultan Valad vividly recalled the agitation that had been so consuming in the days before Shams vanished. A hint of violence was in the air. Some angry men even flashed their daggers at Shams or cursed at him as he passed them in the street. “All wondered when he would quit town or come to a wrathful end,” Sultan Valad wrote. Driving this wish for the eclipse of Shams was the expectation of Rumi’s followers that they would have their teacher and old way of life back. Yet the opposite occurred. Rumi withdrew entirely. As Sultan Valad poetically described, “His bird of affection flew away from their houses.” Realizing their situation had deteriorated—not improved—many repented.
If Shams had been devising another of his tests, Rumi passed. He found that he was not able to return to his earlier ways. He was not able to go forward, either, as his new life pivoted on Shams. In its place was an emptiness Rumi was unable to fill, and he was left feeling paralyzed and depressed. As Aflaki reported, “Because of being apart from Shamsoddin, Mowlana grew unsettled. Day and night he found no rest and did not sleep.” Unknown to Rumi, Shams had traveled to Syria, either Damascus or Aleppo, or both. Yet he may have heard of Rumi’s condition. Even though it took a while to travel this distance, many shuttled between these cultural capitals. So Shams relented a bit. He entrusted a note with a traveler to Konya, reassuring Rumi he was alive and thinking of him: “Please be aware this humble man is praying for you, and mixes with no one else.”
Rumi’s response was electric. He composed at least four letters in verse for Shams, moved by this momentous personal crisis to begin to try to find his voice as a poet. Rumi may have been experimenting earlier, since he was an aficionado of Arabic and Persian poetry, and implied in one stanza that he had begun writing poems:
When you’re not here the sama is forbidden
Music and dance are pelted with stones, like Satan
Without you not even one ghazal has been written
Until the clear message of your letter arrived.
The first few of these urgent verse-letters lack the confident tone of his mature works. Tellingly, he began in Arabic, the more intellectual and formal language of the time. He did choose, though, as his form, the ghazal—his lifetime favorite—a rhymed poem of seven or more lines classically used as an erotic poem, sung by minstrels mostly on frivolous topics of wine, women or boys, and song, and eventually developed as a vehicle for mystical love poems. Like the English or Italian sonnet, the ghazal could be modulated from low to high themes, still redolent of the roughness of the Bedouin desert chants, while expressing the subtler Sufi sentiments.
Although Shams was so derisive of the poetry of al-Mutannabi, these first poems Rumi wrote to him often sound like that favorite Arabic poet, both in language and in courtly convention. Very much a poet-for-hire, al-Mutannabi had specialized in qasidas, or odes of praise, written in a heroic style for a tenth-century ruler of Aleppo. In these paeans, the king is compared to the sun, his perfumed scent is carried on the breezes, his power rivals that of lions, his favor to another causes the poet painful jealousy. Rumi simply adapted these majestic tropes for Shams, comparing him to King Qobad, a Sassanian Persian king, or to a great military commander bringing triumph and victory. He instinctively knew that only the grandest of comparisons matched his spiraling emotions.
If these first attempts were imitative copies of classical poems of love and praise, like juvenile poems, some of Rumi’s wit and vulnerability are evident—that other voice Shams heard when they were in private. A link in many ghazals was the radif, a repeating refrain of a word or phrase at the end of each line, adding a percussive beat that made for easy group chanting, when recited in public. For one of these verses, Rumi chose as his radif a supplication of a command, “Come!”—an urgent refrain imploring Shams’s return:
Oh you, light within the heart, come!
Goal of all effort and desire, come!
You know my life is in your hands.
Do not oppress your worshiper, come!
Midway through the supplication, Rumi cleverly switched to Persian, and likewise switched from the Arabic for “Come!”—“Taal”—to the Persian for “Come!”—“Biya!”:
What is “Taal” in Persian? Biya!
Either come or show mercy, Biya!
Rumi and Shams lived in a bilingual world, and this switching back and forth matched the way they spoke together and with others. When recounting to the disciples his important memory of meeting Rumi, Shams shifted to Arabic. When Rumi dictated to Hosam the precise date of Shams’s departure for Syria, he segued into formal Arabic:
The Sun of Truth and Faith, the hidden light of God in the beginning and in the end—may God lengthen his life and favor us with greeting him—departed on Thursday the 21st day of the month of Shavval in the year 643.
(A waning quarter moon on a lunar calendar, the date corresponded to March 11, 1246.)
Rumi deputized his son Sultan Valad to deliver his reply to Shams in Syria, sending with him a tribute of gold and silver coins. The offering was a subtle reminder of the tariffs that Shams had demanded of Rumi’s followers to prove their love. In an accompanying prose letter, Rumi addressed the issue of these followers and assured Shams of their sincere change of heart—they were eager for Shams’s return and looked forward to his renewed teachings. In his verses, though, Rumi allowed more intimate glimpses of a desperate heart, coded and camouflaged in standard poetic decor:
From the moment when you went away
I was stripped of sweetness, turned to wax
All night long I burn like a candle,
Scorched with fire, but deprived of honey.
