Rumi's Secret Read online

  At first, when the child shows his handwriting to the teacher, the letters are all slanted and wrong. But the teacher, patiently and skillfully, says to the child, “All the letters are good! You have written them very well. Very good! Very good! You have only written this letter the wrong way. You should write it like this. And also that letter is incorrect. It’s like this.”

  Rumi never bragged of any exceptional signs of adolescent intellectual power, yet he did allow himself to etch a portrait of a boy in the third person that might well be understood as a self-portrait, a tactic he coyly used several times in the Masnavi. In a slight detour, while writing a scene set in a school, he meditated on gifted children, arguing the Sunni philosophical position that all minds are created different, against the claim of some philosophers that all minds are created equal and that differences occur later because of education, a sort of nurture over nature argument. Rumi brings to life, as his example, a young prodigy, already wise beyond his years, self-possessed, with a knowing manner:

  The opinions of a young boy

  Without much experience in life,

  May arise from thoughts that an old man,

  Full of years, might never comprehend.

  Rumi’s vignette has a knowing ring, and the boy he describes is recognizable in the anecdote passed down from Sharaf of the pupil refuting the “cleverly subtle” scholars.

  In one of the funniest tales in the Masnavi, a group of boys in a maktab—hardly seeming to be entertaining thoughts beyond their years—plot how to escape the grind of work being assigned by a demanding teacher. One cunning pupil decides to use the power of suggestion to convince the instructor of an illness during the core maktab class of recitation of the verses of the Quran to learn to give each letter and vowel its due:

  The cleverest boy in the class made a plan

  To tell the teacher, “You look so pale.

  I hope you are well, but you’ve lost all color.

  I’m wondering if it’s the weather, or fever.”

  The teacher began to have his doubts.

  Then the clever boy told another, “Do the same.”

  After all thirty students express concern, the teacher hurries home and stays abed, shivering. Rumi’s glee in the prank obviously came from siding with the students and made believable an even more direct confession of his younger self resisting classwork:

  Your love of mother’s milk didn’t last

  Your hatred of going to school didn’t last

  The heart of this education, though, for Rumi, both young and old, was the Quran, the sacred text of Islam, recited by the Prophet Mohammad in Mecca and Medina in the seventh century, as holy verses memorized and transcribed in mostly rhymed Arabic prose. The Quran was divided into suras, or chapters, eventually arranged in order from longest to shortest. While Rumi could be comical or even rebellious about maktab lessons, he was never ironic about the Quran. Everything about the temperament and family of this sensitive child primed a mesmerized reader and listener. If his ears burned hearing the tales of jackals or lions in Kalile and Demne, the accounts in the Quran were narrative “husks” that included moral “kernels.” Later in life, he grew even more fascinated by the model of Mohammad, the ordinary merchant chosen as the messenger of the words of God put down in the Quran, whose personal qualities were nearly erased by divine inspiration—“A window through which we see the Creator.”

  Over and over, the young Rumi heard the stories of prophets from the Quran that would form the raw material of his prayers, talks, and certainly poetry. Among his favorites were: Abraham, surviving Nimrod’s fiery furnace without being burned; Noah, whose restive son dies in the flood; Joseph, so handsome some Egyptian women slice their hands with their dinner knives while distractedly staring at him; Moses, whose rod turns into a serpent and swallows the magician’s wands; Mary, giving birth beneath a palm tree that showers her with ripe dates; the baby Jesus, gifted with speech in his cradle, and able to give life to clay birds with his breath; David, fashioning armor from iron chain-links; King Solomon, with his magic ring, like Rumi’s father in his dream, understanding the language of birds:

  The flames were obedient to Abraham,

  The waves bore Noah on their backs,

  Iron obeyed David, and melted like wax

  While winds were the slaves of Solomon.

