“I burned, I burned, I burned”
RUMI skirted madness. Or madness was simply the only explanation those closest to him could find for his heartbreaking collapse in the wake of Shams’s departure. Even five decades later, when the Arab travel writer Ibn Battuta passed through Konya, he was still hearing stories of the mad behavior of “the sheikh and pious imam” Jalaloddin Rumi following the disappearance of a Shams-like figure who sold him sugar-covered fruits, causing Rumi to abandon his college post to pursue him. “Subsequently he came back to them, after many years, but he had become demented and would speak only in Persian rhymed couplets which no one could understand,” as Ibn Battuta recorded the local lore. “His disciples used to follow him and write down that poetry as it issued from him.”
Rumi lost control on the morning that he discovered Shams’s empty chamber, and the howling and sobbing heard throughout his school and house went on for days, not hours. When Shams had mysteriously left town two years earlier, Rumi retired to his private quarters and shut the door, allowing a recriminating silence to fill the hallways until those responsible for the rattling event repented. This time was dramatically different. He was focused only on hearing Shams’s inimitable voice once again, and feeling “his merciful presence,” as he said to his son, anywhere nearby. All pretense of maintaining his carefully constructed two lives that had so irked Shams was abandoned.
Their time together lasted only about two and a half years, and in that interval, Shams had disappeared for nearly a year. Yet nine of their months together were spent in near seclusion night and day as they communed, talked, and shared secrets, in a marked parenthesis that Rumi cared enough to carve out of the middle of his busy and already accomplished life. Nothing remotely resembled the intensity of the time he spent with Shams, who rightly said just weeks earlier that he and Rumi preferred each other’s company to the superficiality of most other social life. Rumi knew their connection was unique. It had begun with a gaze that pierced his heart. Now he was left with the memory of those searing eyes and whatever transforming truth they had communicated to him. The memory caused Rumi to experience an unraveling between his heart and his mind.
After “a day or two,” according to Sultan Valad, Rumi went even more public with his hysteria and grief, beginning a search throughout Konya for Shams. Such a wide hunt would have included all of Shams’s favorite “seedy” spots, such as the taverns and Armenian churches they visited together, as well as steam baths in every district. Rumi’s concerned family as well as friends and disciples tried to help. He was well connected in the government and able to involve the imperial guards and police in the action. Shams’s prophecy to Sultan Valad that he would disappear without a trace appeared to have come true. “They looked for him in every alley and house,” remembered Sultan Valad of the citywide pursuit, with no clues or leads turning up. “No one had any news of him. Nobody could find a hint of a scent of him. The sheikh was crazed by the separation.”
Unable to find him in person, while remaining hopeful if not in full denial, Rumi tried to re-create his closeness to Shams once again in sama. Besides his focused final messages to Rumi on the meaning of separation, Shams, according to Sepahsalar, had encouraged him to keep practicing sama. “Perform sama!” Shams said. “Whatever you seek will be gained in abundance in the sama.” Rumi treated this mystical dance they had performed together as a form of bonding, though now he was revolving incoherently around the absence of Shams as much as practicing enlightenment. He needed the steady rhythms to mollify his pain and was said to whirl, or turn unsteadily about a pole, while spouting some of the incomprehensible lines heard by anyone nearby.
Rumi soon invited a group of musicians to be present as well, filling in the empty spaces around his solitary dance. The traditional instruments he chose hearkened back to Central Asia, the cultural homeland of both himself and Shams. Crucial was the mournful nay, or reed flute, which one story credited as having first been brought to Anatolia on caravan by Rumi’s family. He came to associate each instrument with the travails of love. The bold trumpet “sang” only when touched to a player’s lips: “Without your lips, I’m silent.” The Khorasani rabab was a voice heard only when stroked with a bow. Rumi imagined his heart a trembling tambourine. Included, too, in his intimate band were a harp held in the lap; drums, both large and small; a tambura lute; and bundled Pandean pipes. As he later wrote, “Sometimes I am a harp, sometimes a lute, night and day.”
Rumi danced his repetitive spinning to music long into the night to the dismay of his exhausted musicians, who were as much drawn into the hole of his despair as they were allowed to act as a healing force. Sultan Valad recorded these frantic scenes he witnessed: “Day and night he began to dance sama, on the ground like a spinning wheel. His voice and his cry reached the sky. Everyone heard his lamentations, young and old. He gave gold and silver to the musicians. Whatever he had in the house, he gave away. He was continuously dancing sama. Day and night, he did not rest for a moment, so the musicians could not keep up. From singing so much they lost their voices. Their throats were sore from singing. Everyone hated the gold and the silver. Everyone was tired and run-down. Without wine, everyone was hungover. If that hangover had been from real wine, it would have disappeared with more wine. Everyone was tired from lack of sleep. Their hearts were cooked, not from fire, but from the pain.”