Separated from your beauty, my body
Lies in ruins and my soul is a night owl
He signed off with his favorite source of puns from that time on—Shams’s name, as “shams,” lent itself, in Arabic, to the sun, as well as to Syria (Sham) and, in the ancient yet still current Pahlavi Persian vocabulary, to the night or early evening hours (sham):
May my night be turned to bright morning by you
You, who are the pride of Syria, Armenia and Rum!
His saddlebag filled with the missive, gold and silver coins, and the verse letters—both charming and intense—Sultan Valad, then twenty, set off for Syria. In his writings, he spoke of being dispatched by his father to Damascus. The biographer Aflaki later gave more details of Rumi directing Sultan Valad even more precisely to a well-known caravanserai located in the Sufi Salehiyye neighborhood, where he told him to expect to find Shams playing backgammon. Shams in his later accounting of his time away from Rumi in Syria spoke fondly of Damascus, and of his special love for the grand Umayyad Mosque, repeating the well-worn equation of Damascus with paradise. Mostly, though, he spoke of having lingered in Aleppo, so that Sultan Valad either went to both cities, the two men stopping in Aleppo on the way from Damascus, or two separate trips were taken.
In his own mind, the high point of Shams’s retreat from Konya, and the city with the greatest pull on his spirit to remain and never depart for Rum, was Aleppo. Shams reported having felt the excitement of a return visitor, sitting near its grand Citadel, close to the district where Rumi’s tutor Ibn al-Adim lived: “It’s a wonderful city, Aleppo—the houses, the streets. I looked around happily, seeing the tops of the battlements. I looked down, I saw a world and a moat.” Of a fortress a short distance from town, he said, “If they had said to me, ‘Your father has come out of the grave and wishes to see you. He has come to Tel Bahser to see you and then die once again—come see him.’ I would have said, ‘Tell him to die.’ I wouldn’t have left Aleppo even for him.” If still unsure of his feelings about Rumi, he was quite sure he had no desire to exchange Aleppo for Konya.
Shams brought between three hundred and five hundred dirhams from Konya, and paid seven dirhams a month for his room, so he did not need to seek odd jobs, as in the past. He also ate frugally. When he had been on the road in earlier days, he was so ascetic that once a day would he go to a lamb’s head seller to buy bread and broth. When a shopkeeper insisted that Shams be given the best cut of lamb in his soup, Shams switched to a shop where they did not give him any such special treatment. On this trip, he was more relaxed about eating. As he later reminisced to Rumi, “I remember in Aleppo, I was saying I wished you were there. When I was eating, I would have given some to you, as well.”
Apart from his absolute love for the city, though, Shams did experience mixed feelings about his motives for being there and his split with his beloved Rumi. During their first month apart he kept vacillating. He was testing Rumi’s resolve. He was also testing himself, deciding whether to walk away from such a cherished friend after having spent much of his adult life looking for him. He later confided to Rumi, “Such praying I did for you in Aleppo in that caravanserai where I was staying! It was not right to show my face to the people when you were not there. So I busied myself with work or spent time at a Sufi lodge.” At other times he felt ready to revert to his earlier, freer life: “When I was in Aleppo, I was busy praying for Mowlana. I prayed a hundred prayers, and only brought to mind memories that increased my affection, avoiding those that cooled the affections, but I had no intention to return.” Balanced in Shams’s thoughts, as well, was the mission of transformation he called “the work.” He did understand their friendship as not merely emotionally charged, but also critical for releasing Rumi’s potential.
Eventually Sultan Valad, with a retinue of twenty companions, discovered Shams’s whereabouts: “When I found Shamsoddin, I put my forehead to the ground, and bowed.” According to the account in Aflaki, Shams was touched and moved to see Sultan Valad again: “Kissing Valad several times, Shamsoddin caressed him beyond measure and asked after Mowlana.” Sultan Valad duly presented the gifts, pouring all the coins into Shams’s shoes, and then passed on a crucial message from his father. “All the companions of Rum have bowed their heads in complete sincerity,” he reported. “Having repented, they have sought forgiveness beyond measure and regret what they did. They have resolved that from this day forward they will not show any disrespect and will not allow any envy to arise within themselves. They are all awaiting your most blessed arrival.”
Shams relented—though when he later discussed their exchange that day with Sultan Valad, he insisted that he had been far from certain about his choice. He was not simply being evasive. He reminded Sultan Valad that his composure had not changed when he saw him: “When you came to Aleppo did you see any change in the color of my face? It’s as if it had been the same for a hundred years.” He went on to admit that he had been suffering greatly inside from the separation: “But it was so unpleasant and difficult for me that it would be bad to speak of it. Sometimes I enjoyed myself. But the unpleasantness was stronger. I preferred Mowlana.” No one knew better than Rumi the hesitation that his son was likely to encounter. Shams had evidently been talking about this choice for some time. Before the group left Konya for Syria, Rumi wrote and performed for them a more lighthearted ghazal that warned of just that strong possibility:
Comrades, go, and bring back my beloved
Bring back to me my runaway beloved
Lure him with sweet melodies, and gifts of gold,
Bring him back home, his face a beautiful moon.
