1The boy who had sat at the druggist's feet came at last, after years of wandering, to the city of Konya in the land of Rum. It lay far to the west, among people who had been Greeks and Christians for a thousand years and were only lately ruled by Muslim Turks. There his father taught, and died, and there Jalal al-Din grew to be a man.
2He became what his father had been, and more. He studied in Aleppo and Damascus. He knew the law of God and the sayings of the Prophet and all the commentaries. At thirty-seven he was the first teacher of Konya. When he rode through the market on his mule, a crowd of students walked beside him, and people in the street stood up.
3He had a son, who was called Sultan Walad, and who watched him closely, as sons do. His father had everything a learned man can have. He lacked nothing. That, the son came to think long afterward, was what he lacked.
4Now hear how it was broken open.
5There came to Konya in the late autumn a wandering dervish from Tabriz, a man of about sixty, in a coarse black cloak. He had no following and wanted none. He took a room at the inn of the sugar merchants and passed for a trader. He had walked the roads of the east all his life, looking, as he said, for one person he could truly speak with, and not finding him. His name was Shams al-Din, the Sun of the Faith. Men called him the Flier, because he never stayed.
6He met Jalal al-Din in the street. The tellings differ as to what was said. In one of them, the teacher sat reading among his books beside a pool, and the stranger asked, "What are these?" and was told, "You would not understand them," and swept them into the water.
7Sultan Walad was there for none of it, and would not swear to any. He swore only to what came after, for that he saw. His father took the stranger by the hand, and led him home, and shut the door.
8They were shut in together for the better part of three months. They talked. No one knows of what. Food went in and came out barely touched. When Jalal al-Din opened the door again, he was a different man. He gave up his lecturing. He gave up his books. He, the sober jurist, had begun to listen to music, and to turn and turn in a slow dance with his arms open, and to speak in verses.
9Understand it rightly. He did not leave his faith. He went deeper into it than he had known there was to go. He had known all about the love of God, as a man may know all about water who has studied rivers on a map. The stranger had pushed him in.
10And he had found, at thirty-seven, what the stranger had been walking sixty years to find: a friend. One who did not admire him. One who was not afraid of him. One who looked through the great teacher of Konya as though he were a window, and spoke to the man on the other side.
11But a teacher belongs to his students, or they think he does. And the students of Jalal al-Din were not pleased.
12Who was this ragged old man from nowhere? What had he done to the master? Their grief turned to envy, and their envy to hatred, as it will. They muttered when Shams passed. They put their hands to their knives. Some of the loudest were of the master's own house.
13Shams heard. One morning, a little more than a year after he had come, his room was empty. The Flier had flown.
14Jalal al-Din was like a man whose house has fallen on him. He would see no one. He wore mourning. He sent letters out along every road, and the letters were poems. After many months a traveller brought word: the dervish had been seen in Damascus.
15Then he called for his elder son. Sultan Walad was about twenty. "Go to him," said his father. "Take silver and pour it into his shoes. Tell him those who wronged him have repented. Tell him—" But he could not say what to tell him, and he gave the boy a poem to carry.
16Sultan Walad went with twenty companions, a month's journey. He found the old man in Damascus, in an inn. He bowed, and poured the silver into his shoes as he had been told, and gave him the poem. Shams read it, and laughed, and said, "What is silver to me? But for the sake of the one who sent this, I will come."
17They gave him a horse for the road. And Sultan Walad, the son of the first man of Konya, walked beside that horse on foot, with his hand on the stirrup, all the way back across Syria and over the mountains. When Shams told him to mount, he said, "The king rides, and the servant walks. How should the two ride side by side?" He told that story with pride for the rest of his life. He had seen what his father saw.
18When the two friends met again on the road outside the city, each fell at the other's feet, and those who watched could not tell, as one of them wrote, which was the lover and which the beloved.
19For a time it was well. The students came and asked pardon. Shams was given a room in the master's house, and a wife from the household. But she died that winter. And the old envy had only been sleeping.
20On a night in December, it is told, Shams and Jalal al-Din were sitting together when someone knocked at the back door and called the dervish out by name. He rose, saying only that he was called for, and went out into the dark.
21He was never seen again.
22No one knows to this day what became of him. Some say he simply went as he had gone before, and died in some far city. Others say that seven men were waiting behind that door with knives, and that his body went down a well. And it was whispered, even then, that one of the seven was Jalal al-Din's own younger son.
23It cannot be known. Sultan Walad, who loved his father and his brother both, wrote only that Shams had vanished. But it is told that a coldness lay between the father and the younger son ever after, and that when that son died young, the father did not go to the burial.
24Jalal al-Din would not believe that his friend was dead. He went himself to Damascus to search. He walked its streets asking strangers. He came home, and went again. Two years passed so.
25And on the second journey, somewhere in the streets of Damascus, the search ended. He did not find Shams. He stopped looking. His son set down what his father told him: that he had been seeking outside himself for one who was no longer outside. All that the friend had been to him, all that he had lit, was burning in his own chest. They had talked for so long behind that door that there was no longer a wall between them. The friend had not left. He had only gone where he could not be driven out.