Rumi’s response during his first and far more benign separation had been to pivot to writing poetry to channel his pain as well as to lure Shams to return with flattery and proof of his creativity, which his beloved had encouraged and nurtured. Now Rumi turned to poetry again, but with less polished results, as stumbling in execution as his sama dancing. As Aflaki reported, “Mowlana was extremely agitated day and night and had no peace and no rest. He constantly walked up and down in the courtyard of the madrase, reciting quatrains.” Sometimes he muttered broken phrases. At other times, he seemed—in painful, occasionally sinister, often roughly constructed lines—to be trying to gain a foothold onto his own sanity as much as onto the metrical terrain of poetry. The themes tended to oblivion or total annihilation in the shadow of the vanished beloved:
The night wears black to show us that it mourns
Like the widow who wears a black dress after burying her husband
He spoke of these desperate poems as “bloody,” as they were clotted with violent images, perhaps evoking the distress caused by his menacing thoughts. He imagined in one of them Mount Sinai “covered in blood, longing for love,” and elsewhere wrote:
This earth is not covered with dirt but blood
From the blood of lovers, the wounds of a checkmated king
Written under pressure of grief, and relying on heart and imagination rather than intellect for their rapidly flashing imagery, such lines often approached a surreal incomprehensibility.
When the water boiled into a wind, making mountains fly
Like straw before the fierce wind, whirling and frightening
Through the cracked mountains, deep mines were revealed
Where you could see ruby on ruby, shining like moonlight,
In that glow, you beheld him, his face porcelain, like the moon,
His hands open, full of blood, like the hands of a butcher.
Yet the “bloody” handprints in these poems may also have reflected a grim possibility that must have been playing on Rumi’s mind, and certainly in his most troubled fantasies in his unsettled state, as the question spread through Konya: Was Shams murdered? The atmosphere of the past few months made such an act conceivable. Rumors of murder were swirling around Rumi, two of them—contradicting each other—finding their way into Aflaki’s later accounts. In one of these dark scenarios, Shams and Rumi were seated together in the evening when a stranger came to the door and whispered for Shams to step outside. Shams rose and said, “They want to kill me,” to which Rumi responded, “Perhaps it is God’s will.” Shams walked outside, where he was set on by seven ruffians with knives. His loud shouts caused them all to pass out in unison and when they awoke they saw nothing but a few drops of blood, with no other sign of their victim. In a second rumor, Sultan Valad, alerted by a dream, discovered Shams’s corpse at the bottom of a well and buried him in the madrase walls. Rumi never endorsed such reports of the murder of Shams, though they were haunting his poems.
Almost as compelling as the unsolved murder mystery, though, was the distress in Konya and the Madrase Khodavandgar that allowed even the suspicion of the killing of Shams of Tabriz to have taken hold as imaginable. Somehow this unique bond between Rumi and Shams was unconventional enough to have driven those around them to irrational and outsize reactions. As Annemarie Schimmel has described their challenge: “The relationship between Mowlana and Shams was nothing like the traditional love of a mature Sufi for a very young boy in whom he saw Divine Beauty manifested, and who thus is a shahed, a living witness to Divine Beauty—indeed it is revealing that the term shahed, favored by most Persian poets, occurs only rarely in Mowlana’s work. This was the meeting of two mature men.” The Iranian-American scholar Janet Afary has described their connection as “a more reciprocal ethic of love.” Rumi and Shams were tampering with social formalities, and their lack of clear boundaries was disturbing, as the cultural norm of “lover” and “beloved” between men and boys, or even between sheikh and disciple, required one partner to be the moth and the other the flame.
Rumi next fixed on the hope that Shams was in Damascus, where he first traveled sometime between the winter of 1248 and the spring of 1249, and then on one or two other occasions, alone or with a retinue. Whatever lapses of sanity Rumi may have undergone in the first weeks and months of their jarring separation, he kept enough presence of mind to pursue with a steady logic the dwindling few chances of finding Shams, while striving to keep his spirit stitched to him through sama and poetry.
Even before departing Konya, Rumi seized on travelers from Damascus, hoping to hear news of Shams, his desperation making him vulnerable. As Aflaki told: “One day someone informed Rumi, ‘I saw Shamsoddin in Damascus.’ Rumi became more cheerful than can be expressed in words. He gave away everything he was wearing to the man as gifts—his turban, cloak, and shoes. A close companion said, ‘He lied to you. He has never seen him.’ Rumi replied, ‘I gave him my turban and my cloak for his lie. If his news were true, instead of giving away my clothing, I would have given my life away. I would have sacrificed myself for him.” This desire to give away, or throw away, grew extravagant.