If he promises that he’ll come along shortly
He may be deceiving you. All his promises are tricks.
Rumi’s playful tone implied that he judged the worst over. Likewise playful was his toying with the romantic conventions of the ghazal—addressed to women in Arabic lyrics, though more often in the Persian tradition to young men, especially Turk soldiers in court, or wine stewards, with curly black hair and eyebrows. Shams was as far from that beardless ideal as from the warrior kings Rumi compared him to in his verse letters, while at the same time arousing all of the fiery love, longing, and awe that the imagery carried.
The distance from Aleppo to Konya was about four hundred miles, which would have taken a camel caravan approximately a month. Sultan Valad’s contingent traveled on horseback. According to Aflaki, as they now had an extra rider, they were one horse short. Sultan Valad reasonably enough insisted that Shams ride the horse. Less reasonably, when Shams suggested their riding together, Sultan Valad refused, on the grounds of proper respect in the presence of a sheikh. Given the ancient emphasis on elaborate rituals of politeness in Persian culture, this exchange might have gone on extensively. “It is not permitted for a king and a slave to ride on one horse at the same time,” demurred Sultan Valad, attending to Shams’s stirrup throughout the entire journey.
Rumi and Shams’s separation lasted about a year, with Shams’s reentry to Konya taking place around April 1247. As Rumi was dejected for months, his happiness anticipating Shams’s return was nearly manic. He saw the chance of having his life both ways—exploring the freedom, creativity, and love Shams offered, while remaining responsible to family and community. If Rumi had been more committed when the two—according to Shams—briefly met in Damascus during his student years, he might have pursued a life as a poet and mystic. He, too, could have been a “flier” like Shams, Attar, or Sanai. As his revolution occurred midlife, he needed to set responsibilities bequeathed by his father against the adventurous alternatives offered by Shams. The hope he might be able to have both made him giddy.
Rumi wishfully told his disciples of the wonderful life they would now share, as he took them at their word about leaving behind their jealousy of the provocative Shams:
This time you will find yourselves taking more pleasure from Shamsoddin’s words that faith is the sail on the ship of a man’s life. When the sail is set, the wind takes it to great places. Without the sail, words are nothing but wind.
Trying to please, these disciples encouraged their teacher’s excitement by reporting rumors of Shams being spotted on his way to Konya. In his playful response, Rumi scolded them for these false sightings, making a comparison between seeing Shams and having spiritual insight. Without such insight, Shams would remain invisible:
These people say, “We saw Shamsoddin of Tabriz, Master, we did see him.” You brother of a whore, where did you see him? It’s like someone who can’t even make out a camel on a roof saying, “I found the eye of the needle and threaded it!”
Shams’s highly anticipated homecoming was treated as a civic holiday. When Sultan Valad arrived at the nearby Zanjirli Caravanserai, he sent ahead a dervish to inform Rumi of their imminent arrival. Rumi alerted his disciples, who paraded out beyond the city gates to greet Shams in a welcoming ceremony that included banging on kettledrums, waving banners, and reciting poetry. Sultan Valad then led Shams’s horse to Rumi’s house. Again they saw each other, and again their hearts expanded. As Sultan Valad described the event, stressing the lack of clarity, or the mutual feeling, which marked their unconventional relationship, they fell at each other’s feet, “and no one knew who was the lover and who the beloved.” This perceptive comment on the abandon of their greeting was circulated widely enough to find its way eventually into a quatrain of Rumi’s:
With his beautiful face, the envy of angels,
He came to me at dawn and wept on my chest
He wept and I wept until the break of day
“How strange,” they said. “Of these two, who is the lover?”
Rumi celebrated Shams’s arrival by performing occasional poems—writing poems for special occasions would remain his lifelong practice. These lines were musical, and trancelike, designed to accompany the whirling and meditating that went on at festivals. In his rousing lyric for Shams’s return, he used the same radif, “come,” which he had used in his imploring verse letter, but in the past tense, as a wish fulfilled, making a full circle. The poem was a long exhalation of the breath Rumi had been holding for nearly a year:
My sun and moon has come, my sight and hearing has come
My silver one has come, my mine of gold has come.
My ecstasy has come; the light of my life has come
Whatever you may name has come; my wish has come.
My highway robber has come; my parole breaker has come
That fair-skinned Joseph, suddenly by my side, has come.
Today is better than yesterday, my dear old friend,
Last night I was ecstatic, hearing news that he had come.
The one I was looking for last night with lantern in hand
Today, like a basket of flowers strewn on my way, has come . . .
Now is the time to rise up, as morning rises in the world
Now is the time to roar, because my lion has come.