  Rumi later imagined the Quran as a rich fabric brocade woven on two sides—“Some enjoy the one side, some the other. Both are true.” And he saw these two complementary sides as a woman, both a mother and a wife, supplying different needs:

  Her baby’s pleasure comes from her breasts and her milk, that of the husband from enjoying intimacy with her. Some are children on the path and drink milk—these enjoy the external meaning of the Quran—unlike those who have become mature and understand in a different way.

  The Masnavi unfolds with long stretches of probing philosophical questions raised by the Quran, in sermonic style, and in parsed couplets. Rumi could be precise and legal in his musings on free will or determinism. But other parts of the poem reveal a more immediate, childlike response to the Quran as a boyhood book of wonder. In one such story of the Blind Man and the Quran, a visiting sheikh is confused by the prominence of the scripture on a shelf in the home of a blind man. At night he hears him reciting verses, and rushes out to catch him in the act, and to demand some explanation:

  “Amazing, with your blind eyes

  You recite as if you see the lines

  You have touched what you are reading

  You put your finger on the very word!”

  The blind man explains that when he went blind he prayed to be able to read the Quran, as he was not a hafez, who had memorized the entire book. God granted him sight for the sluices of time when he read verses, and then—like magic—his eyes snapped shut again:

  “That peerless King restores for me my sight

  Like a lantern that brightens the dark night!”

  During the decade between 1212 and 1221, most probably in 1216, when Rumi was nine or ten years old, the camel caravan of the family of Baha Valad set out again, this time in the direction of Mecca, the birthplace of the Prophet Mohammad and holy city of Islam, a required pilgrimage destination for every Muslim in reasonable health at least once in a lifetime. Theirs was a journey with no certain plan of return. All the accounts record their point of embarkation from Khorasan as Balkh—likely enough, given the family history. To travel from Samarkand to Balkh, they simply would have needed to double back alongside the Oxus River.

  A natural crossing point to the Balkh side of the river was the fortress town of Termez, hometown of Rumi’s tutor Borhan, who had decided to remain there. In his midforties, Borhan was Rumi’s lale, a tutor assigned the special task of looking out for his well-being and spiritual education, and so was a warm and important figure in Rumi’s boyhood, surpassed in influence only by his father. Borhan was later fondly remembered for “always lifting Khodavandgar on his shoulders and carrying him around.” Rumi spoke of this tutor in the same glowing terms as he spoke of his father: “Go! Turn into pure light like Borhan-e Mohaqqeq!” And he remarked on his “ability to argue fine points well from his reading the masters.”

  Borhan had become one of an intimate group of acolytes around Baha Valad, devoted to studying mystical practices in a sort of advanced seminar in prayers, visions, and dreams, which was not shared publicly. Of these practices, Borhan was particularly fanatic about fasting as a technique for self-discipline. In imitation of Baha Valad, he kept his own spiritual diary, where he wrote of the benefits of abstinence, so that his body might become “just like a glass through which the light of faith shines.” Rumi quickly absorbed these cues. By age six, he was supposedly able to sustain a fast as long as three or four days. So this sudden, absolute separation from his lale was not easy for the boy.

  Other separations caused by his father’s decision to embark were equally difficult. Staying behind, most likely in Balkh, were his gran
dmother “Mami,” in her seventies, too aged for the rigorous and uncertain trip; his older half-brother Hosayn; his half-sister Fateme, who stayed with her husband; and, along with Borhan, the other figure Rumi missed most, looking back, his dear nanny, Nosob. When he wished to stress the need to count solely on God, he evoked the loss of this nurturing pair from his young life:

  Closeness to anyone but God’s untrue,

  Where now is the love of your nanny and your tutor?

  Only God is your true supporter

  His eminent family friend, and another mentor in his young life, Sharaf Samarqandi, had recently died—another separation. Since Sharaf had been a man of means, his widow used the remaining family resources to travel on the pilgrimage, too, with her daughter Gowhar. Both mother and daughter would grow in importance to the family over the course of this journey. Baha Valad later said of the widowed “perfect saint,” “My spiritual level and her spiritual level are the same.” By the time they neared the end of their travels, nearly a decade later, Gowhar had become Rumi’s first wife.