Barely able to manage his daily existence, Rumi had easily let the business of the madrase fade to the margins of concern, while holding many of those in the community responsible for Shams’s vanishing, especially his son Alaoddin, from whom he became estranged during this period of heightened emotion and tension. As Sepahsalar wrote, “During that time, whoever was blamed for this separation did not receive any attention from him.” When he went away, Rumi put Hosam, the young leader of the local workingmen, in charge of keeping order in the day-to-day operations of the school. He instinctively only entrusted a position of authority to someone drawn from within the small, warm circle around Shams—a pattern he continued for the rest of his life.
With Syria riven by civil war, and suffering from the famine and general ruin caused by the incursions of many Crusader armies, the Damascus that Rumi confronted upon his arrival was not the paradise of brilliant intellectual debate, spirited commerce, and monumental architecture he had witnessed just a decade earlier from the removed vantage of the Sufi Salehiyye neighborhood during his student years. Yet the circles in which he had moved were still active, and so, reported Sultan Valad, he went street by street, “putting his head into every corner.” He performed very public sama sessions, hoping to attract locals who knew Shams, or might have information. And he composed new, anxious ghazals, written in Arabic. As he proclaimed his mission on a third journey:
For the third time, I rush from Rum to Syria,
Seeking his curls as dark as night, seeking the fragrance of Damascus
If my Master Shams, the Truth of Tabriz, is there
I will be the Master of Damascus, the Master of Damascus!
The Damascus period of Rumi’s search for Shams lasted about two years. After days or weeks scouring the Sufi neighborhoods, with the same disappointing results he had encountered in Konya, Rumi spent much of the rest of the time hunting down clues or listening to hearsay, waiting to talk with the pilgrims returning from Mecca, or other travelers, as travel was the main artery of communication. He was also cultivating sama and beginning to write poems with more intensity and frequency than ever before. The pitch of hysteria reached in Konya could not be sustained, and he began to discover in his emerging poetry and song not only expressions of pain but also inklings of love.
Rumi instinctively relied on whirling after Shams’s disappearance to quell his panic and somehow stay closer to his companion by imitating him at a time when he could think of nothing or no one else. His intuition about his need at that moment for sama was a positive one. The philosopher Mohammad al-Ghazali, whose intellectual legacy Rumi and his father encountered, especially in Baghdad, claimed the whirling practice had pulled him back from his own period of despair, which has been construed as a nervous breakdown. Indeed, he devoted an entire volume of his monumental Revival of the Religious Sciences to sama, eloquently writing of having his spiritual life saved by such practices. His testimony helped in the spread of rooms appointed for sama in tenth-century Baghdad. Rumi, too, was now sensing that his sanity and spiritual revival owed much to the meditative dance.
While Shams was in Konya, he and Rumi practiced sama in seclusion, hidden from the eyes and ears of the legally minded, including Alaoddin. Even though Rumi’s father was sympathetic with Sufis and practiced secret mystical techniques, he would never have allowed music and dance in the halls of the Madrase Khodavandgar, as such expressions were likely to be dangerous, even illegal. Just as popular as al-Ghazali’s defense of sama in Baghdad was the treatise The Trickery of Satan, by an austere theologian claiming music and dance were the devil’s work. Many medieval Islamic leaders—failing to find sanctions in the Quran or the teachings of the Prophet for listening to music, singing, and chanting—insisted that the only acceptable music worth listening to was Arabic Quranic recitation. As Rumi became more public and open about sama in Konya and Damascus, he was moving closer toward a fault line, and setting up a defining conflict of the rest of his life.
Likewise in Damascus Rumi’s poems began to reveal a new lightness and to announce their true source of inspiration, Shams of Tabriz, as the messenger of love. Since the works of medieval Persian poets are arranged according to the alphabetical order of their rhyming letters—beginning with the long a—and within that scheme by meter, rather than chronologically, the sequence of Rumi’s poems has never been clear. Yet a logic of suffering and acceptance was at work indicating their falling into loose, overlapping stages, marked by their openness in naming Shams as muse. By the time Rumi left Damascus, he had found his voice as a poet or, as he understood it, found Shams’s voice through his poetry, while experiencing a midlife creative burst that was exceptional in the history of world poetry as he wrote the bulk of his lyric love poems.
Following from the verse-letters that he wrote on Shams’s first departure to Syria, over a year earlier, Rumi resumed, likely in Damascus, rhapsodizing Shams in extravagant codes of praise. Rather than mentioning his name, using Sufi discretion, he invoked his reliable symbol for fiery Shams, the “Sun of Religion,” and “Sun of Tabriz”:
Since I am the servant of the sun, I speak only of the sun.