The peaceable community to which Shams returned held together without unraveling for several months. During the first weeks, different members of Rumi’s circle hosted parties that included music, poetry, prayer, and sama dancing in their private homes, celebrating Shams’s return. Eventually he began teaching again, speaking to the newly respectful students about a theme close to his heart—the beauty of the world, accessible beyond our confining minds. “The heart is wider than the heavens,” Shams taught them, “and subtler and brighter than the starry skies. Why squeeze your heart with thoughts and whispering doubts? Why make this joyous world into a narrow prison? Like a caterpillar, we weave a cocoon of thoughts, doubts, and fantasies, slowly suffocating ourselves.” He added, “I never struggle with sayings of the Prophet, except ‘This world is the prison of the believer.’ But I don’t see any prison. I ask you, ‘Where is the prison?’”
While Shams did not pride himself on being a poet, and did not work at the craft, he did have poetic talent and accented these talks with couplets of his own that he recited spontaneously. “Tolerate me for just two or three more days—in the book of my life, only a single page remains,” he said, sighing aloud in a rhyme one day, expressing a sentiment eerily hinting at an imminent ending. Many of these lines show up in Rumi’s later poems, either because he memorized them, or he pored over the pages of Shams’s transcribed talks, as he had pored over his father’s pages—often in poems revolving around Shams:
In the book of my life, only a single page remains.
His sweet jealousy has left my soul restless
In my book, he wrote words sweeter than sugar,
Words that would make the shy moon blush.
Under no illusion about the display of newfound respect among the students of Rumi, Shams knew that much of their warmth was contrived. He was too observant not to realize that theirs was a calculated reverence, and, with his uncensored frankness, he said as much in public. “They felt jealous in the past because they supposed, ‘If he were not here, Mowlana would be happy with us,’” Shams summarized the matter. “Then they experienced that things became worse, but Rumi gave them no consolation. Whatever they had in the beginning, they lost, and then even all the passion they held about the situation dissipated. So now they are happy and they honor me and they pray for me.”
After his return Shams and Rumi resumed their intense companionship. According to the early biographer Sepahsalar, who presented himself as having been by Rumi’s side from the earliest days, “Mowlana became even more involved with Shamsoddin, even more than the first time they met each other. They became more united than ever. Day and night they talked to each other, and they sank into each other.” Yet even with the lighter atmosphere in the Madrase Khodavandgar, Shams still longed for the open road. If Rumi’s ideal solution was having Shams available in Konya as he went about his duties, Shams’s wish was to disappear with Rumi as his traveling companion. He wanted to show him his homeland. “I wish we could take a trip together to Mosul and—you have not seen those places—to Tabriz,” he cajoled Rumi. “You could preach in the pulpit, and then mingle with the crowds and see how they are when they get together just among themselves. Afterwards we could travel to Baghdad, and then travel on to Damascus.”
Implicit in such invitations was Shams’s persistent desire to depart. When he spoke with Sultan Valad of his composure when he arrived in Syria, he insinuated that Rumi was far more distraught and agitated by the sudden separation. The “work,” the teaching with Rumi, was going well. Indeed the “sinking” of Rumi into Shams was the spiritual immersion that he had hoped to achieve. Yet the threat of an abrupt departure still made Rumi uneasy, while Shams’s years of solitude had accustomed him to self-reliance, or at least so he claimed, though he had not been entirely sure when he was in Aleppo. “If truly you are not able to accompany me, I’m not afraid,” insisted Shams. “I did not suffer when I was separated from you, nor does being together with you bring me happiness. My happiness comes from within and my suffering comes within. Now, I know living with me is difficult. I know that I am complicated. I am neither this nor that.”
A significant interruption in this steady pattern of communing followed by threats of leaving forever occurred in the early winter of 1247 when Shams, now in his sixties, surprisingly asked Rumi for permission to marry Kimiya, a young woman brought up in Rumi’s harem. (As she may have shared a name with Kerra’s daughter, some would surmise she was Rumi’s stepdaughter.) This request, with its implication of settling down, not only marked a change in the tenor between Shams and Rumi, but also a sharp break from Shams’s lifetime habit of wandering loosely, with no family ties, though he did mention having once had children, whom he left behind to travel on his quest. Kimiya was a “pure and beautiful” young woman, and theirs was a December-May marriage. This late-life blossoming of desire on the part of Shams seemed sincere, though it clearly began as a practical transition to a more stable connection with Rumi. As marriages were arranged according to a patriarchal tradition, Kimiya’s opinion may or may not have been heard.
Rumi was most pleased by this turn of events, which insured that Shams would be more committed—and nearby—as an official member of his household. On the day of the wedding, Rumi read the contract of marriage for the couple. According to the biographer Sepahsalar, “Because it was winter, Mowlana arranged special rooms with a fireplace for them to consummate their vows. That winter Shamsoddin continued to reside in those rooms.” The nuptial bed was a ceremonial focus of the traditional wedding ritual, and like Rumi’s father, Baha Valad, Shams emphasized the integration of his sexual relations with Kimiya and his intense religious devotion. In later years, when trying to explain to some students the meaning behind Bayazid Bestami’s practice of seeking divinity in the faces of young men, Rumi told them a story about Shams from that winter:
Shamsoddin said, “The Lord Most High loves me so much that He comes to me in whatever appearance pleases me. Just now, He came to me in the appearance of Kimiya, having taken on her form.” So it was with Bayazid. The Lord Most High appeared before him in the face of a beardless youth.
