Rumi's Secret Read online

  Dedication

  For Walter

  Epigraph

  Love stole my prayer beads and gave me poetry and song

  —RUMI

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART I 1. “In a lightning flash from here to Vakhsh”

  2. Samarkand

  3. On the Silk Road

  4. “Fire fell into the world”

  5. Konya

  6. “I kept hearing my own name”

  PART II 7. “The face of the sun is Shams of Tabriz”

  8. Separation

  9. “I burned, I burned, I burned”

  PART III 10. “Last year in a red cloak . . . this year in blue”

  11. The Fall of Baghdad

  12. “Sing, flute!”

  13. “A nightingale flew away, then returned”

  14. The Religion of Love

  15. Wedding Night

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Note on Transliteration

  Glossary of Names

  Glossary of Terms

  Maps

  References

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Brad Gooch

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  ONE Friday morning, I wandered, nearly alone, through the Grand Bazaar, in Aleppo, Syria. Most of the shops in the usually frenetic indoor market—a warren of dank crosshatching passageways, lined by fluorescent-lit counters piled high with figs, pistachios, djellabas, even toy trucks and cleaning products—were closing for noonday services. I could already see clumps of men depositing their scuffed shoes outside the Umayyad Mosque, its stately courtyard with old square brick minaret, tilted slightly to the right, visible through a pointed archway admitting a shaft of warm sunlight. It was nearly the beginning of springtime, March 18, 2011, and by day’s end, unanticipated by me, as well as a surprise to most of the world, a Syrian civil uprising would erupt that within a few years would destroy much of this medieval bazaar and the historic mosque thriving nearby.

  The only sounds in the bazaar that morning, though, were the cooing of doves, fluttering in stone ceilings vaulted high above a darkened second story, and the clanging shut of a few shop grates. Taking advantage of this pause in all the jostling, I pulled out a little notebook and began drawing a map, trying to figure out the architecture extant from the thirteenth century, when the young Rumi had been a student in this thrumming Arabic trading town. I was penciling in an axial line for the straight street east to west, when a black-haired twenty-something-year-old, pedaling by on his bike, came to a sharp stop.

  “Where are you from?” he asked in impeccable British English.

  “America.”

  “Are you a spy?” he said, pointing toward my notebook.

  No sooner did I shoot him an alarmed look than he broke into an infectious “just kidding” giggle. “Sebastian,” as he told me his name was, quickly filled in that he had been schooled in England and was now home helping his family with their carpet shop. When he poked for more information about my note taking, I started filling in quickly, too.

  “I’m writing a biography of Rumi . . . the Persian Sufi poet . . . he’s famous now in . . .”

  I didn’t need to continue spelling out the ABCs of Rumi’s life. Sebastian was jolted by my response and erupted into a swoon of rapid questions and comments.

  “You’re writing about Rumi? He’s one of my favorite two or three poets in the entire world. He reminds me of your American poet Whitman because he’s so universal!”

  Now I, too, was surprised. Not only was Sebastian one of Rumi’s passionate fans, but he also made an apt comparison, which had never occurred to me, with Whitman, likewise a poet of epic intimacy. As we walked a few more steps together, he startled me even more by breaking into a flawless recitation of the opening of Rumi’s major poem, Masnavi, not in the original Persian, as I might have guessed, but in singsong stanzas translated in the last century by the eminent orientalist Cambridge don R. A. Nicholson:

  Hearken to this reed forlorn,

  Breathing, ever since was torn

  From its rushy bed, a strain

  Of impassioned love and pain

  The lines were lovely, if dated, and created a heady effect. But their curious spell didn’t last. Sebastian needed to get back to his pile of camel hair carpets and Ottoman blue tiles.

  “Rumi is in a small group of the greatest poets of all time,” he said, as his parting thought. “Why? Because, like Whitman, or like Shakespeare, he never tells his secret!”

  After slipping me his business card, he was gone, a silhouette riding his bike through many receding arches, past the shuttered shops of the spice and jewelry markets.