I do not worship the moon, nor do I speak of dreams
Astrological houses could stand for Shams, too, such as Mars, or Venus, or the panoply of stars. Gypsies, or lulis, evoked his perpetual motion and cleverness, and the wide desert, the sahra, his location beyond all places and categories, his abstraction from daily life, his transcendence. Rumi addressed Shams as his “sovereign,” or, in Greek, as afenti or aghapos, honored and beloved, and used various other glorifying terms for him:
I gave him so many names, perfect and imperfect,
But since he is unique, he has a hundred times more
One fixture of traditional Persian poetry that Rumi began to experiment with in these poems, as he seemed once again more in control of his method of composition, was the takhallos, a poetic signature, or pen name, reserved for the final line of a ghazal, also romanticized as a “clasp,” holding together the strung pearls of single lines into a necklace. Rumi shied away from using his own name as a takhallos. Only once, in an early, opaque poem, did he try using his title bestowed on him by his father as a tag in the more conventional fashion:
Jalaloddin, go to sleep now, and quit writing
Just say: No leopards can find such a unique lion.
Many of the poems of crisis were unruly and lacked a polished final line altogether. In some, Rumi had abruptly announced, “Bas!” or “Enough!” Yet he came close to an inventive takhallos by closing several with “Khamush!” or “Silence!,” indicating an approach to a mystical state of unknowing as well as reticence in naming his inspiration:
Be silent my tongue, since my heart is burning,
Your heart will burn, too, if I speak of my burning heart
A breakthrough for Rumi occurred when he was finally able to name Shams in his poems, as if the same breaking down of a wall between his inner and outer lives, which had been forced by Shams’s disappearance, also needed to take place in his poetry. This transition was enacted in one crucial ghazal where he dramatized an imaginative vision, reminiscent of dream visions he experienced during chelle, including a voice of wisdom:
One night, I awoke at midnight, unable to find my heart
I looked everywhere, around the house. Where did he go?
When finally I searched every room, I found the poor thing
Crying in a corner, whispering the name of God, and praying.
As he eavesdropped on his own heart praying, Rumi heard him confessing trepidation about ever uttering the name of his beloved for fear of having his secret stolen away by someone who might be listening. A guiding voice commanded him to speak the name:
A voice called to the heart, “Say his name,
Don’t worry about others, say his name boldly
His name is the key to the wishes of your soul
Say his name at once, so he will open the door quickly.”
The poet’s heart remained anxious, in spite of divine intervention, until finally at dawn the sun rose—reliable code for Shams—and the heart yelped, “Tabriz!” unraveled by these efforts like the woof and warp of a carpet. The poem ends with Rumi’s joyful confession:
As I was fainting away, the name of Shamsoddin,
That ocean of generosity, was engraved upon my heart
Having opened the door, as he described the sensation, Rumi found, within the heart of his poetry, permission to speak the name of his beloved, going against all caution and secrecy. In the Persian poetic tradition, such love poems were only written to youths, not mature men, and personal names rarely, if ever, used, except for that of the patron or the poet’s own takhallos pen name. Rumi was explicit about the course of his evolution toward this liberation. Not only could he speak of Shams in code, but he could now also spell out Shams’s name brazenly within the lines of his poems, a bold transparency he found exhilarating and inspiring as he made use of this new freedom rhapsodically:
Not alone I keep on singing, Shamsoddin and Shamsoddin
The nightingale in the garden sings, the partridge in the hills . . .
Day of splendor, Shamsoddin, turning heavens, Shamsoddin
Mine of jewels, Shamsoddin, day and night, Shamsoddin.
In the abundance of incantatory poems that followed were lines revealing Rumi’s belief that chanting Shams’s name freed his spirit from the guarded fear that contributed to their painful separation and gave luster and a radiant spark to his art and poetry:
Say the name of Shamsoddin every single moment
Until your poems and songs begin to glow with beauty
Naming names was a bold personal move for Rumi, especially given his public position. His next steps, though, were even more radical, as he began writing poems that moved beyond anything dared so far in either Persian lyric poetry or Muslim devotional poetry. Novelty was immaterial to Rumi. He was not interested in becoming a poet’s poet. Yet in trying to articulate his love for Shams, he was led by force of passion to breaking with tradition. His innovation in Persian lyric poetry was to begin using as his takhallos, or signature tag, the name of Shams of Tabriz, rather than his own. By the end of his life, he had written nearly a thousand poems mentioning Shams or ending with the flourish of his name. The most extraordinary probably date from his Damascus period, when he was away from the judgmental eyes and ears surrounding him in Konya. He had been energized by the poetic license he felt granted him by his own heart, reacting to divine prompts, and allowing him to be at once romantic and religious. As he wrote in one ghazal composed while the search for Shams was under way, using his special takhallos:
I wonder, where did the handsome beloved go?
