Rumi's Secret Read online

  During the family’s stay, Baha Valad, with his son in tow, was said to have found his way to the apothecary shop run by Attar inside a crowded bazaar. (“Attar” was a pen name signifying an herbal druggist, apothecary, or even a perfume seller, as in “attar of roses.”) Such a meeting was indeed possible, though Rumi never spoke in public of such a fateful audience with the great poet, arguably his favorite. Attar was apparently in Nishapur during the year of the family’s visit; an arranged conversation between a visiting religious leader, traveling from the eastern lands, and versed in the language of dreams and visions, would seem possible. The focus, though, should have been the elder dignitary, Baha Valad, not his little boy.

  As the story was told, flatteringly, by others, Attar, however, was more taken with Baha Valad’s sensitive son. With great prescience, the poet intuited the future of the child standing before him and predicted to Baha Valad, “Your son will soon be kindling fire in all the world’s lovers of God.” As a gift, he handed the boy a copy of his masnavi in couplets, his Book of Secrets. In this abstract reverie, with a sage theme, Attar reveals that the secrets of the world are hidden near the throne of God, and discovery of these eternal verities is available only to those willing “to lose their heads” and drink the divine rosewater of “meaning.” With blessings bestowed, both father and son then walked off.

  This story clung to Rumi’s reputation in later years because whether or not it actually occurred in the bazaar in Nishapur, it occurred in a realm of “meaning,” important to him and his followers. Rumi claimed in Attar a sort of father figure, a poet father, and came to venerate “the unique Attar,” always comparing himself diminutively, or inventing puns playing on “the scent of Attar,” or on his small perfume and apothecary shop:

  Whatever you want, you will find in Attar

  His is the shop of the world, and there is no other

  Rumi not only looked up to Attar as a poet, but he also accepted the poetic lineage Attar fashioned for himself. Like many poets in defense of their style, Attar found inspiration and a model to emulate in the past, and contrary poets to reject for following an unsatisfying muse. He chose as his own father figure poet Sanai, a poet of the previous generation from Ghazna, in present-day Afghanistan, the first court poet credited with giving up writing fawning odes for his patron so he could practice devotional poetry. Sanai’s Garden of Truth, in ten chapters, was the first spiritual masnavi, a template for those to come, including Rumi’s, its flat, deliberate rhymed couplets recited throughout Khorasan. (Rumi’s tutor Borhan had loved to pepper his conversations with its proverbs: “The Royal Road leading your soul to God is nothing but the cleansing of the heart’s mirror.”)

  Attar, following the later Sanai, bragged of never having written a panegyric for hire, and both freely mixed their spirituality with scandal, in the mode of the flamboyant mystics of Nishapur. Sanai’s most notorious poem, “Satan’s Lament”—parodied once by Rumi—turned on the tricky notion of Satan as the true lover of God, impossibly jealous of Adam. In The Conference of the Birds, Attar’s flock exchanges tales of unconventional passions, between, for example, a Muslim sheikh and a Christian lady, or Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna and his Turk male slave Ayaz. Rumi was definite about his deep literary and spiritual debt to these poets, and his son Sultan Valad later ascribed to his father the line:

  Attar was the soul and Sanai the eyes of the heart

  I follow in the footsteps of Sanai and Attar

  Rumi said as much when making clear his poetic and spiritual lineage for his students:

  Whoever deeply reads the words of Attar will understand the secrets of Sanai, and whoever reads the words of Sanai, with belief, will better comprehend my own words and will benefit from and enjoy them.

  The poet of the previous generation dismissed by Attar, and by Rumi, or at least by his friend Shams of Tabriz, was Omar Khayyam, buried beside a garden wall a few miles outside Nishapur, where pear and peach trees scattered petals on his tomb. Celebrated as a mathematician and astronomer while alive, Khayyam also wrote seductive, four-line quatrains, compatible with short, pithy observations about life: “Whether at Nishapur or Babylon . . . The leaves of life keep falling one by one.” Yet the bracing wind of doubt and pessimism—including questioning whether an afterlife existed—that sweeps through these robais disturbed the mystical Attar. In his Book of the Divine, Attar imagined a clairvoyant, standing at Khayyam’s grave, seeing the great intellectual “bathing in his sweat for shame and confusion,” having to admit his error. No story was ever told of Baha Valad and Rumi visiting the grave of Omar Khayyam.

