Rumi's Secret

by Brad Gooch

  Along with dazzling verbal performances and abstruse examinations of religious thought, Rumi was surrounded in Damascus by a scholarly culture that valued rank and fame. Books were stacked according to importance, with the Quran on top of any pile. Seating at lectures radiated out from the sheikh in decreasing order of status, as he was faced with his most eminent guest, judged by knowledge, age, piety, or fame. Of these qualities, fame weighed most strongly, the making of a name, especially a name beyond Damascus or, even better, Syria. Sources of the time noted that one young scholar “flashed his merit like a bright star rising on the horizon,” and, of another, “his name flew to fill the regions”—values far from Rumi’s later yearning for a nameless sort of oblivion.

  Following nearly five years of study in Aleppo and Damascus, having saturated himself in steep and difficult texts, and having been exposed to some of the most renowned religious scholars of the day, Rumi, about thirty years old, returned to his teacher of teachers, Borhan. Rumi sought to integrate the last and most important missing piece in his education, held out by Borhan as the ultimate achievement—advanced lessons in spiritual practice designed to unlock interior practices even more demanding and essential for his future responsibilities than the academic exercises mastered in Syria.

  Their meeting likely took place in Kayseri. The sultan’s governor had constructed by then the madrase where Borhan was based, though he still made the trip of about two hundred miles to Konya regularly. When Rumi arrived, the governor invited him to stay in his palace, but Borhan, channeling the words of Baha Valad, warned Rumi that schools were the proper place for scholars to reside. The name of the town reflected its grand past history as a Roman capital, and Rumi punned on the naming of Kayseri, or Caesarea, after the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, when alluding to Borhan:

  When our Caesar is in Kayseri—

  Don’t keep us waiting in Elbistan

  The brunt of Rumi’s joke, Elbistan, was a smaller Anatolian city on the road to Syria.

  But their reunion might have taken place anywhere, as Borhan was now stressing the inner world with his pupil. In the tradition of the historical Sufi movement, Borhan trained Rumi in exercises of asceticism, especially fasting. Borhan had been dedicated to fasting all his life. During this period, he wrote in his notes of the exemplary effects of fasting on the soul: “The thinner the shell of the walnut, the fuller is its nut, and the same for the almond and pistachio.” He had advised his disciple Salah that even if he found himself unable to perform other devotions, he should never neglect fasting. Such self-denial was meant to instill martial discipline, as well as to wean the practitioner off the ordinary values of the world. The ultimate “fasting of the elite” meant the desire for God alone.

  From this intensive season in Kayseri, Rumi never relaxed his stance on fasting, a habit he pursued with passion, almost thrilled, becoming as identified as Borhan with the practice. In Book V of the Masnavi, he would lift off in an inspired hymn to fasting:

  Don’t eat straw and barley, like donkeys:

  Graze on flowers of the Judas tree, like musk deer in Khotan

  Only graze on clove, jasmine, or roses,

  In Khotan, with your beloved companion . . .

  The stomach of the body pulls towards the straw-barn

  The spiritual stomach pulls towards fields of sweet basil.

  If spring is the favorite season in Rumi’s poems, Ramadan, the month of fasting from dawn to sunset, obligatory for able Muslims, became his cherished religious observance:

  Congratulations! The month of fasting is here!

  Have a good journey, my companion in fasting.

  I climbed to the roof, to see the moon,

  With my heart and soul, I longed for fasting.

  When I looked up, my hat fell off,

  My head was set spinning by the king of fasting!

  Fasting became a reminder for Rumi of memories of Borhan, as few anecdotes about the displaced mystic of Khorasan failed to link him with his habitual practice. Fasting was also Rumi’s introduction to the consolations of “tightening the belt.” He was learning that things were not what they seemed, and that empty stomachs held “hidden sweetness.”