  I instantly felt as if Sebastian, with his dashed, provocative comment, had also handed me—as we stood on that basalt slab walkway in the deserted souk—an important passkey to the poetry, life, and thought of Rumi. For just a few lines further along in the same poem that he had practically been singing to me, Rumi’s reed flute itself sings:

  The secret of my song, though near,

  None can see and none can hear

  And then, plangently:

  Oh, for a friend to know the sign

  And mingle all his soul with mine!

  Yes, I thought. Rumi did have secrets—personal, poetic, and theological—that he was always both revealing and concealing. His was a life full of both mystery and meaning.

  I was in town investigating one piece of the life of Rumi, who had likely been a theological student in Aleppo in the 1230s, perhaps at the former college, which I could just make out across the black-and-white marbled square. Yet I’d been in thrall to Rumi for much longer, beginning with the seductive lines of his verse. For years the poems of Rumi were my steady pleasure, ever since discovering a paperback of translations by A. J. Arberry—a student of Nicholson’s at Cambridge—on a friend’s bookshelf in Miami. I spent most of a week’s visit reading one after another, drawn in by their ecstatic imagery, if not always understanding their mesh of flashes of wisdom on human and divine love:

  I am the black cloud in the night of grief who

  Gladdened the day of festival.

  I am the amazing earth who out of the fire of love

  Filled with air the brain of the sky.

  A decade later I found myself among a group of young Muslim Americans in a Sufi group—the mystical branch of Islam—as I was researching a chapter about Islam in New York City for my book Godtalk. We met Friday evenings in a modest apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. By then Rumi was something of a sensation in America, similar to the craze, in Victorian England, for Omar Khayyam (“A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou!”). Because of popular translations by Coleman Barks, Time magazine labeled Rumi the “best-selling poet in the U.S.” Extraordinarily prolific, he had indeed composed a six-book spiritual epic, as well as over three thousand lyric ghazals and two thousand four-line robais.

  But this circle was less interested in the compelling single lines of verse (“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing / there is a field. I’ll meet you there”—in Barks’s famous version) than with meditations their leader read aloud from Rumi’s talks, transcribed and collected in a book titled, simply, Fihe ma fih, or In It Is What Is in It:

  If you accustom yourself to speak well of others, you are always in a paradise. When you do a good deed for someone else you become a friend to him, and whenever he thinks of you he will think of you as a friend—and thinking of a friend is as restful as a flower garden.

  Together the group constituted a Noah’s Ark of str
ipes and strains of Muslims in America, and from these young men and women of Central Asian, Pakistani, Middle Eastern, North African, Turkish, European, or Canadian background, I learned much more about Rumi’s life story, and the importance of his religious background and beliefs.

  The map of Rumi’s life stretches over 2,500 miles, and I soon began to travel, trying to put a face and a place to this name and ecstatic style glowing in my mind. I spent two summers—in Austin, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin—in intensive Persian programs, getting closer to his native language, and beginning to translate his elusive poetry, as all the translations in this biography are mine in collaboration with the Iranian-American writer Maryam Mortaz. I visited Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, the site of a traumatic siege during his boyhood. I followed the old Silk Road into Iran, thinking of the adolescent Rumi, traveling west with his family, lulled to sleep by the tinkling saddle bells and Arabic love songs of the camel drivers on endless caravans. I stood at dusk on the bare, rocky rise of Mount Qasiyun, overlooking Damascus—for the mature Rumi, “paradise on earth.” I was struck by similarities between his own violent and tumultuous times and our own. I also realized that all the dots of his life might never be connected, some secrets remaining intact. For this mystic of eight hundred years ago, poems were occasionally our only hard facts.

