Shams of Tabriz

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A man in black walked into Konya in the autumn of 1244 and asked a question that broke a scholar’s life in two. The traditional date is exact in the way hagiography likes to be exact — the fifteenth of November, at the caravanserai of the sugar-merchants — and the man had no rank, no books, no chair in any college. He had spent years on the road weaving baskets and selling girdles, sleeping where the caravans stopped, refusing every offer of a settled place; the trade earned him, in the later memoirs, the half-affectionate name of the embroiderer. His own name was Shams al-Din Muhammad, and because Tabriz was where he came from, the world remembers him as Shams of Tabriz — shams, the sun. He was perhaps sixty. The scholar he had come to find was a respected jurist of thirty-seven who, within months, would stop being a jurist at all.

Shams of Tabriz in a Safavid-era miniature, from a copy of Rumi’s poems dedicated to Shams (c. 1502-1504), Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The arrival at Konya

What Shams was looking for, the tradition agrees, was a single companion worthy of what he carried — someone who could bear the undiluted thing. He had studied, traveled the length of the Islamic east, sat with masters and left them dissatisfied; the Sufi milieu of the thirteenth century was thick with teachers, and he found in none of them a vessel that would not crack. The meeting in Konya is told, in the order’s foundational narrative, as an ambush of the spirit.

In the most-repeated version — and it is legend, a hagiographic set-piece, not a transcript — Shams comes upon Jalal al-Din Rumi surrounded by his students, books open before him, and asks who stood higher: the Prophet Muhammad, or the early ecstatic Bayazid Bistami, who in his rapture had cried out words that sounded like the speech of God himself. To a jurist the question is almost blasphemous, and Rumi answers it as a jurist would, with the Prophet’s primacy intact: Bistami’s thirst was slaked by a single draught and he stopped, where the Prophet thirsted forever, climbing past each station only to see how small it had been. Hearing the answer, Shams cries out and falls senseless to the ground. In a rival telling he tips Rumi’s books into a fountain and, when the scholar protests, lifts them out dry, untouched — knowledge of the kind that water cannot reach. The point of both stories is identical and it is the point of Shams himself: the learning of the schools is a wall, and somewhere on the far side of it is the thing the learning was supposed to be about.

After the meeting the two men withdrew. For a stretch of weeks — the tradition fixes it at forty days of seclusion, the khalwa, though the figure is a symbol’s number as much as a calendar’s — they shut the door on everyone, including Rumi’s family and his students, and spoke. No record survives of what passed between them, and that absence is itself the heart of the story: the most consequential conversation in Persian mysticism left no text, only its effect. The effect was total. The sober master of Islamic law and theology who had measured out fatwas and filled a preaching hall came out of the room a man who whirled in the street, who composed verse helplessly, who had mislaid the dignity that had defined him. His circle of students watched their teacher taken from them by a ragged stranger, and they hated the stranger for it.

The doctrine of the human beloved

What Shams gave Rumi was not a system. He left no treatise, founded no school, codified no method; he distrusted, on principle, the man who could hand over a clean doctrine, because a clean doctrine is one more wall. What he gave was a relationship, and the relationship itself was the teaching.

At its center stands the figure that runs through all of Persian poetic mysticism: the beloved. In the love poetry of the Persian-speaking world the beloved is the still point around which the lover’s whole world turns — the face that is sun and idol and king, before whom the lover is nothing. Sufism had long read that vocabulary as a language for the soul’s longing toward God, the human passion a rehearsal for the divine. Shams pressed the identification harder than rehearsal. The human beloved, in the relation he opened with Rumi, is not a metaphor pointing at God from a safe distance but a mirror in which the divine is actually met — a real face in which the Real looks back. To love such a one wholly, past the limit where self-protection ends, is not a detour from the love of God but its only available form, because the human being made perfect is precisely where the unseen consents to be seen. The drop does not reach the sea by contemplating the idea of the sea. It reaches the sea through another drop.