26He came home to Konya, and he did not wear mourning any more.
27Now, a man whom love has broken open does not close again. Jalal al-Din was walking one day through the bazaar of the goldsmiths, where men sit beating gold into leaf, thin as breath. The hammers fell all up and down the street, each in its own time, and yet together they made one sound. He stopped. He heard in it the name of God, over and over. And in the middle of the street, before them all, he opened his arms and began to turn.
28An old goldsmith named Salah al-Din saw him from his shop. He was a plain man who could not read, and who had loved Shams. He understood at once. He called to his apprentices not to stop their hammers, not if all the gold in the shop was spoiled. Then he came out into the street and turned with him. The gold was spoiled. He never grudged it.
29That goldsmith became his second friend, and when he died, a third was given: a young man named Husam, whom he called the Light of Truth.
30It was Husam who asked for the book. The songs were many, he said, but the friends had no long teaching in verse such as Attar had left. Would the master not make one? It is told that Jalal al-Din smiled and drew from the fold of his turban a paper, on which eighteen lines were already written. They began:
31"Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations."
32For the reed flute, which the dervishes play, is cut from the reed bed. It is hollowed and pierced. And its whole music, he said, is the cry of a thing torn from where it grew, longing to go home. Everyone who has ever been parted from one they love knows that song without being taught it.
33He spoke that book for twelve years, and Husam wrote it down. He spoke it walking, and sitting, and in the bath house, and turning in the dance, sometimes from dusk until dawn. It came to six books and more than twenty-five thousand verses, tale within tale. People call him by the name of the country where he made it. They call him Rumi, the man of Rum.
34About the time he began it, news came from the east that struck the whole of Islam dumb.
35The Mongols had come to Baghdad. The round city of peace, where three faiths had fought like brothers over the name of a fever, was taken and sacked. The caliph was put to death. The slaughter went on for a week. And the libraries were emptied into the Tigris. It is told that the river ran black for days with the ink of the books, so that a horse could have crossed on them.
36Five hundred years of gathering, gone in a week. But think of what you have already heard. The books of Baghdad drowned. But the books of Baghdad were also in Cairo, and in Damascus, and in Shiraz, and in Córdoba, and in Konya, in ten thousand houses. A learned Persian in the Mongols' own camp begged cartloads of them from the ruin, and with them built a new house of the stars in the hills of the north. The river took the paper. It could not take what had been copied.
37It was in those years that Rumi told, in his great book, a tale that had come to him from India, and it is right to set it here.
38Some people of India brought an elephant to a land where none had ever been seen, and kept it in a dark house. The people of the town crowded in to learn what manner of thing it was. It was too dark to see, so each one felt it with the palm of the hand.
39One laid his hand on the trunk, and said, "This creature is like a water pipe." One touched the ear, and said, "No. It is like a great fan." One found a leg, and said, "It is a pillar." One stroked the back, and said, "In truth it is a throne." Each had a hand on the truth, and each called the others liars.
40If every one of them had carried a candle in, said Rumi, there would have been no quarrel.
41Now Konya was a city of many peoples. There were Turks and Persians and Arabs. There were Greeks and Armenians, who were Christians, and there were Jews. They did not love one another more than peoples usually do. But they all knew the man with the grey beard who turned in the street. He bowed to everyone alike.
42He died on a winter evening as the sun went down, at sixty-six. He had told his friends not to weep, for he called that night his wedding night: the reed going home to the reed bed.
43And here is what was seen at his burial. It was written down by those who followed his way, and they were astonished by it themselves.
44The whole city came. Not the Muslims only. The Christians came with their priests, carrying the Gospels. The Jews came with their rabbis, carrying the Torah. They walked before the bier, reading aloud from their own holy books in their own tongues, and weeping as loudly as the Muslims. The crowd was so great that the bier, which left the house at dawn, did not come to the grave until evening.
45Some of the zealous went to the Sultan's minister and complained. What had unbelievers to do with the burial of a Muslim saint? Let them be driven off with sticks.
46The minister sent for the priests and the rabbis and asked them, fairly, why they were there.
47They gave their answer, each company for itself. This man had not asked them to leave their own houses. But in him they had understood their own prophets better. He had been to them like bread, they said, and who is there that has no need of bread?
48The minister let them walk.
49Sultan Walad was a grown man then, with grey in his own beard. He walked behind his father's body through that crowd of three faiths. He thought of an old dervish on a horse, and a boy walking at the stirrup. He thought of a door, and a voice calling a name in the dark, and a brother's face.
50One friend had been driven out of this city by those who could not bear that the master should love a stranger. Now the whole city was a river of strangers, weeping for him side by side. It had taken twenty-six years. It had cost a life, perhaps. He did not know whether to call it justice. But he knew what had done it. One man had been loved without fear, once, behind a shut door, and had not been able to keep it to himself.
51Now leave the snow of Rum. Go south and west, farther than you have yet gone in this book, across the sea and across the greatest desert in the world, to a city of mud walls at its far edge. For the lamp had gone there too.