  Interest in Rumi inevitably leads to Konya, in south-central Turkey, where he lived most of the nearly fifty years of his adult life. I visited Konya on the most auspicious and crowded week of the commemoration of Rumi’s death, spun by him in advance as his “Wedding Night,” on December 17, 1273. My guide was a raven-haired Turkish woman, in her early twenties, drawn to Sufism by reading a popular Turkish novel about Rumi. One afternoon she drove me to a thirteenth-century Seljuk inn, or caravanserai, the stone remains of its courtyard and stables outlined against the sky of a flat, grassy Anatolian steppe—like so many where Rumi had lodged. Having passed a peripatetic boyhood, he found in these way stations a metaphor for human experience:

  The mind is a caravanserai

  Each morning, new guests arrive . . .

  All thoughts, happy or sad,

  Are guests. Welcome them.

  On our way back into Konya, rising on its outskirts like a punctuation mark of devotion to Rumi, not only as a poet but also as a saint, was the turquoise-tiled cylindrical tower, wrapped in a band of blue-and-gold calligraphy, of his shrine. The burial site is a rose garden, given as a gift for his father’s tomb by their patron, the Seljuk Sultan Alaoddin Kayqobad I. Along with the nearly five thousand daily visitors, I filed through the chamber, crowded with women sobbing and praying, drawing scarves devoutly over their heads, while men and boys read aloud from books of his poetry, murmuring the words in Persian or Turkish. Rumi’s elevated tomb, covered in gold-embroidered black velvet, is placed near those of sixty-five members of his immediate family, including his second wife.

  My guide finally dropped me at a private home, for a gathering for whirling, the dance central to Rumi’s own meditating. I was stopped at the door and said the password “zekr,” a word for Sufi prayer I’d learned at the Manhattan group. Inside, one by one, men and women whirled on a low table, in a heat of fast drumbeats. The next night I attended the more official ceremony, or sama, at a stadium-size venue, where dozens of “whirling dervishes” in tan felt tombstone hats, accompanied by flutes and drums, shed their black woolen cloaks, looking, as they spun, like white flowers opening, or orbiting planets. Like his contemporary Francis of Assisi, whose Franciscan Order cohered mostly after his death, Rumi’s circle only later became a standard Sufi order—the Mevlevis—and his practice of meditating while spinning to music was codified into this elegant dance.

  During the week in 1273 that we were commemorating, Konya had been keyed up, too, with much of the population on a deathwatch for the sixty-six-year-old Rumi—who was as much a public figure as a mystic and poet. His chambers had been hushed for months, except for the mewing of a favorite cat. In those final days, Rumi’s thoughts were often on Shams, the transformative friend he felt had opened spiritual dimensions of love and creativity for him—the supposed site of their meeting now marked by a modest octagonal glass and turquoise-painted metal shrine, resembling a bus stop, on Konya’s main boulevard. On his deathbed, Rumi had murmured that while loved ones pulled at him to remain alive, Shams “calls me from the other side.” And he dictated a number of urgent poems about his impending death, conveying fresh, upbeat messages, including the joyfully brash lines that we visitors could now study carved into the ornate calligraphy of his sarcophagus:

  If you visit my grave

  My tomb will make you dance

  Be sure to bring a tambourine

  Rumi’s funeral on a gray December day was more like the heated frenzy of whirling I’d witnessed in the Sufi home rather than in the official sama ceremony. The turbulent procession originated in his home and school, a site now occupied—as pointed out to me by the director of the Mevlana Museum—by a flimsy, pale-blue, modern apartment house slated for demolition. Rumi’s coffin was carried forth in the morning and did not arrive at the rose garden until sunset, its lid needing to be replaced after being torn off by mourners. Following behind, bareheaded, were not only Muslim imams, Quran reciters, bands of musicians playing tambourines and trumpets Sufi-style, as well as singers of Rumi’s odes, but also Jewish rabbis, reciting psalms, and Christian priests, reading from the Gospels. They passed through the turreted walls of Konya, which endured into the early twentieth century but have since been reduced to a lonely gate here, some stonework there, such as the archway nearest to the rose garden, still intact, in the midst of a busy traffic circle.