I wonder, where did that tall, shapely cypress tree go?
He spread his light among us like a candle
Where did he go? So strange, where did he go without me?
All day long my heart trembles like a leaf
All alone at midnight, where did that beloved go? . . .
Tell me clearly, Shams of Tabriz,
Of whom it is said, “The sun never dies!”—Where did he go?
The adoption of Shams as his takhallos was an original solution to Rumi’s quandary. He was audaciously implying that he was not the author of his own poems. Shams was writing the verses through him, and he was merely the ink pen or the paper:
Speak, Sun of Truth and Faith, Pride of Tabriz,
For your voice is speaking through all my words!
Rumi pushed the notion of a muse to its extreme, so that he was not merely inspired by but infused with the spoken word of Shams being dictated through him. This frame for understanding the poetry—especially these lyric love poems—remained forever affixed to them, in Rumi’s understanding, and in their public reception. When the poems were later gathered in collections, or divans, some dating back to within a couple decades of Rumi’s death, they were titled as Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (“The Collected Shams of Tabriz”), or Kolliyat-e Shams-e Tabrizi (“The Complete Shams of Tabriz”), or Ghazaliyyat-e Shams-e Tabrizi (“The Shams of Tabriz Ghazals”). (These earliest collections were helped in being judged authentic by their use of Rumi’s local Khorasani spellings for Persian words, rather than Anatolian, similar to the differences between British English and American.)
Rumi then took a final step, investing Shams with prophetic or even divine powers, which was as challenging to Muslim orthodoxy as the use of music and dance in sama. It was as if the less chance Rumi felt of their being reunited in person, the more Shams began to merge in his heart with the source of love itself. The Rumi scholar Franklin D. Lewis has written that “there was probably no precedent for addressing any person, other than the Prophets,” as Rumi in one instance praised Shams as “the light that said to Moses, ‘I am God, I am God, I am God.’” Never in classical Persian poetry had the beloved been divinized as the burning bush through whom Moses heard the voice of God, or as the lover’s qibla, for turning to prayer, or beyond the ken of the angel Gabriel, revealing the Quran to Mohammad. Such exclamations bordered on blasphemy:
It’s not enough for me to call you a human being,
But I am afraid to call you “God.”
You do not allow me to remain silent
Yet you do not reveal to me the proper speech.
Imploring Shams to forgive his own sins of pride, or heal his wounds, Rumi dared to fashion in these rhapsodic, celestial poems an audacious meld of love poem and prayer:
You speak for God, you see the Truth,
You save the world from drowning in an ocean of fire
A king beyond compare, your majesty is eternal
You lead the soul away from harmful desires
You hunt for souls on the path of self-sacrifice
Looking to discover which soul is the most worthy . . .
Sun of souls! Shamsoddin, the Truth of Tabriz,
Each of your radiant beams speaks eloquently of God.
Yet Rumi had still not accepted the difficult fact of the permanent loss of Shams in death. His last holdout of hope was Tabriz, an obviously magical point on Rumi’s imaginative horizon, and a journey by land of only about seven hundred miles from either Damascus or Konya, although no record exists of Rumi actually undertaking that trip. By 1248 the Azerbaijani capital was solidly within the control of the Il Khan dynasty, under the transitional rule of a Persian ally of the Mongols, responsible for funneling taxes and tributes to its rulers. Rumi’s poems of the period are dotted with mentions of Tabriz, as if the possibility of Shams’s having returned home kept arising—either from reports, or because of his friend’s ardent wish for them to have traveled there together. In these final poems, Tabriz remains a distant place of the mind, not, like Damascus, an actual location:
When I went to Tabriz, I spoke with Shamsoddin
Of the oneness of God, without needing any words
At least once, Rumi heard news of Shams in Tabriz that was believable enough for him to write a poem excitedly about the possibility of his being alive, more visceral than his whimsical payments given to strangers claiming a sighting here or there. Rumi compared the reception of this news to the Quranic story of Joseph’s father, Jacob, catching the scent of his vanished son, who was said to have been murdered and cast down into a well by his brothers—suspiciously similar to the murder rumors about Shams:
Joseph’s shirt, and the scent of him have come!
Following these two signs, surely he too comes!
The finale of the ghazal fixes the living Shams’s whereabouts confidently within Tabriz:
You asked for a banquet from heaven
Rise up, and prepare. The table descends.
Good news, O Love! From Shamsoddin,
In Tabriz, a new sign has come!