This is why the relation was a scandal and why it was generative in equal measure. Read flatly, a sixty-year-old wanderer and a settled scholar shutting themselves away for weeks is a thing the students could resent and gossip could distort, and both happened. Read from inside the frame, it is the doctrine enacted rather than argued: the beloved is the mirror, annihilation of the self happens in front of a face, and the face Shams turned toward Rumi was, for the length of their companionship, the door through which Rumi’s God came in. The longing that the broad current of Sufi teaching calls the engine of return — the ache that drives the cut reed back toward the reed-bed — Shams located in a living person and made unbearable on purpose. He was not a comfort. He was the wound that opens the way.

The Maqalat

Almost nothing of Shams comes to us in his own composing, and what does survive came by accident. During the conversations in Konya — not only the first sealed weeks but the longer companionship that followed — members of Rumi’s circle took notes, jottings of what the master’s strange teacher said. These were never shaped into a book, never edited or authorized; they were copied here and there, carried off, and scattered into the libraries of Anatolia, where they slept for centuries as a difficult, broken, half-anonymous heap of sayings. This is the Maqalat, the Discourses — less a work than a residue, the spoken Shams caught in the act and never tidied.

It does not read like a treatise and was never meant to. The voice in it is abrupt, funny, scalding, contemptuous of pretension, doubling back on itself; it tells stories against scholars, against ascetics who mistake their own austerity for arrival, against the seeker who collects spiritual experiences the way a merchant collects goods. It refuses to flatter the reader, and it refuses to be systematic, because system was the disease it had come to cure. For all that, the Maqalat is now reckoned among the two or three most important prose witnesses to the world that produced Rumi’s poetry — the nearest thing to standing in the room. The best of its early manuscripts is judged to be in the hand of Rumi’s own son, Sultan Walad, who had known Shams; the standard critical edition, two volumes assembled by Mohammad-Ali Movahhed (Tehran, 1990), gathered the dispersed copies into a text at last. To read it is to recover the teacher behind the legend — sharper, plainer, and more human than the saint the order would build.

The disappearance

The companionship could not hold against the resentment around it. The students were jealous, the household uneasy, the city scandalized that its eminent scholar had dissolved into a vagrant’s shadow. Shams left once, abruptly, for Damascus; Rumi, undone, sent his son to coax him back, and back he came, and the second union was as intense as the first. Then, around the turn of 1247 into 1248, he vanished a second time, and this time for good.

What happened is genuinely unknown, and the sources hold two incompatible accounts without choosing between them. In the order’s later hagiography — Aflaki’s collection, written generations afterward — Shams was murdered: lured out one night and killed by a conspiracy in which Rumi’s younger son, Ala al-Din, was implicated, his body thrown into a well near the house. Even that telling concedes there were no witnesses to the death. The other account, closer to the earliest layer, is quieter and bloodless: Shams simply went, as wanderers go, withdrawing into the road that had always been his element, dying somewhere on it — at Khoy, perhaps, in the northwest of Iran, where a tower still stands over a grave that bears his name, or at Damascus. Sultan Walad’s own record of the second departure speaks of leaving, not of killing. Both stories are old; both serve the tradition’s needs; the documentary record will not adjudicate between the knife and the open gate, and so the disappearance remains exactly as inconclusive as the conversation that left no transcript. The man who could not be held was, in the end, not held.

The grave bearing the name of Shams, beside its brick tower in the memorial park at Khoy, northwestern Iran — photo by Elmju, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Divan-i Shams

Rumi’s grief did not subside into mourning. It became the largest body of ecstatic lyric in the Persian language. Over the years that followed he poured out thousands of ghazals and quatrains, and instead of sealing them with his own name in the closing line — the takhallus, the signature the form demands of its poet — he sealed countless of them with the name of Shams. The whole collection he called the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi: the collected poems of Shams of Tabriz. He did not write about his lost friend so much as he let the friend speak through him, effacing the boundary between the one who sang and the one sung to until it is often impossible to say, in a given verse, who is the lover and who the beloved, who the singer and who the sun.