  Nishapur was known not only as the “Gate to the East”—the entrance to Khorasan—but also as the “Gate to the West.” Having passed through that gate, as two roads diverged just west of Nishapur, travelers such as Rumi’s family would have then taken the more northern caravan route rather than the southern post road. This route led past Rey, near modern-day Tehran, and on to Baghdad. Along the way, Persian tunes gradually gave way to Arabic love songs as the caravans left behind the Persian towns, where Farsi was spoken, and headed toward the Arabic-speaking regions of the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula. Of a life spent toggling between these two languages, Rumi wrote:

  Speak Persian, though Arabic is more beautiful

  Love speaks a hundred different languages

  When they passed beyond the outskirts of Persian-speaking Nishapur, Rumi’s family forever departed Khorasan. He never again saw the “beauties” of his native homeland.

  As they were on pilgrimage to Mecca, the family was also traveling to the center of the Muslim religious world. As important as land geography for thirteenth-century Muslims were religious quadrants, the location of these places within latitudes and longitudes of spiritual significance. All prayer rugs during ritual prayer were pointed in the direction, or qibla, of Mecca. In Muslim cemeteries, usually located, as in Baghdad, just outside the city gates, the deceased were often buried facing toward Mecca. A carved wall niche in all mosques indicated the alignment with the holy city—this qibla later reimagined with romantic devotion by Rumi as the “qibla of the friend’s face.”

  Baghdad was constructed as a main entranceway to Mecca, the entire city roughly oriented toward the qibla, as its Kufa Gate was calibrated southwest in the direction of the holy city, leading to a pilgrim road. As with a succession of capitals, its geography also marked its political destiny. Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to the hamlet of Medina signaled his shift from a lone prophet to a political leader, the beginnings of an Arabian theocracy. The first purely Arab Umayyad Caliphate ruled from Damascus, in Syria, backed by the Arabian Desert, the homeland of their best soldiers and nomadic kin—the caliph, meaning “deputy” or “successor,” was the ruling descendent of the Prophet Mohammad. The succeeding Abbasid Caliphate built Baghdad—a Persian name, meaning “Given by God”—on the banks of the Tigris, in the eighth century, near the old Persian capital Ctesiphon, closer to Central Asia and accessible to the non-Arab Muslims of Khorasan.

  Probably arriving in Baghdad in January or February of 1217, Rumi’s family had missed the golden age of the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad. Its glamour had been at its most radiant during the reign of Harun al-Rashid in the ninth century, the prosperity of his capital city opulently conveyed in the Arabian Nights. Harun set up a court in the Persian imperial style and encouraged intellectual projects—primitive Bedouin songs were transcribed, and Greek scientific texts translated by Nestorian monks. The gardens of his Golden Gate palace were plotted about a tree made of silver with mechanical singing birds, and beyond stretched a cosmopolitan city that included three pontoon bridges, anchored by iron chains to either bank of the Tigris, plus thousands of ferry skiffs; a Christian district with churches and monasteries; public parks for horse racing and polo (a Persian sport); and a wild beast park, with Indian peacocks.

  During the winter of 1217 Baghdad was a less coherent showplace of urban planning, with travel across town for R
umi’s family probably made more difficult by a great flood. The caliph al-Nasir had been ruling for nearly forty years, striving to maintain the glories of the Baghdad of Harun but without unified military power. The caliph remained checked by Khwarazmshah to the east and Seljuk Turks to the west. Yet he dealt effectively, while cultivating his gardens and moving the palaces from Harun’s round city to the eastern banks of the Tigris. The poet Khaqani, as he passed through Baghdad, swooned over the gardens as a paradise, comparing the Tigris to the Virgin Mary’s tears.

  Medieval Baghdad was widely diverse and tolerant, with a few restrictions. Some caliphs decreed that non-Muslim women wear yellow or blue clothing and red shoes. Yet Christian neighborhoods were among the most popular in Baghdad, partly explained by the unofficial role of monks as bootleggers for abstaining Muslims, as they brewed and dispensed wine from their cloisters. “On a rainy day, what a pleasure it is to drink wine with a priest,” wrote one chronicler. Around the time of Rumi’s visit, the geographer and travel writer Yaqut was quite taken with a Greek Nestorian church, in the Dayr al-Rum quarter, where he said crowds of Muslims came on festival days to stare at “the young deacons and monks, with their handsome faces” and enjoy “dancing, drinking, and pleasure-making.”