On another occasion, Shams re-created a bit of bedtime conversation with his new wife for Rumi, or others gathered. “‘I asked God to give me a child,’” he had apparently said to Kimiya. “‘My wish to have a child is because I want you to be his mother. You are sleeping!’ Then she opened her eyes. She saw me. Again she fell asleep. It’s rare that I wake anybody up, but I woke her up three times. And each time she fell asleep again.” On another evening, Shams took his bedding and slept alone in a corner, his head pillowed on his arm. He was as open about talking of intimacies with Kimiya as Rumi’s father had been confessional in his own notebooks about sleeping with Rumi’s mother.
The small heated rooms Rumi set aside for Shams and Kimiya were located off a porch leading to the women’s harem. The other half of Rumi’s domestic world, the harem was adjacent to the madrase, but entirely separate. No women were allowed to use the entrance leading to the school, and no males were allowed to pass into the small hallway, unless they were mahram, or religiously legal insiders, as Shams now was. Such harems often had their own courtyard, with a pool of water, gutters, and, in Konya, mulberry or plane trees, hung with icicles in winter, surrounded by mud walls, and lit at night by torches. Besides sleeping cells there was a kitchen, a bath, and an undecorated women’s dining room.
If the life of the madrase was in constant upheaval during those years, the harem was still dominated by some of the original personalities and customary behavior, dating back to Khorasan. Holding sway as a matriarchal figure remained the Great Kerra, the mother of Rumi’s first wife. A keeper of the institutional memory, she was able to tell tales of life in Balkh and Samarkand, and had been witness to the difficult period when her daughter, Rumi’s first wife, Gowhar, was left to bring up their two tussling sons while her husband was off in Syria pursuing his studies. The feuding of the boys had so embroiled the harem that some said it instigated their being sent away to Damascus to school. Still living in the harem, too, was their nanny, who had been so pained when her charges were sent away that she had passed her days in her chamber, mournfully cleaning carrots and turnips. The youngest children left in the harem were Rumi’s second pair, by Kerra—his daughter, Maleke, and his third son, Mozaffaroddin.
By moving into a residence just inside the harem, Shams found himself immediately enmeshed in some difficult family politics, which were not mollified by his aggravating personality. The focus was Rumi’s second son, Alaoddin, who was already antagonistic toward Shams. Among the few in Rumi’s circle who did not participate in the welcoming ceremonies in honor of Shams’s triumphal return, Alaoddin, now in his early twenties, had a natural talent for book learning and knowledge. In the absence of his father, many of the more traditional students in the madrase had begun to gather around him for orthodox teachings, as he mingled with the learned jurists in other schools. He particularly resented Shams for taking his father away from his lectures and sermons, and, now, for interjecting himself in a volatile sibling rivalry by favoring Sultan Valad. Some rumors were even circulating that Alaoddin had secretly wished to marry Kimiya. Annoying Alaoddin, too, was Shams’s interfering with his favorite pastime of chess, the Persian court game, as Shams told Rumi that he should stop procuring Alaoddin’s chess pieces. “This is his study time,” Shams said. “He must study every day, even if only one sentence.”
The incident that caused these tensions to explode was Alaoddin walking too often by Shams’s and Kimiya’s rooms—even though another path would have been impossible, given the layout of the harem. As Sepahsalar told the story, “The second son of Mowlana, Alaoddin, was the treasure of the world, because of his beauty, kindness, knowledge, and intellect. Every time he would come to pay his respects to his grandmother and women relatives, when he would pass through the courtyard and go by the winter house, Shamsoddin would boil with jealousy. A few times, Shamsoddin gently advised Alaoddin, ‘Oh light of my eyes, even though you have wonderful manners, you need to walk by this house less often.’ This rebuke humiliated Alaoddin, especially as he already resented Shamsoddin for showing more attention and kindness to Sultan Valad.”
Angry words were exchanged that led to much trouble between them. “Did you see how I threatened Alaoddin, indirectly?” Shams asked around afterward, giving a fuller report of his side of the conversation. “I said, ‘Your cloak is in the shop.’ He said, ‘Tell the merchant to bring it here for me.’ ‘No, I’ve forbidden him to come into my room because it disturbs me. I’ve chosen this place for my seclusion and solitude.’ Likewise to the woman who brings water to the room, I said, ‘Come, when I tell you to come. But otherwise don’t just walk in. I may be naked or I may be clothed.’” He then quoted to Alaoddin, in Arabic, similar rebukes ascribed to Mohammad, for his followers, when they were given to walking into his private family quarters unannounced. The message Shams seemed to be sending in this conflict was of his desire to maintain his privacy—and Kimiya’s—against Alaoddin’s casual and frequent comings and goings.