Finally, though, most likely in Damascus, around 1250, Rumi heard some confirmation of the death of Shams that caused him to decisively face his worst fears, which he had been avoiding as much as pursuing during the past two years, and to adopt instead an attitude of mourning, and to no longer hold out hope. The tenor of his writing, speaking, and feeling about Shams shifted. He moved toward acceptance rather than denial. From him poured a classical elegy, a container for his grief, filled with tears that were hot but not hysterical, each line of the threnody ending with the sad radif, “weep”:
If my eyes could bear to cry fully for this great grief
Days and nights, until dawn, I would only weep . . . .
Death is deaf to mourning, and hears no wailing
Otherwise, with a burning heart, he would weep.
Death is an executioner, without a heart,
Even if he had a heart of stone, he would weep.
The noble ode ends in a sorrowful mode unusual for Rumi’s writings on his personal sun:
Shams of Tabriz is gone, and who
For this greatest man among men, will weep?
In the world of essences, he is enjoying his wedding,
But in our world of mere forms, without him, we weep.
Rumi might never have known the exact cause of Shams’s death, or his final resting place, and he appears to have strongly dismissed all murder rumors to the end of his life. Whether inklings or doubts rose and fell over the years is not known. No one will ever know the truth about the hazy circumstances of Shams’s death and burial, which were just as mysterious and obscure at the time—not entirely surprising for a lone figure, no longer young, possibly traveling incognito, and without an entourage. Tombs for Shams exist in Konya, Tabriz, and Multan, Pakistan—the most ancient in Khoy, a town near Tabriz on the main road from Konya, its grave site, with encrusted minaret, dating back at least to 1400.
Rumi’s acceptance of Sham’s death, though, set him free and also set Shams free to live again in Rumi’s poetry as a state of being as much as a mere mortal. During the rest of Rumi’s time in Damascus, he reconciled himself to this finality while allowing himself to be remade from within to become the man he wished to be in the wake of Shams’s departure. When Shams left for Aleppo, four years earlier, Rumi discovered how much he relied on the volatile teacher for his new way of life. Now he needed to accept that Shams’s absence was permanent. He had the option of returning to Konya, defeated, to take on the turban and robes again to live out his life respected, if perhaps a bit pitied, or of seizing responsibility for embodying the freedom and love Shams sought to impart. To do so meant undergoing the kind of life change common in young people in transition from adolescence to adulthood, but more rare in a man in his forties.
Sultan Valad wrote of the transformation of his father in Damascus in the technical terms of medieval theology—his father went from being a “pious man” to a “mystic.” A “pious man,” explained Sultan Valad, obediently follows the religious laws, believing “If I do good deeds, I won’t be drawn to evil.” Yet the mystic, he wrote, “Out of love, says ‘What will come to pass?’ In a state of amazement, he waits to see what God will do.” Sultan Valad probably learned of this distinction from his father, who composed another elegy for Shams at that time revealing a similar understanding of his change:
Each dawn, like an autumn cloud, I rain tears at your door
Then wipe the tears from your house with my sleeve
Whether I travel to the east or the west, or up into the sky
I won’t see any sign of life, until I see you again.
I was a pious man of the land. I held a pulpit.
Then fate made my heart fall in love and dance after you.
Rumi’s final days in Damascus were quieter and more formal. The madness of Konya for him had subsided. Aflaki later reported of time spent by Rumi studying in the company of a local leader of the Damascene Sufi community whom he “loved dearly.” He had clearly avoided Konya, the scene of so much pain and breakdown, and was now ready to return. In another set of Sufi terms, he had graduated from “lover” to “beloved,” finding the source of the power and wisdom he admired and missed in Shams within himself. The integration he experienced in his poetry occurred in his life as well. In Sultan Valad’s version, Rumi discovered Shams, “in himself, radiant as the moon.” As he directly repeated his father’s words, either from verses Rumi recited, or from a near rendition:
He said, “Since I am he, who am I seeking?
I am the same as he. His essence speaks!
While I was praising his goodness and beauty
I myself was that beauty and that goodness.
Surely I was looking for myself.”
At about the age of forty-three, Rumi returned to Konya, rarely to leave again. Much had transpired in the capital since he had looked on as a young man while his father was given a royal welcome when his family first arrived two decades earlier. His own reentry was now quite different, as those gilded and hopeful days were long faded. The great protector of both his father and the Seljuk Empire, Kayqobad I, had been dead for over a dozen years. Likewise Kayqobad I’s profligate and inept son, Kaykhosrow II, had died four years earlier—after having temporarily placated the Mongols with a weak financial deal. He left behind an uneasy triumvirate of three young princes, all younger than twelve—Ezzoddin, Roknoddin, and Alaoddin, the son of the sultan’s favorite wife, Gorji Khatun.