  Like the scholars of Damascus, the mystics and Sufis had their own ranks and an organized ladder of mystical practices that indicated status in the spiritual world. More extreme than regular fasting but essential was the completion of a forty-day trial in sealed isolation from the world known as chelle—from chehel, Persian for “forty.” This period of solitude and subsisting on bread and water was a sort of vision quest, conceived as an inward hajj, or desert experience, owing its origins perhaps to the Syrian hermit monks, such as those Rumi met on his way to Damascus. Borhan arranged Rumi’s retreat, sealing him into total seclusion, and then helping him with interpreting his insights afterward.

  A chip of remembrance, likely from this retreat, appears in Book V of the Masnavi. This time, rather than “a poet,” Rumi casts his younger self as “a certain man,” but his exact recording of one disorienting nightmare was quite personal, nearly surreal:

  During the chelle, a certain man

  Dreamed he saw a pregnant dog on a road

  Suddenly he heard the cries of her puppies

  Though they were in the womb, invisible . . .

  Puppies howling in a womb, he thought

  “Has anyone ever heard of such a thing?” . . .

  Interpreting dreams was a problematic challenge—for medieval Muslims especially, a religious problem. Isolation only exacerbated Rumi’s confusion, blurring his waking:

  When he woke from his dream and came to himself,

  His astonishment grew greater at every moment.

  During the chelle, there is no other solution to problems,

  Except for being present to God the Almighty.

  So he began to pray, and heard a wise voice interpreting his bizarre dream imagery:

  At that moment, he heard a mysterious voice,

  Saying, “That is a symbol of the yelping of the ignorant,

  Those who have not pierced the veil and curtain,

  But with blind eyes are speaking aimlessly.”

  Rumi emerged from his chelle with a personal experience of having heard a voice that he felt was available to him for guidance. He could hear wisdom, not just in reading circles, or from lecturers, but also in meditation, and he could copy down the words, as in dictation. In trying to measure the gap between human and divine, such an encounter was revelatory.

  After instructing Rumi in the wisdom tradition shared with him by Baha Valad, and encouraging him even more insistently to study his father’s notebooks, Borhan began to decline. During his last few years Borhan was sometimes in Konya, but he kept returning to Kayseri, possibly wishing to withdraw so that his charge could take on a leadership position alone. In Kayseri, Borhan showed poignant signs of loss of the strength, mental focus, and near athletic prowess in self-discipline that marked his prime years, though his behavior was also taken as evidence of saintliness, of having moved beyond the ordinary restraints of religion. When he led prayers in the mosque he spent long stretches of time—rather than minutes—in bowing or standing poses. When some members of the congregation complained, he apologized, “Some madness continually overwhelms me. I am not fit to be your prayer leader.” The plea only made him more revered and followed, as he was now understood to be as humble as he was wise.

  Most striking was the transformation of the rigid ascetic into a corpulent gentleman as he relaxed his tight regimen. Borhan once heard a voice commanding, “Undergo no further hardship!” He now obeyed this voice. A grand lady, who had become his disciple, teasingly asked why he had given up fasting and was not practicing his five daily prayers. “Oh child, I am like a load-bearing camel,” he replied, comparing himself to an emaciated camel at journey’s end being fed a few grains of barley. When his patron, the governor, grew concerned about his unkempt appearance, he snapped, “So I came into the
world for the sake of doing my laundry? Leave me alone!” Rather than feats of fasting, Borhan focused on his love of pickled turnips for indigestion. In old age, he began behaving with some of the carefree joy of the holy fools for God of Nishapur.

  Borhan died in Kayseri in 1240 or 1241, in his midseventies. Following a conventional mourning period of forty days, a letter was sent notifying Rumi in Konya. A decade after the death of his father, this news had a similar impact. Rumi collapsed into the knowledge that he was again without fatherly support. He set out quickly with a band of disciples on a road he traveled regularly enough during those years to recall later all the stops on the way, while illustrating the difference between ritual and true spiritual progress:

  The stages on the road from Konya to Kayseri are fixed and defined. They are Kaymaz, Uprukh, Sultan, and so forth. But the stages on the sea between Antalya and Alexandria are not fixed and defined. A ship’s captain may know them, but he won’t tell them to land dwellers because they would not understand.