Alaoddin spoke publicly of this perceived insult, causing more troubles in the school and the harem. According to Sepahsalar’s account, “He repeated Shamsoddin’s words to others. They took advantage of that opportunity to begin to rile Alaoddin even further. They said, ‘What a strange thing to say! That foreigner has come and is staying in Khodavandgar’s house and he doesn’t allow Khodavandgar’s son into his own home.’ Whenever these people had a chance, they tried to challenge and embarrass Shamsoddin. Because of his great kindness and patience, Shamsoddin did not say anything to Mowlana. After awhile he spoke to Sultan Valad, as they bothered him excessively.”
Although Shams swore that Kimiya’s “heart was after me,” she often chafed against her new regimen as the young bride of Shams. Referring to his possessiveness with Rumi, Shams admitted: “Whomever I love, I oppress. If he accepts, I roll up like a little ball in his palm. Kindness is something that you can practice with a five-year-old child, so he will believe in you and love you. But the real thing is oppression.” He contrasted his harsh manner with Rumi’s gentleness, a trait from childhood on. “‘Someone said,’ he repeated, ‘Rumi is all gentleness, and Shamsoddin has both the attribute of gentleness and the attribute of severity.’” Shams added, “I become bored with gentleness.” Ever the strict Quran teacher, he saw kindness as ineffectual for teaching.
Yet the wisdom that Shams accrued over long years of teaching and debating the philosophers, and praying and fasting in solitary confinement in little rooms in caravanserai across the Middle East, had not prepared him for life in the harem. Severity worked well perhaps with disciples on a chosen fiery path to self-knowledge, yet he was not entirely in control of his passions in this late-life union with a woman much younger. His traits of possessiveness and jealousy became inordinate. He grew suspicious of younger men as having potential charm for her, especially Alaoddin. After a lifetime of ascetic practice and notorious mystical feats, Shams was blindsided by domestic life.
Flashes of marital fights and conflicts began to surface in his monologues. Kimiya evidently was a free spirit and not ideal as a submissive wife. An issue was her frequent escaping to one of the gardens on the outskirts of town with other women, without his permission. Such walled gardens were located outside the city and were generally divided into orchards for cultivating figs and grapes or producing honey, and rose gardens with benches set aside for chatting and entertaining among the upper classes. Shams complained of Kimiya spending time with ladies outside of their home: “I cannot blame her. She does not know what she is doing. But why has she gone to the garden? How could she sit with this group?” He threatened to find two witnesses in front of whom he could perform the simple Muslim rite of divorce. Another time he begged Rumi to give him ten days to find a house and leave. “Stay for two months,” requested Rumi. Upset, Shams responded, “It was as if he was telling me to sit still for two years.”
One afternoon during that winter, the women of the harem decided to take Kimiya on an outing for fresh air. She had evidently been depressed, kept guarded in near isolation by her husband, and perhaps had been ill, too. As Aflaki told the story, “One day, without permission from Shamsoddin, the women took her with Sultan Valad’s grandmother to her garden to cheer her up. Suddenly Shamsoddin returned home and asked for Kimiya. He was told, ‘Sultan Valad’s grandmother, with other ladies, has taken her out for a walk.’ Shamsoddin let out a loud shout and became very angry. When Kimiya Khatun returned home, she immediately felt pain in her neck and she was as motionless as a dry branch. She screamed in pain, and after three days she passed away.”
The sudden death of Kimiya was the darkest of Shams’s many difficult challenges in Konya. However awkwardly or excessively he expressed his feelings, Shams had come to cherish Kimiya. Certainly no contemporary account accused Shams of her murder. Yet the fraught circumstances of her death, and suspicious shadow of his own violent anger over those final winter days, did not give him much confidence in his unseasonable attempt to live a settled family life, while the tragedy exacerbated the fully returned anger of Alaoddin and his emboldened cohort. Rumi would compose lines about his commitment to Shams, vow-like lines that included his refusing to listen to dissenters:
When speaking with people, seal your lips with mud
Keep the sugar stuck behind your teeth, and go.
Say, “‘That moon is for me, the rest is for you,
I don’t need a family or home,” and go.
Who is that moon? The Lord Shams of Tabriz.
Step into the shadow of that king, and go.
On the subject of the death of Kimiya, however, Rumi was publicly silent. Enduring his shocking loss, Shams left the harem to return to live near the portico of the madrase.
Hanging over Shams was a sense of failure. While Rumi had begun as his eager student, and Shams enjoyed the power of his own independence—his experience as a lifelong wanderer—he had tried in several dramatic ways to secure their valued companionship. Shams changed his life more than Rumi had, and he had sacrificed more. He never wanted to remain in Konya, and clearly after his departure to Syria did not wish to return to certain trouble, being constantly studied by the glaring eyes of enemies. His marriage to Kimiya was his final attempt at making the situation work by becoming a stable member of Rumi’s extended family. Yet Shams was unsuited for domestic life. As he left his room in the harem, having practically been banished now from that family, he was reduced to a few moves, cornered, and was mulling the meaning of these ominous signs of trouble.