  Rumi accumulated a personal geography, a poetic version of Yaqut’s Dictionary of Countries, where these cities he visited were consistently pegged. Samarkand and Damascus were forever sweetness and light, Bukhara forever tied to the suspect “logic” of Greek sciences on display in its renowned library, where the texts, stored in chests rather than on shelves, were delivered on request by the staff. “Bukhara is a mine of knowledge,” he wrote, adding a warning against just such knowledge elsewhere:

  Give up art and logic for amazement

  Go towards humility, not Bukhara

  As the center of the caliphate, Baghdad remained, for him, a symbol of justice and power:

  Your Baghdad is full of justice

  Your Samarkand is full of sweetness

  In one tale of Baghdad in the Masnavi, the ambitious wife of a Bedouin nomad convinces her husband to advance their fortunes by petitioning the caliph, and bringing to him as a tribute the greatest and scarcest treasure in the desert, a jug of rainwater:

  The Bedouin’s wife was not aware

  The Tigris, sweet as sugar, flows there,

  Flowing through Baghdad, like a sea,

  Full of boats, with nets full of fish . . .

  All our senses, and perceptions

  Are like a drop in that pure river.

  The joke was about the comic limits of human understanding of the unknown, especially the divinely ordained unknown. Rumi was impressed with the “hot sun of Iraq,” and the Tigris and Euphrates from then on joined the mighty Oxus on the map of his imagination:

  The Euphrates, Tigris, and Oxus would be bitter

  As the salty sea, if they were not flowing

  The family likely stayed in Baghdad for a month. By the thirteenth century, the city was full of khaneqahs, or Sufi lodges, often built next to cemeteries, appropriate for otherworldly yearning. Yet Rumi’s father was said to have chosen instead to reside in one of the madrases, or colleges. On the western side of Baghdad, the terminus for caravans from Khorasan, at least thirty such religious colleges were located. He never publicly identified with Sufi lodges, and the college setting was deemed more appropriate for a jurist and preacher, traveling with his family. In an important moment in his life, an emissary of the Seljuk sultan of Konya supposedly heard a weekday sermon given by Baha Valad in a Baghdad mosque, and reported back his favorable impression.

  If not in residence at Nezamiyye College, Baha Valad would at least have toured this most magnificent university in the Islamic world, founded by the Vizier Nezam al-Molk in 1065, over a century before Oxford or the Sorbonne. Providing free education in the Shafiite branch of Sharia law, this institute, with branches for research, known as the “Mother of Madrases,” was located near a wharf on the banks of the Tigris River—alongside the great Tuesday Market street of East Baghdad that led in a serpentine route around the walls of the palaces of the caliphs—and was funded by the state with generous stipends for professors, as well as for building and grounds maintenance. Babylonian willow trees provided shade, while date and dried fruit sellers plied their trades nearby.

  Even a casual stroll through Nezamiyye College offered a sampling of the textures of academic life that would become familiar to Rumi during the studious years of his young adulthood. Following a student riot and fire years earlier, the college had been rebuilt and was again stirring with activity. The long, open-fronted robes of the scholars debating one another in the porticos were often dusty and frayed, while more celebrated jurists, in the manner of Baha Valad’s imagined rival Razi, were elegantly dressed and perfumed, their sharp beards trimmed, and their large turbans tightly wound. (In the Masnavi, Rumi pokes fun at one such scholar stuffing his academic turban with rags to make it appear bigger.) The universal language of students bustling in the courtyards was Arabic—like Latin in Europe, the lingua franca for all scholarly discourse and writing.

  Most famously at Nezamiyye, nearly two hundred years earlier, in the eleventh century, the renowned scholar Mohammad al-Ghazali lectured in halls that were crowded with hundreds of students, for four years, then apparently suffered a nervous breakdown and left Baghdad to wander the deserts of the Hejaz, near Mecca and Syria. Haunted by doubts about Aristotelian logic, he eventually entered a Sufi lodge, where he wrote his widely influential treatise on “inner” science, The Revival of the Religious Sciences. In his lifetime—and Rumi’s—The Revival of the Religious Sciences was akin to a best seller.