  Rumi visited the grave of his mentor and held a funeral banquet in his honor. Borhan’s books and notes were spread out for him to choose whatever he wished. He cherished these words and found in rereading them the connection so important in his growth over the past decade. As with his father’s writings, Borhan left Rumi not only hard ascetic rules, but also messages of love that were the soft core of his discipline of curbing impulses: “If you prick your foot on a thorn, you would leave all the important things aside, and wholly attend to it. You ought then to do the same for your brother.”

  In his midthirties Rumi, finally, if inevitably, ascended to the leadership of his community. At the Madrase Khodavandgar, he was looked upon as the living embodiment of Baha Valad and Borhan. He walked the streets of Konya in the official garb of a religious scholar—wearing a cumbersome wide-sleeve cloak and a large turban, wound with one band unraveleld and hanging down his back. Although he never served in Konya as chief justice, or qadi, he held academic appointments at four separate colleges, all respected, including the Cotton Sellers Madrase, endowed by the guild of cotton merchants, and located on their street in the market district. His name appeared on lists of the most prominent doctors of the law belonging to the Hanafi School.

  At about the same time as the death of Borhan, Rumi’s wife, Gowhar, also mysteriously died, with no record of the cause. Again, Rumi experienced the loss of an intimate link to his childhood in Central Asia as well as, most crucially, the mother of his two sons. Yet Gowhar’s mother continued to live in the harem and take special interest in her grandsons. Rumi soon afterward married a widow, Kerra, from a Roman-Turkish family in Konya, whose deceased husband Mohammad Shah had been an aristocratic Persian speaker from Iran. Like Rumi, Kerra brought two children to their marriage—a boy, Shamsoddin Yahya, and a girl, Kimiya. Over the next few years Rumi and Kerra had their own son, Mozaffaroddin Amir Alem Chelebi—Rumi’s third—and a daughter, Maleke. With these four young children, the harem grew even more crowded and busier.

  Unlike his father, Rumi never kept multiple wives, and the widower and his widowed bride remained together for the rest of his life. Kerra was more vividly remembered than Gowhar, as theirs was not an arranged marriage, and she lived with Rumi during the period of his growing fame. Though he never wrote about Kerra directly, she was remembered by those in his inner circle and was later the source of some of the more magical and fantastical tales about her husband. Her choice to leave the aristocratic household of her deceased husband to marry a cleric pointed to spiritual leanings, underlined in Aflaki’s description of her as “a second Virgin Mary.” She was certainly superstitious, and was forever seeing jinn, or invisible, mischievous spirits. Early in their marriage, Rumi used to stand by a tall lamp stand at night, reading his father’s pages. She told him that the jinn complained to her of the bright light. Rumi smiled and three days later tried to mollify her. “After today do not worry. The jinn are my disciples and they are devoted to me. They will not cause any harm to come to our children or friends.”

  Rumi’s bemused smile to Kerra, on news of the jinn, either patronizing, loving, or both, expressed some of the enigma of his attitude toward women and marriage, as well as the general ambivalence toward women in medieval society. Rumi often fell into a traditional classifying of men as strong and rational, and women as mercurial and emotional. He once even painted wives as purifying tests for their coarse husbands:

  God showed the Prophet a narrow and hidden way to refine himself, and that was the path of marrying women, and enduring their tyranny, and listening to their complaints, and letting them order him around. . . . Character would only become purer through such patient forbearance.

  In other moods, he could be more sympathetic, as in his ode in the Masnavi to women:

  A woman is a ray of God, heavenly and beloved

  She is a creator, uncreated, from above

  Rumi later argued against imposing veils on women and had many female disciples, whose Friday evening gatherings in one lady’s garden he was criticized for attending.