Shams’s tiny cell in the school was far less secure than his peripheral room with Kimiya on the edge of the harem. Sensing weakness, Alaoddin and his allies again tried to drive Shams from town, as if the welcoming jubilee of nine months earlier had never occurred. Rumi had set Shams up in a cell that he nicknamed “The Place of Khezr,” referring to the mystic friend of Moses in the Quran, who initiated him into the secret ways of spiritual practice. As he had with his rooms in the merchant inn, Shams padlocked the door to insure privacy and seclusion, his habit in whatever setting he found himself. Yet the protective hand of Rumi was not sufficient to guard him against unannounced nighttime local police incursions and regular threats to his security.
One incident was so distressing that Shams waited two days before informing Rumi. This confrontation at his cell was not the first, or he had been warned, because he had been awake all night in anticipation of some kind of incident. “I was restless the whole night,” said Shams, when he told of the disturbing encounter. “My heart was trembling.” Finally at daylight some guards arrived, under the command of Aminoddin Mikail, an important lieutenant and viceroy of the sultan, though he was not present. They claimed the emir himself ordered that the cell must be emptied and Shams must leave. They also claimed the authority of Tajoddin Armavi, a high-ranking lieutenant.
“‘This cell belongs to the sweeper, and now this man puts a lock on it and says that it belongs to him.’” Shams reported the incoherent shouting of the head guard, in Turkish. “Then he said, ‘We’re talking to you. Why did you lock this cell? You’re not a licensed instructor here. We’re talking to you. They threw you out of town. What do they call you? Shams? What? Shams? What?’” Then Shams stood up silently, having not yet said a word: “Those men of Aminoddin looked at my face and thought they needed to speak Turkish to me. They didn’t think I understood what they were saying. ‘This is Mowlana’s cell,’ I said. ‘It’s his library. I will go and get the key from Mowlana, and I will open the door.’ ‘Get him,’ they said. ‘He’s lying. He has the key. Get the key from him.’” One of them persisted, “Why are you coming here? We threw you out a few times.” Shams asked whether they had really been sent by the proper authorities. “I know Tajoddin’s nature,” he said. “I need proof if he says that I’m a dog and a nonbeliever.” (Tajoddin, also known as “Tabrizi,” was from Shams’s hometown.)
Amid all the anxiety and disruption of being trapped within the surveillance of the religious military state, if only at its lower echelons, Shams in these last days persisted in his teaching, mostly meant for Rumi alone, during a period that lasted anywhere from a week to several months. He still had important themes to communicate that he felt his existence hung upon and were the core of “the work” he was intent on finishing. Essential for him was the message of love, and of the heart, which was Rumi’s great inspiration. In Persian epic or spiritual poetry, nâme meant “book,” as in the Shahname, the Book of Kings, or Attar’s Asrarname, the Book of Secrets. For Shams, the Quran was the Eshqname, or Book of Love. He also rose to poetic utterances about the practice of whirling. “The dance of the men of God is delicate and weightless,” he exulted. “They are like leaves floating on a river.” That such delicate, sensitive lessons were expounded in an atmosphere increasingly unsettled and dangerous only added to their sense of urgency.
A darker and more complex theme began to emerge, as well, in Shams’s teachings to Rumi during this chaotic time—separation. He revealed his departure to Syria as having been an object lesson, not an impulse, and threatened more such lessons. “If you can,” Shams spelled out his intentions, “act such that I don’t have to travel for the sake of your work and your best interest, so the work may be accomplished by the journey that I already took. That would be better. I am not in a position to command you to travel. I can take on the traveling for your benefit, so you may become more mature. In separation, you say, ‘That degree of commandments or prohibitions was nothing. Why didn’t I do it?’ It was easy compared to the hardship of separation.”
“I was just speaking in riddles,” he went on, unpacking his metaphor. “I should have been explicit. What’s the worth of that work? For your best interest, I would make fifty journeys. Otherwise what difference does it make to me whether I am in Rum or Syria? Whether I’m at the Kaaba or in Constantinople, it makes no difference. However it is certainly the case that separation cooks and polishes. Now, is the one polished and cooked by union better, or the one polished and cooked by separation? . . . Was Mowlana ever happy from the day that I left? . . . The deeper the union, the more difficult and arduous the time of separation.” This was a core lesson, a sermon, he implied, he was willing to teach with his own life.