  Attending those services, which extended long into the night and still stand out in Konya’s civic history, was Eraqi, a Sufi poet, not a close friend of Rumi’s, more of an acquaintance. On his way out of the cemetery, and over the years whenever asked, his takeaway remark on Rumi voiced an essential insight that had been echoed, too, unintentionally, by Sebastian in the Aleppo bazaar and remains a through-line in history: “No one understood him properly. He came into this world as a stranger, and he left as a stranger.”

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  “In a lightning flash from here to Vakhsh”

  WHEN Rumi was five years old, he saw angels and would occasionally jump up and grow agitated at these visions. A few of the students gathered around his father, Baha Valad, then held the boy to their chests to try to calm him. “These are angels from the unseen world,” his father reassured him. “They are showing themselves to you to offer you their favors and they have brought visible and invisible gifts for you.” He emphasized that these unsettling episodes were nothing to fear but a sign of being blessed.

  Baha Valad also recalled neighborhood children once visiting his son, when he was about five or six years old, on their rooftop on a Friday morning. “Let’s jump from this roof to the other roof!” a friend shouted. They made a wager on the daring feat, just as his son, scoffing at their game, somehow vanished, causing a clamor. When he reappeared, a few minutes later, he announced, “While I was talking to you, I saw some people in green robes. They took me away and helped me to fly and showed me the sky and the planets. When I heard your shouts and screams, they brought me back.” This report of a mystical adventure cinched his status among his amazed group of playmates.

  In several such stories about Rumi’s early childhood passed down from his father and his father’s pupils, a coherent picture emerges that is consistent with the boy who saw angels yet managed often enough to stay a step ahead of his peers. The young Rumi was sensitive, nervous, and excitable, but he was also clever, warm, and engaging. The warmth emanated from a family life that he experienced as positive and loving. As he later wrote, “Love is your father and your family.” He was eagerly absorbed in childhood fantasy and imagination, yet, given his family and community, this invisible world was mostly religiously tinged. Descended from a line of eminent p
reachers, his father assumed that his precocious son would follow in his footsteps to the mosque minbar, or pulpit.

  While aspiring later in life to the ecstatic condition of having “no name,” Rumi was truly a boy, and man, wrapped in layers of names and titles. His given name was Mohammad, like his father, and like so many of the boys in his neighborhood. Because the name was so common—if glorified—nicknames were useful, such as “Khodavandgar,” a title usually reserved for adult spiritual leaders or seers, as the term was Persian for “Lord” or “Master,” which his father conferred on him soon after he began seeing angels. Another of Rumi’s honorifics, likewise given by his father, “Jalaloddin,” means “Splendor of the Faith.” In an account in one of his notebooks, Baha Valad tenderly referred to his son as “My Jalaloddin Mohammad.” Later in life he tended to be addressed with the title “Mowlana,” for “Our Master” or “Our Teacher.” Indeed “Rumi,” the single name by which he is now known—derived from “Rum,” or “Rome,” referring to Byzantium, the eastern half of the Roman Empire, including present-day Turkey, where he spent most of his adult life—was used for identifying him by few, if any, during his lifetime.

  Like most young children, until puberty Rumi spent his earliest childhood years behind the protective walls of the harem, a more intimate and separate domain in a traditional Muslim household, where the women lived and walked about unveiled. He stayed not only with his mother, Momene, about whom little is known, though she was later credited with the honor of descent from the house of the Prophet Mohammad, but also with his father’s other wives, his difficult paternal grandmother, “Mami,” whom Baha Valad complained about in his diaries, for her “mean temper . . . always screaming, yelling, and fighting,” and a nanny, Nosob, with whom he was especially close. Given the intricate dynamics of multiple wives, Rumi had both siblings and half-siblings. His older brother, Alaoddin, was born to Rumi’s mother two years before him. He also had an older married sister, Fateme, and at least one half-brother, Hosayn. Rumi was the youngest, as his father was already in his early fifties when he was born.