This was not a literary conceit. It was the doctrine of the mirror followed to its end. If the beloved is the face in which the Real appears, then the perfected lover loses the line that separates him from that face, and the poetry that comes out the far side is signed, truthfully, with the beloved’s name, because there is no longer a separate self to sign with its own. The motif that Shams had pressed into Rumi as a relationship became, in the Divan, a structural fact of the verse. The poems and their authorship belong to Rumi’s own story; what belongs to Shams is that he is the name they are signed in — the absent sun whose light the whole book is.

The texts and the tradition

Shams reaches the modern world through three channels, each with its own distance from the man. The first is his own scattered speech, the Maqalat, now edited and partly Englished: William C. Chittick’s Me and Rumi: The Autobiography of Shams-i Tabrizi (Fons Vitae, 2004) renders roughly two-thirds of the Discourses into English and arranges the fragments so that a reader can follow them, the fullest portrait available in the language; further selections appear in Franklin D. Lewis’s Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oneworld, 2000; rev. 2008), which is also the indispensable critical biography behind the dates and the cautions used here.

The second channel is the order’s hagiography. The narrative of Shams’s life — the arrival, the seclusion, the murder — comes most fully from Shams al-Din Ahmad Aflaki’s Manaqib al-Arifin (The Feats of the Knowers of God), a vast compendium of teaching-anecdotes about Rumi and his circle. Aflaki, a disciple of Rumi’s grandson, began the work in 718/1318 and completed an enlarged final recension by 754/1353–54, drawing on Rumi’s letters, on Sultan Walad’s writings, and on the Maqalat itself; the standard scholarly translation is John O’Kane’s The Feats of the Knowers of God (Brill, 2002). It is hagiography in the full sense — freighted with miracle and shaped to glorify the brotherhood that was consolidating itself — and its dates and dramatic scenes carry that genre’s uncertainty; it is neither chronicle nor invention, but a literary creation reflecting the agendas of an emerging order. (A briefer, much older selection of Aflaki’s anecdotes prefaces James Redhouse’s Victorian verse Mesnevi of 1881, the first substantial English carrier of the legend.)

The third channel is the institution. Shams founded nothing himself, but the Mevlevi order — the whirling dervishes, organized after Rumi’s death by Sultan Walad — became the keeper of his memory, weaving his presence into its Anatolian and Ottoman self-understanding and its turning ceremony, the sema, the sound-and-motion samāʿ that the order developed as a structured Sufi path. His doctrine of the human face as a window onto the divine sits alongside the great speculative currents of the same century — the philosophy of being that Akbarian Sufism was systematizing, the Illuminationist metaphysics of light, the earlier sober mysticism that al-Ghazali and al-Hujwiri had given prose form — but Shams built no philosophy. He was the opposite kind of figure: not a thinker of gnosis but its bare event, a man who arrived without a doctrine and left without a grave anyone can be sure of, and changed the course of a literature anyway.

The Mevlana Museum at Konya, the former lodge of the Mevlevi order that became the keeper of Shams’s memory — photo by Mardetanha, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The sun in his name was never meant to be looked at directly. A sun is what one sees other things by; it is the source whose whole nature is to be the condition of vision and to remain, itself, unbearable to the eye. That is the office Shams filled and went on filling after he was gone — the unseen light by which Rumi saw everything else, signed into every page of the book that bears his name and was written by another hand.

→ In the library: Rūmī — The Mesnevī, Book the First, with the Acts of the Adepts (Redhouse, 1881)

→ Related: Rumi · Mevlevi Order Mevleviyya Whirling Dervishes · Persian Poetic Mysticism · Islamic Sufism · Sufism · Anatolian Ottoman Sufism · Qawwali Sufi Sama · Sufi Tariqa Institution · Akbarian Sufism Wahdat Al Wujud · Abu Yazid Al Bistami · Al Ghazali · Suhrawardi · Al Hujwiri · Gnosis