Of all the teachings that Shams shared with Rumi, which were becoming the raw material of Rumi’s poetry, he gave him perhaps his most central metaphor in these last talks: comparing the evolution of the human spirit, through the workings of separation, to cooking. This imagery—a way of explaining how a painful separation can have beneficial results, and how love, both human and divine, involves both union and separation—became a continuous motif in Rumi’s poetry and talks, a familiar and homey analogy of the type that he favored. Rumi liked to tell of the chickpea transformed through suffering in the boiling water of the cook’s pot. He also expressed far more personally his own suffering in the heat of separation, which was visited on him through his love for Shams:
My entire life has come down to three words—
I was raw, I was cooked, I was burned
He used nearly the same wording in a less precisely parsed cry from the heart in a ghazal:
My entire life has come down to three words—
I burned, I burned, I burned
Shams was emotionally riveting as he talked of separation, especially gripping for Rumi, who felt the fire in his words, yet he had motives for dwelling on separation besides the poetic and philosophical. Shams’s daily life was ever more precarious in Konya, and he faced constant difficulties. The incident at his cell was not isolated, and Rumi’s followers were aligning with the cohort identified with Alaoddin. Shams spared Rumi many details, though he confided his apprehensions to Sultan Valad, who later recalled Shams’s ultimatum to him: “He said, to me, ‘Have you seen them? Reunited again by envy with each other? They want to separate me from Mowlana, who is far wiser than anyone else. They want to separate me and take me away. After me, they want to be in charge of everything. This time, I’ll leave in such a way that no one will be able to find where I am. All will fail miserably trying to find me. No one will be able to find the slightest clue. Many years will pass in this way. No one will find even a trace of my dust. When I have been gone for a long time, they will say surely they think that an enemy has killed me.’ He repeated his words several times because he wished to emphasize them.”
When he was feeling particularly troubled, Shams did occasionally discuss matters with Rumi. He was once accused of stealing and spoke in obviously distressed tones to Rumi. “I cannot even get a separate house,” he was saying of his fragile and uncharacteristically dependent living situation. “I don’t want to make you a prisoner here. But I don’t want anything else from this place, just to be able to see you.” He was underlining that the only attraction for him in Konya was Rumi, but that just such singleness of purpose could finally become an increasing burden for both of them. At other times, though, he blamed Rumi for not coming to his defense, and keeping him out of sight, as if embarrassed by him, or living his two lives in two discrete compartments.
One practice in Rumi’s household, traditional in the Islamic culture that set Fridays apart for congregational prayer and for time spent with family, was for him to visit with the community during the dusk hours after evening prayers, following any obligations at the Citadel mosque or on the palace grounds. Customarily, the men would be seated at the top end of a long carpet, where some bread or dates were usually laid out, the women seated farther down, while Rumi listened to the concerns of the household, or told stories, or otherwise invested his charm in calming conflicts. He did not invite Shams to those Friday gatherings, and Shams was stung. “As neither Mowlana nor I like to spend time without a purpose, we tend to stay alone with each other,” Shams complained. “So every Friday that he doesn’t bring me with him, I become depressed. Why can’t I be included in this group? I know my sadness should not be real, but it is.”
Sometimes Shams’s feelings of betrayal by Rumi broke through their mutually adoring banter. Rumi appeared to be trying to distance himself from Shams’s disruptive presence, to keep the peace, especially following the death of Kimiya and the sharpened anger of Alaoddin, who would have been present at the Friday gatherings where Shams was excluded. “I became so upset when instead of answering them, you stayed silent,” Shams said, confronting Rumi when he had not countered criticisms against him, the sorts of complaints making the attacks possible. “My whole resentment arose when they said those things and you didn’t answer them. You remained silent. You know my loyalty. You know me. But when someone outside the house said something, you didn’t answer.”
This incident, or another similar, kept Shams awake at night. “To be able to look into my friend’s eyes, I have to go through the eyes of a hundred enemies,” he bemoaned. “Last night I was thinking of you, and I was picturing your face. I was saying to you, in my mind, ‘Why didn’t you answer those people, clearly and directly?’ In my imagination, you were saying, by your expression, ‘I am ashamed of them,’ or ‘I am shy,’ or ‘I don’t want them to be upset.’ I talked to you, and our argument took a long time within my mind.” Rumi had always been averse to open conflict and had evidently reverted to trying to placate Alaoddin and Shams’s many critics, doing his best to keep all parties placated, especially after the difficult events of the winter. Shams clearly felt that Rumi was not defending him sufficiently, and he was left staving off threats while feeling less certain that Rumi needed him as absolutely as he had in their early days. Yet he had not lost control of his wisdom and understanding of the events around him. His recent conversations with Rumi were profound in revealing the nature of love as including suffering and separation—a message that was about to become even more relevant.
One morning Rumi arrived at the school and, as was his custom, went to visit Shams’s cell near the portico. When he entered, he found no sign of his friend other than his cap, a pair of shoes, and a few items accumulated while in Konya. Missing were the personal belongings that Shams carried when traveling, alerting Rumi to his departure. Given the dark mood and tragic events of the past months, Rumi understood that this hasty flight was not simply in keeping with Shams’s elusive character but had an air of finality that even the first disappearance lacked. He realized with horror that his own attempt to live his life both ways had just collapsed. Rumi rushed into Sultan Valad’s room. “Bahaoddin, why are you sleeping?” he cried out. “Get up, and seek for your sheikh. I’m not sensing his merciful presence anywhere nearby.” “When Shamsoddin wasn’t found after a day or two,” recalled Sultan Valad, “Mowlana began crying from pain.” As Sepahsalar reported, out of sorrow, “Mowlana roared like thunder.”