These royal personages and their machinations were more than distant chess pieces to Rumi. He returned to Konya a far more outspoken figure than he left—less “pious,” to use the word of both his son and himself. These key personalities of the Seljuk court would turn out to be far more forgiving and protective than some of the more upright members of the religious establishment in town, and his relations with them were often quite close. Either mother or stepmother to all three sultans, Gorji Khatun became the center of a circle of noblewomen devoted to Rumi, and was mentioned warmly in a poem of praise written by Sultan Valad. At least nine letters exist from Rumi to the Sultan Ezzoddin, in which he referred to Ezzoddin as his “son” and himself as his “father.” Mutual fondness also tied him to Karatay—a freed Greek slave, now regent, the true power behind all three thrones between 1249 and 1254—whose “angelic qualities” Rumi once extolled.
Karatay especially was helping preserve Konya from the sort of destruction and stripping of all beauty and subtlety that Rumi had just witnessed in Damascus. Indeed the capital was experiencing a mellifluous and florid spike in its art and architecture that lent a warm context to Rumi’s wish for a spiritual life of music and poetry. The symbol of this late phase of the Seljuk Empire in Konya was the madrase built by Karatay as his own legacy, a theological school across from the Citadel, midway to the Madrase Khodavandgar, which was finished in 1251, just as Rumi was returning from Damascus. Its architecture was a clear departure from the sobriety of the Alaoddin Mosque toward a more refined Seljuk classical style—covered in turquoise blue glazed tiles, encircled by bands of Kufic inscriptions, with carved interlocking triangles leading toward an open dome. The white, bluish, black, and turquoise tiles of the dome formed complex patterns of stars. At night, actual stars visible in the circle of the dome reflected in a pool below, the sort of effect never lost on Rumi, for whom reflections expressed his metaphoric way of seeing:
Just as water reflects the stars and the moon,
The body reflects the mind and the soul.
If Rumi’s life had been disrupted by Shams, so had the family to which he returned, though in ways set up early on by their first responses to the stranger from Tabriz. Kerra went along rather easily with her husband’s transformation following Damascus. She had always exhibited a bent toward a magical spirituality of dreams and visions as well as hovering jinn and lurking water monsters. Many of the more incredible tales of Rumi after his death—like being transported to Mecca during prayer and returning with dust on his feet—were traced back to her. Of his two sons, both in their midtwenties, Sultan Valad had solidified his role as his father’s dutiful favorite. His white sheep image, though, was sullied by some, like Kerra, who complained of his violent behavior, out of his father’s view, toward other family members in the harem. The more tortured Alaoddin left Konya for a time after the disappearance of Shams, shamed by his father’s blaming him for his role in the events—the estrangement between the two never entirely healed during Alaoddin’s lifetime. Rumi’s third son, Mozaffaroddin, a young boy, was still in the harem, with his sister Maleke; within a decade both children would need to decide whether to lead mercantile lives or to become Sufis.
When Rumi returned from Damascus, he moved between court and family and school as he always had, yet he was somehow changed. And that change became the next mystery for those around him to notice and try to understand. Unlike Shams, truly an outsider with no stake in any place or institution, Rumi had always been an entitled member of the religious and ruling class of Konya, and his comments and actions were topics of note, especially given the ongoing drama of his very public adoration of Shams. He knew when he returned to Konya that he was walking onto a stage again. He went about his business with that air of being solitary while being among people that Shams had counseled. Yet he was now not a frightening or aloof figure to most. He had evolved into a far more accessible and concerned religious leader, without pretense, good-humored, humble and simple in approach, living life in a new way in his old town.
Many stories of Rumi following his return from Damascus report quiet acts of kindness around town. Typical was the friend who told of Rumi having asked him to purchase two trays of tasty delicacies at market. When he gave them to Rumi, he wrapped them in a cloth and departed. Curious, the friend trailed him and discovered Rumi inside a ruined building, feeding the treats to a dog that had given birth to puppies. When confronted, he explained, “This unfortunate dog has not eaten anything for seven days and nights, and because of her puppies she is unable to go off.” Such mercy from Rumi, described as having walked with his head down, spoke to all the people of Konya, his humility and kindness understood as virtuous by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike.
He appeared everywhere, mixing with everyone, in all kinds of settings. Many of those around him wished to protect him by keeping him apart and dignified. But he repeatedly showed by his demeanor that he was a changed person. Once he attended a sama session where a young man brushed against him during the dance, and Rumi’s disciples said harsh words to the overly excited whirling Sufi about his decorum. Rumi quickly cut them off, refusing to be kept insulated or to hurt anyone’s feelings in the name of piety:
My kindness is such that I don’t want anyone’s heart to be hurt because of me. When someone in a crowd in sama brushes up against me, some of my friends try to prevent them, but I am not pleased by that. I have said a hundred times don’t presume to speak for me. Only then am I content.