  Whether paranoid or realistic, Baha Valad was always anxious about the risky politics of the region. While they were still living in Vakhsh, he feared that he would be imprisoned for his political opinions in an area far removed from his family and his followers, where no one could help him. During his time in Samarkand, the power of Khwarazmshah had grown, and his influence was everywhere. On the eastern borders, the first threats from Mongols had been felt as early as 1211, as this Asiatic power made border skirmishes from China. So the practical concerns of Baha Valad interlocked well with the requirements of his religion to make a trip to Mecca.

  Baha Valad often wrote in his journal of yearning for quest and for movement—“When God is taking your body and your soul from East to West.” He would not have been disappointed in the larger caravan they now joined. In the first leg of their journey, as they trekked along the borders of Central Asia, countless other long trains of double-hump Bactrian, or single-hump dromedary camels and donkeys, were making their way across the deserts and plains ringed by snowcapped mountains, stopping in oasis towns surrounded by subtropical palm trees. Busy markets were crowded with merchants peddling melons or horses to travelers from a wide swathe of the known world—as Rumi would write when reaching to express geographical expanse, “from Rome to Khorasan.”

  As a boy, Rumi absorbed the rhythm of these camels as they traced their shuffling lines in grass and sand, dutifully following the lead of their drivers, who steered with pegs of wood inserted in the camels’ noses, through which loops of rope were strung. He would later come to imagine himself as just such a camel, guided by reins held by love’s hand, “Drunkenly pulling your load, in ecstasy.” And he came to know by heart the tunes permeating everywhere on the trip, sung to pass the time or quicken the pace. Accompanied at each stride by the jingle of silver bells fastened near their camels’ ears, the drivers spontaneously broke into traditional songs—often love songs—only interrupted for the call to prayer. Most pronounced in these melodies was the nay, or reed flute, an almost mournful Persian instrument that became for Rumi an image of his art and soul.

  Spaced a day’s journey apart along the way were the caravanserai, outfitted with a well and stables for animals, a prayer room, a small bazaar, and a gallery of guest rooms around a central courtyard. In the colder mountains, these inns were built of stone, with roofed courtyards to keep out rain and snow. On the warmer plains, they were constructed of compacted earth or brick with open courtyards. Such inns always evoked for Rumi transience rather than comfort, as he passed through so many growing up. Yet the tenor of his writing about this juvenile time of traveling was positive. He was moving farther from any maktab school, being taught by his father or others. And images of flutes and camels, caravans and inns, crescent moons and desert sands, along with the constant change would eventually be compressed into his great theme of nonattachment:

  Our voices like the bells of a caravan

  Or thunder when the clouds are full

  Traveler, don’t leave your heart in the inn.

  CHAPTER 3

  On the Silk Road

  IN the early stretches of their travels, Rumi’s family followed simple roads that traced the shortest distance between two points. Yet as their destinations became more distant, they joined into an elaborate network of trade routes that connected China, India, and Persia to the Mediterranean Sea. This well-kept system of major roads, inherited by the Arabs from the earlier Persian kingdom, radiated out of Baghdad and served both trade and religious purposes. Known in later centuries as the “Silk Road,” the route was actually neither: “silk” was just one of its transported goods, which included everything from spices and fine glass to ammonium chloride for treating saddles; and the “road,” in outlying regions, broke into unmarked paths over deserts or steep mountains.

  Like other travelers from Balkh, Rumi’s family would have followed a southern route that linked to the most trafficked of the trunk roads, the Great Khorasan Road, to Baghdad and Mecca, passing through Khorasan, and continuing westward, with the Great Desert to their south and the Tabaristan Mountains to their north. Eventually they would have descended from the highlands of Persia to cross the Tigris River and enter Baghdad through its eastern Khorasan Gate. From western Baghdad, the main Pilgrim Road then led on toward Mecca and Medina, crossing over the vast Arabian Desert in a direct line.

