I want a heart that is torn open with longing/ So that I might share the pain of this love/ Whoever has been parted from his source/ Longs to return to that state of union.”

The whirling of the dervish was a dance of transcendence, the lament of separation and at the same time of rapturous union, and these episodes of agony and ecstasy led to the creation of some of the most beautiful poetry to have ever been expressed. Ranked along with Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh as the foundational text of Persian literature, Jalaluddin Rumi’s Masnavi — with its dominant themes of love, spirituality, longing, grief and beauty — holds special relevance in today’s world. No wonder then that he, rather than homegrown greats such as Charles Bukowski, Walt Whitman or Maya Angelou, has been the bestselling poet in America in recent times.

While his spellbinding poetry has always been the focus of attention, Rumi’s personal life has often been a mere footnote to his legend. Brad Gooch’s biography Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love is an attempt to lift the veil covering the poet’s life. By placing Rumi in the historical and cultural milieu, Gooch has tried to provide readers with a deeper understanding of Rumi’s work. In that sense the book is a travelogue, a history lesson and a biography blended into one accessible narrative for both the lay reader and the expert.

A searching biography of the 13th century Sufi poet from a New York Times bestselling author

As a poet, academic and author, Gooch comes with immaculate credentials to recreate the details of Rumi’s eventful life. Unlike a pedant scribbling away in the cosy confines of his ivory tower, Gooch travelled extensively in the Middle East, retracing the steps of the roving mystic. This uncompromising fidelity to his subject shines through the prose as Gooch illuminates little-known aspects of Rumi’s life.

The narrative is chronological and divided into three sections detailing the phases that had a formative influence on Rumi’s life and work: his escape from the Mongol invasion, his transformation from preacher to mystic and the making of his magnum opus Masnavi.

Rumi’s story starts in Balkh — modern-day Afghanistan — as a precocious youth given to supernatural visions that would be a precursor to mystical experiences later in his life. His father, Bahauddin Walad (a cleric himself) and the young Rumi fled the Mongol onslaught in the early 11th century as it ravaged the Islamic world in the Middle Ages. What follows is a 2,500 mile long journey tracing the intellectual and theological map of the medieval Islamic world, including the great Islamic universities at Baghdad, Damascus and Aleppo.

Their itinerant lifestyle ended when Rumi and his household settled down in Konya, Turkey, one of the great centres of Islamic learning and teaching of its age. Konya became the base from where Rumi’s message of ecstatic love would radiate throughout the world. By the time he inherited the mantle of the head of Madressah Khodavandgar from his father, Rumi was a respected cleric and jurist in his own right.

The second section of the book deals with Rumi’s meeting with Shams of Tabriz, a roving mystic from the hinterlands of Azerbaijan. Shams became his muse, friend and companion, and the source and inspiration of his most profound poetry as Rumi himself acknowledged, “the face of the sun is Shams of Tabriz.” Shams was to incite rebellion in Rumi, blazing a trail for him to follow with song, music and dance rather than dabble in theology.

Of course, Rumi’s transformation under Shams did not endear him to the neglected students of his madressah. Shams’s mysterious disappearance was as sudden as his appearance, and just as his companionship filled Rumi with the rapture of amorous union, his separation plunged him to the depths of despair. Both union and separation are the dominant themes of Rumi’s poetry, with Shams as a euphemism for both divine and amorous love: “Listen to the reed and the tale it tells/ How it sings of separation/ Ever since they cut me from the reed bed/ My wail has caused men and women to weep.”

While Shams was not to be the last of Rumi’s muses, he certainly had the most lasting influence on his mystical poetry. His sojourn into near madness with Shams as he flouted all the rules of Islamic orthodoxy was one of the most creative episodes of Rumi’s life. This new vision of spirituality posed a challenge to traditional interpretations of Islam; the vague and perilous middle ground between orthodoxy and heresy. In that sense, to borrow his own analogy, Rumi was treading the field beyond good and evil that he alluded to frequently in his couplets.

Nevertheless, Rumi was respected and revered all the same by his students, family and Konya’s population comprising of different faiths. It bears mentioning that Rumi wrote in both Persian and Arabic, two languages that complemented each other in the Islamic world, as did Greek and Latin in Christian Europe.

The last section of the book dwells on that period in his life when Rumi composed the Masnavi. Spanning six books and 26,000 couplets, the Masnavi is considered one of the longest poems composed by a single author. The sheer volume of the work aside, its profound contents make it one of the great accomplishments in world literature. Encompassing Quranic revelations, everyday wisdom and metaphysics among other things, the Masnavi touches upon all facets of human life. Initially reluctant, Rumi was prodded by his favourite pupil Husam al-Din Chalabi in putting these bursts of poetic inspiration into writing. Rumi was the oracle as he broke into verse while Chalabi performed the role of the scribe, committing his master’s words to paper.

One of the strengths of Rumi’s Secret is that Gooch has taken great care to intersperse his text with the poet’s couplets and verses relative to the various stages of his subject’s eventful life. The reader can experience first-hand the steady evolution of Rumi with the progression of the book. Refreshingly, Gooch humanises Rumi from the aloof, starry-eyed mystic of popular imagining to the many roles he served, whether as sheikh, preacher, father, teacher, mystic or poet: it is surprising to learn that Rumi, the oracle of love, had such a fraught relationship with his own son that he chose not to attend his son’s funeral — a slight blemish on an otherwise thoroughly compassionate life.

The prime lesson that Gooch defines in Rumi’s Secret is to live in accordance with one’s highest values rather than just express them in empty words. Love is to be acted out as a verb. This compassion won Rumi the gratitude of his adopted city of Konya, as evident at the time of his funeral when all civic life came to a halt. People of all faiths poured in to pay their last respects, turning the procession into a flurry of grief. In death as in life, Rumi inspired the same love among his devotees that he would exhort in his poetic reveries. In that sense his legacy is as relevant today as it was 800 years ago. In an age of religiously motivated violence, Rumi’s message of divinely inspired love is a much needed counter-narrative. Rumi’s Secret is a timely exposition of one of humanity’s great teachers, with his voice speaking to us through the ages.

The reviewer has worked as a producer in news media and an analyst in the NGO sector

Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet
of Love
By Brad Gooch
HarperCollins, US
ISBN: 78-0061999147
400pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 9th, 2017