  Rumi would refer to al-Ghazali with respect, but his true passion was al-Ghazali’s more radical and outrageous poet brother, Ahmad, sometimes credited with the dramatic turnaround of the older philosopher from logical analysis toward his more therapeutic religion of the heart. Ahmad had always been a highly visible Sufi in Baghdad, espousing mystical love in aphorisms in his well-known book, Savaneh, or Flashes, and rather notorious for meditating on the eternal while gazing on the face of a beautiful boy, known as shahed-bazi, a controversial practice in Sufism. Ahmad liked to lay a rose before a comely face and contemplate the lovely pair alternately. Yet Rumi remarked on the diminution of Mohammad’s intellect next to Ahmad’s hot passion: “Had he possessed just one atom of love like Ahmad, it would have been better.”

  If Baghdad had lost a degree of its caliphal splendor by the time Rumi’s family visited, the city was still a great laboratory of developing Sufism, as it had been for over the previous four centuries. While the plain woolen robes of the earliest Sufis—their name probably derived from suf, or wool, for this near-uniform—associated them with Christian desert monks, the label “Sufiyya,” rooted in the Arabic word tasawwuf, from which the English word “Sufism” is derived, was first applied to a mostly urban movement in eighth-century Baghdad. As one modern scholar of Sufism has speculated: “The term ‘Sufi’ had a certain ‘avant-garde’ or ‘cutting-edge’ resonance among both renunciants and others . . . this ‘hip’ quality facilitated its application to the new movement.”

  Starting from simple notions of clean living and exile from the luxuries of civilization—following the example of Ebrahim ebn Adham, the “Buddha of Balkh”—Sufism exfoliated into a subtle theology, emphasizing a more intimate relation with God and the possibility of inner union, or reunion, with the divine. Sufis favored verses of the Quran that emphasized closeness and accessibility over the sheer transcendence of God. Especially beloved was the fifteenth verse of Sura 50: “We indeed created man; and We know what his soul whispers within him, and we are nearer to him than the jugular vein.”

  A chronicler of these early Sufis, appropriately enough, was Attar. Uninterested in writing yet another Lives of the Poets, he had retooled the genre, as Sanai had lyric poetry, by compiling a Persian Lives of the Saints—such compilations of popular stories abo
ut holy figures had long been popular in Arabic. There he told of Rabia, the woman mystic of Basra, said to have torn through the streets with a torch in one hand and a jug of water in the other to burn down Paradise and douse the fires of Hell, so no one would love God solely for reward or punishment. He profiled Jonayd, the glass seller, who promoted a “sober” School of Baghdad, advising speaking in code, and his foil Bayazid Bestami, who inspired a “drunken” school of Sufism similar to the School of Khorasan, full of music and ecstasy. These stories were lore the boy Rumi either already knew or was now discovering.

  The climax to Attar’s seventy-two life sketches was Mansur al-Hallaj, a larger-than-life “drunken” Sufi, brutally executed in Baghdad in 922. Attar blamed his death on his famed utterance, “I am the Truth.” Since Truth was one of the ninety-nine names of God in Islam, the claim was judged heretical. (For his supporters, the statement indicated a complete annihilation of ego.) The sister of Hallaj also caused a minor stir by walking the streets of Baghdad without wearing a proper veil. Attar told a gruesome tale of the martyrdom of Hallaj—the merciful saint was led to the gallows, where his hands and feet were cut off, while he smiled and prayed. His body was then burned and his ashes tossed into the Tigris. Rumi’s Baghdad was a city of power, but sometimes that power was harshly wielded:

  In the world of Baghdad I cried out, “I am the Truth!”

  While that world was busy debating the words of Hallaj

  Traveling to Mecca in 1217, Rumi’s family would have needed to depart Baghdad by February, at the latest. That year, on the Muslim lunar calendar, the final month of the year, or Dhul-Hijja, named as the month for the pilgrimage, or hajj, to Mecca—the birthplace of Mohammad—began on March 11. The official ceremonies in Mecca took place during the first two weeks of this month; Muslims could make a “little” pilgrimage to the holy city at any time throughout the year, though without fulfilling the commandment to participate in the hajj at least once in a lifetime. Incumbent on Hanafites departing from Baghdad, such as Baha Valad, was to first visit the grave of Abu Hanifa, the founder of the Hanafi School. His shrine was marked with a white dome, where a charitable station was set up for feeding the poor. The first phase of their trip was then the hundred-mile journey to join with pilgrim caravans departing from the squat brick city of Kufa.