He was also bold and energetic in organizing his own sama sessions in public, drawing a clear line to show where he stood on this issue of music, dance, and song in religious meditation and prayer. While exceedingly kind, he was also galvanized and immoveable in his resolve. As Sultan Valad remembered, stressing his remarkable reinvigoration: “He went to Damascus like a partridge, and returned to Rum like a falcon. A drop of his soul became as expansive as the sea. The degree of his love became even greater. Because he became like this, don’t ever say, ‘He didn’t find him.’ Whatever he was seeking, he truly found. He again called together all the musicians, on the roof and in the yard. Not knowing his head from his feet, he shouted with all his strength, his voice boisterous. His love was filled with waves like a stormy sea. Everyone was astonished.”
In trying to make sense of the meaning of his time with Shams, and its lessons for his life going forward, Rumi’s thoughts often returned to a favorite Sufi guiding notion of the need for a living spiritual world axis, either known or anonymous, who was the center of love and understanding in his time, and on whom the welfare of all human beings depended. Rumi later explained this subtle, elusive concept in Book II of his Masnavi:
In every age a saint appears
As testing continues to the end of time
When those with good souls will be liberated . . .
He is the lamp that gives light to other saints
Lesser saints are like lamp niches, reflecting his light.
Rumi never directly said that he considered Shams as the saint of saints of his epoch. He did not attempt to place him technically within the complex hierarchy of Sufi spirituality, remaining as guarded, or ambiguous, on this as on many theological matters. Yet he implied in all his turns of phrase that he did believe Shams was such an exalted figure. He went about Konya looking for the reflection of such light in the people he met every day.
With the passing of the decades, especially the tumultuous decade of the 1240s, Sultan Valad came to present the life of his father schematically, following the basic contours, but tidying them into defined squares and boxes. As his son described his father’s life, the crazed search by Rumi for Shams was resolved by 1250, when he returned to Konya having attained a station of empowerment. Yet Rumi actually remained fitfully pained by his aching memories of the loss of Shams throughout his life, while revealing or concealing that secret in different ways. Likewise his “Collected Shams of Tabriz,” or at least the thousand or so poems explicitly naming Shamsoddin, were implied to have all been written during their time together, especially during the searching in Syria. Logically, if Rumi understood the need for a living spiritual saint, he would not have kept summoning the spirit of Shams in poetry. He did, though, continue writing poems of love that pointed to just such composition, as in one wrenching late ghazal:
I grew old mourning him, but say the word “Tabriz”
And all of my youth comes back to me
Rumi kept honoring the memory of Shams and marked his continuing presence, his enduring spirit. He often visited Shams’s cell near the madrase portico. Evoking his own nicknaming of Shams, Rumi, according to Aflaki, “one day lowered his head before the door of Mowlana Shamsoddin’s room and, with red ink, inscribed in his own blessed handwriting, ‘The place of the beloved of Khezr.’” The cell was kept untouched as a timeless shrine to Shams. Years later, when Rumi heard someone doing repairs, and hammering a nail into the wall of the cell, he cried out, “They feel no fear in hammering a nail in this place? Don’t let them do it again. I imagine that they are driving that nail into my heart!” No one could spend time in the Madrase Khodavandgar without sensing the resonance of Shams’s lasting impact upon Rumi. Folded into his aura of solitude, and his faraway look, was the absence of the one man who would have understood him.
Even Rumi’s way of dressing was a constant reminder for him of Shams. As a sign of respect, when he accepted Shams’s death, Rumi put aside the white turban that had been his headgear until that time, the standard designation of the scholar and mature religious leader, and wrapped a smoke-colored turban about his head instead. He also dispensed with his wide-sleeve jurist’s robe, like the atabi robes worn by academics in Baghdad, made of shimmering silk. He fashioned an inexpensive faraji cloak woven from thick linen cloth, made in India or Yemen, and dyed dark blue. Such was the garb associated with traveling Sufis, their dark hues masking the clotted dirt of the road, while Rumi associated them as well with the rich violet hues of the early morning skies:
Morning rises, and draws his polished blade,
In the heavens, a light as white as camphor bursts forth
The Sufi of the skies slices his blue robe and shawl
Downwards, deliberately, until he touches his navel.
Dark blues and violets were also the colors of sorrow and distress in medieval Persian society, and family members wore blue clothing as often as black during their formal forty days of grief. As Aflaki reported, “This was his clothing until the end of his life.”