  This journey, though, was as much inward as outward, even if Rumi was still such a young boy and much of its impact not fully realized for some time. He was seeing many fantastic sights by touring through the great Islamic cities of the day, yet he was even more crucially coming into contact with important clues to his poetic, cultural, and spiritual lineage, especially in Nishapur, Baghdad, and Mecca. Nishapur was the center of a vibrant scene of devotional poetry and mystics trading in scandal as a spiritual practice; Baghdad, the very nervous system of both Islamic university life and Sufism from its beginings, as well as the seat of the caliph, both pope and king; in Mecca, Muslims of all ages came to reflect, once in a lifetime, on the relation of their souls to God, a matter of early concern to Rumi as it was to his family. The man Rumi became would have been inconceivable without the pieces of his identity he discovered in this decade-long trip.

  Their first stop would have been Nishapur, near the northeast border of present-day Iran, where they likely arrived sometime in 1216, when Rumi was about ten years old. Nishapur was the fourth of the large capitals of Khorasan, the most populous, and the most western in location, a final outpost of the land of Rumi’s birth. It was also a welcome respite on such a trip, as branch roads from Balkh were among the more meandering kind, less well kept than the broader routes leading into Baghdad, and so the family had just passed through long stretches of dusty badlands, a forbidding hideout for outlaws, with endless plains enlivened in spring only by a fuzz of green grass dotted with red poppies, domed adobe houses, and the tent camps of nomad shepherds. The resolve, and health, of Baha Valad would have been tested with such a rocky beginning, and the relative comforts of home and the maktab schools set in high contrast for the boy Rumi.

  In Nishapur in 1216 was the geographer and travel writer Yaqut, who visited many of the same cities as Rumi and his family, and often in the same year. He described the capital in the phase that would have been witnessed by the family of Baha Valad as still distressed in spots from the great earthquakes of 1145, followed, in 1153, by a siege by Oghuz Turks, who captured and carried off their grand sultan Sanjar the Seljuk. As an empire builder, Sanjar came to stand for powerful, worldly rulers in Rumi’s poems:

  Since I came into your shade, I am the sun in the sky

  Since I became a slave of love, I am the Khan and the Sultan Sanjar

  As with many of the cities he described in the florid style of the time, Yaqut still found fine marvels to catch his eye, praising especially the turquoise mines and the swift river of Nishapur, powering dozens of mills wit
h the snow melting from nearby mountains.

  While Nishapur was not the most memorable or significant of places visited by Rumi’s family, the city did offer its style of liberated, freewheeling spirituality, and an equally novel and brilliant poetry scene—with both of which Rumi eventually revealed an affinity. Nishapuri mystics were distinctive enough to become labeled the “School of Khorasan.” Their most notorious members were followers of the “malamatiyya,” or “path of blame.” Camouflaging their actual piety so as not to be deemed saintly, these brazen types walked the streets barefoot, appeared to drink wine, wore finely embroidered silks, and behaved as if sinful or crazy. Having witnessed urban frivolity in the squares of Samarkand at twilight, which may have been extreme for a boy from Vakhsh, Rumi was likely exposed in Nishapur to these fools for God, behaving just as wildly but as a spiritual practice.

  The Nishapuri poets, too, traded in scandal. Their most famous practicing master, Attar, was by then well into his eighties or even nineties, his finest works behind him, especially The Conference of the Birds, an inventive and vividly imagined tale of a flock of birds embarked on a quest in search of the divine, fantastically plumed Simorgh, perched atop the highest peak of the Alborz mountain range in northern Iran. Such a work was made-to-order for a boy such as Rumi. Its moral tale involved talking animals, like his favorite Kalile and Demne, and the Simorgh had first appeared in all her majesty in the Shahname. Rumi responded to its simple Arabic meter, which he later used in his own Masnavi. And the poem reflected much that was rich and captivating in the sensibility of Nishapur at this peak moment.