  When his two older sons reached adolescence, Rumi sent them both to study in Damascus, a decision that distressed their maternal grandmother, the Great Kerra, as she would miss them greatly. He evidently thought highly enough of Damascus as the standard for religious education. Overseeing them on this trip was their tutor and guardian, Sharafoddin. Yet as both boys were now in their midteens, the combativeness of their childhood conflicts was only magnified. When they were younger, Rumi himself had mostly been away in Syria, leaving his first wife, Gowhar, with the problem of their bad behavior. Now the target of their rebelliousness in Damascus quickly became their tutor, and Rumi was upset at needing to write them a pointed letter, advising them to be more respectful to their elders:

  Dear son Bahaoddin, and dear son Alaoddin. Don’t forget to be polite to this father, the father of your education and training, Sharafoddin. Don’t be rude, or judgmental, or abusive, and treat him as a father. I am indebted to this dear father Sharafoddin. I am hoping that my dear children will be patient and kind and generous with him, and talk to him in a very kind way, and when this father is angry, I want my children to make themselves busy with other matters, or go to sleep. I am waiting to receive some news, and I pray for my children to become more kind and hopefully very soon you will return home and make us happy.

  Rumi was now flourishing in Konya, where he had become known for the power and popularity of his eloquent preaching. By the time he was seventeen and had returned from Syria, his son Bahaoddin, later known as Sultan Valad, would sit next to his father during these sermons, just as Rumi sat next to his father, Baha Valad. However, Rumi had such a youthful appearance that when the two appeared together in public they were often mistaken for brothers. Rumi was satisfying his patrons, the Sunni Seljuk rulers, as his public speeches displayed enough emotion and beauty to convert Greeks and Armenians, a desired outcome for the regime. He could later still summon the fervent emotion that his sermons had stirred among local Greek speakers, who did not understand much of their content:

  I was speaking one day to a crowd that included non-Muslims, and during my talk they were weeping and going into ecstatic states. “What do they understand? What do they know?” someone asked. “Not one out of a thousand Muslims can understand this sort of talk. What have they comprehended that they can weep so?” It was not necessary for them to understand the words. What they understood was the essence of the speech . . . the oneness of God.

  Seeing the response of audiences from the viewpoint of his father, as he sat beside him, Sultan Valad, too, recalled the excitement stirred by his gifted and warmhearted oratory: “Now that he stood alone, his greatness became more visible, in the eyes of the old, and the eyes of the young. Even among those who had kept their distance from him before.”

  Yet Rumi was not wholly satisfied by this early success. Ironically he had achieved everything his father and tutor desired for him, and attained the goa
ls and station considered most lofty by his society at a relatively young age. Ever since childhood he had been a bit of a prodigy, and always had a graceful power over those around him. These indicators of success were borne out by his talents as a teacher, preacher, jurist, and spiritual counselor. He traveled both outward and inward paths of education, yet he was feeling incomplete, inauthentic, not yet arrived at his destination.

  Now in his late thirties, Rumi particularly puzzled over the limits of the learning he had accumulated with such exertion in Aleppo and Damascus—expending great effort was another virtue of the scholarly culture. He struggled, as well, with fame, the sort of important status recognized by the scholars. By his combination of the authority of learning with youthful charm and charisma, he attracted an eager retinue—if not quite the “ten thousand more” newly minted followers counted by Sultan Valad. His pleasure in this easy adulation was authentic, but so was a jagged shadow of doubt. Rumi began to feel uneasy about expectations being laid on him. He distrusted his need for notice of an identity he could not comfortably fit—a discomfort made worse by having no one to talk with about these unexpected doubts, no confidant. The vehemence of Rumi’s later attacks on intellectual preening and the traps of fame grew from experiences during this unexpectedly conflicted moment in his life. He admitted as much in a reflective robai: