The Sun Behind the Sun

By Salman Alam Khan

Of all the figures in the Islamic mystical tradition, there is perhaps none whose influence has been vaster and whose life has been so obscure than Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Malikdad Tabrizi. Known universally as Shams Tabrizi. Shams meaning “sun” in Arabic.  

Shams transformed Jalal al-Din Rumi from a respected jurist and theological scholar into one of the greatest poets of divine love and devotion. It is safe to say that without Shams, there would neither be any Masnavi nor any whirling dervishes. The entire Mevlevi tradition, which has moved generations across continents is the outcome of the meeting of these two minds. 

This is one of the most extraordinary facts in the history of literature: the largest single body of devotional poetry named after a person of whom almost nothing is known, whose biography can be reconstructed only in fragments, and who left behind only a single prose work, the Maqalat. The Maqalat is written not by him but by the disciples who listened to him. Shams Tabrizi lived in the cracks of history. He surfaces briefly and brilliantly, sets the Islamic world’s greatest poet on fire, and disappears, leaving behind an ocean of verse in his name and a handful of authenticated facts about his life.

The misreading and misunderstanding of Shams Tabrizi operates on several levels simultaneously: the reduction of a formidable, theologically rigorous dervish to a romantic catalyst; the romanticisation of his relationship with Rumi into something the authentic sources do not support; the appropriation of his image, like Rumi’s, by a Western spiritual market that is uninterested in the Islamic framework; and the posthumous overshadowing of his own extraordinary mind by the poetry of the man he taught.

Shams al-Din Muhammad Tabrizi was born around 1185 CE in Tabriz, in present-day northwestern Iran. The two earliest and most reliable sources for his biography are the Risalah-i Sipehsalar, written by Faridun ibn Ahmad Sipehsalar, a close disciple of Rumi who spent forty days in Shams’s company, and the Manaqib al-Arifin (Eulogies of the Gnostics) compiled by Aflaki. 

His education in Tabriz was rooted in Islamic jurisprudence and theology, which he studied under his father and uncle, both accomplished jurists. He also undertook Sufi training, his principal teachers being Baba Kemal al-Din Jumdi, a disciple of Najm al-Din Kubra, one of the great masters of the Kubrawiyya order and Baba Faraj-i Tabrizi. 

Having completed his formation, Shams did something unusual even by the standards of Sufi wandering: he set out in permanent, restless search of a spiritual companion. This search was not of a master or a disciple, but an equal. In the Maqalat, the record of his conversations and reflections compiled in Konya, he describes a series of dreams in which God assured him that he would find the right companion when the time came. He travelled across the Islamic world, from Tabriz to Syria, from Syria to Anatolia, meeting famous teachers, sitting with Sufi masters, and finding no one who could receive him. “I kept searching,” he is recorded as saying, “and God kept pointing me further.”

He lived during these years as a wandering dervish of the qalandar type: unconventional in dress, preferring to stay in caravanserais among merchants rather than in the respectable institutions of the ulema or the Sufi lodges. He supported himself, according to Sipehsalar, by braiding the cords of trousers. He locked his room with a heavy lock even though it was empty. A gesture the tradition reads as the deliberate concealment of a man who had everything to give and was protecting it until the right recipient appeared.

The encounter between Shams Tabrizi and Jalal al-Din Rumi in Konya in the autumn of 1244 is one of the most described and most mythologised moments in the history of Sufism. Because it is so thoroughly mythologised, it is worth pausing on what the most authoritative sources actually record which is, in several respects, different from what the popular tradition has made of it.

Shams arrived in Konya, the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum in central Anatolia, and at that time a major centre of Islamic learning around late October or November 1244. He was approximately sixty years old. He lodged at the inn of the Sugar Merchants (Shakar Furushan), in keeping with his practice of staying among traders and maintaining his disguise as a travelling merchant. According to the Maqalat, he had in fact encountered Rumi before: he records having first heard Rumi speak in Syria, some sixteen years earlier, possibly at a debate or lecture. He had been favourably inclined toward Rumi since then but had felt that Rumi at that time lacked the spiritual maturity to comprehend what Shams had to offer. He had waited. The moment had now arrived.

The account of their first actual meeting in Konya exists in several versions, the oldest from Haji Bektash Veli’s Maqalat. In one version, Shams encountered Rumi on horseback in the marketplace and stopped him with a question. The question most consistently associated with this meeting in the tradition is: “Who was greater, Muhammad (P.B.U.H), or Bayazid al-Bistami?” This was not a casual enquiry. 

Rumi’s answer, by the tradition’s account, was to say that Bayazid’s thirst was satisfied with a single sip of divine grace, whereas Muhammad’s (P.B.U.H) ocean of longing remained forever open to the infinite. Hence, there is no question to it that Muhammad (P.B.U.H) is the greatest.  The distinction Rumi drew between the completeness of the ordinary mystic and the inexhaustible receptivity of the Prophet appears to have satisfied Shams that he had found his companion.

A second and perhaps more widely known version of the meeting involves books: Shams, encountering Rumi reading beside a stack of books, asks what he is doing; Rumi dismisses him; Shams throws the books into water; Rumi retrieves them dry; Shams says, “This is what you cannot understand.” The scholars William Chittick and Franklin Lewis regard the book-in-the-pool story as almost certainly legendary, a later accretion to the narrative. The question about Muhammad and Bayazid is considered more likely to reflect the actual texture of their first exchange.

What followed the first encounter was a period of withdrawal from the world that lasted approximately forty days.  Shams and Rumi withdrew together into a room. Which room, and for precisely how long, the sources debate but the tradition describes it as an unbroken period of spiritual conversation and mutual illumination. During this time Rumi withdrew from his students, his family, and his teaching. When he emerged, he had been transformed. In this time of seclusion both men were fully committed to the discipline of the sharia, Shams himself notes that if on the rare occasion somehow, they missed the obligatory prayer they would be deeply perturbed and then would make up for it by praying separately. 

One of the central concerns of the Maqalat is the nature of spiritual friendship, Suhbat and the conditions under which genuine transmission between souls is possible. Shams held that most relationships between masters and disciples are corrupted by the disciple’s inability to receive the master fully by the disciple’s attachment to their own image of the master, to their own need for the master’s approval, to their own spiritual ambitions. The true spiritual companion, in Shams’s view, was the one who could be present to the master without ego-contamination and this, he had spent decades determining, was what Rumi had become capable of being.

The scholar Badi’ al-Zaman Foruzanfar, the foremost Iranian scholar of Rumi, has demonstrated the profound connection between the Maqalat and the Masnavi: Rumi repeatedly returns, in his greatest work, to ideas, images, and parables that can be traced directly to Shams’s conversations as recorded in the Maqalat. The two texts are, in a deep sense, in dialogue across the years of separation that followed Shams’s disappearance.

The intimacy between Shams and Rumi provoked, almost from its beginning, a fierce resentment among Rumi’s disciples. They had come to Konya to study with the city’s most distinguished theological scholar. They found, instead, that their master had withdrawn entirely from them in favour of a dishevelled wanderer who had appeared from nowhere and seemed to hold Rumi in a grip that none of them understood. Their resentment was, in a human sense, entirely comprehensible. 

Shams left Konya for the first time in February 1246, abruptly, without warning. Rumi was devastated. He withdrew further from his students, turned his grief into verse, and eventually sent his eldest son Sultan Walad to Damascus to bring Shams back. The search party found Shams in Damascus. Sultan Walad brought him back to Konya in April 1247, where joyful celebrations marked his return. Shams himself, in a passage of the Maqalat, wrote that he had gone away for the sake of Rumi’s spiritual development that the separation had been necessary, as the Sufi tradition consistently teaches, for the deepening of the longing that is itself the path.

The second disappearance, in late 1247 or early 1248, was permanent. One version of that permanent disappearance holds that  Shams was murdered by a group of Rumi’s disciples led by, or at least involving, Rumi’s own son Ala al-Din. Sultan Walad, Rumi’s other son, confirms in his Walad-Nama that Shams “disappeared from Konya one night” but gives no further details. Rumi searched for Shams twice in Damascus and did not find him. He eventually understood, the tradition holds, that the exterior Shams was gone and that the interior Shams, the sun that had burned away his self, was now inseparable from him.

It is this understanding that explains the structure of the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi: Rumi ends most of his ghazals, unusually, not with his own name (as was the convention of the form) but with the name of Shams. The attribution of the Divan to Shams is not a literary device. It is a statement of spiritual fact: the annihilation of oneself into another, achieved through love, grief, and the discipline of forty days and years of contemplation.

The Maqalat is saturated with Quranic verse, prophetic hadith, and detailed engagement with the controversies of Islamic theology. Shams was not above Islam. He was at its most demanding depth. 

Within the Islamic tradition itself, is the romanticisation of the Shams-Rumi relationship in ways that its own participants would not have recognised. But the love was, in the Sufi understanding, the most demanding and annihilating form of spiritual attachment: the mirror in which one’s ego is most clearly seen and most completely burned away. It was not, as modern romanticisation sometimes suggest, a relationship of mutual admiration and emotional comfort. 

The misunderstanding of the appropriation of the Shams-Rumi encounter as a symbol of a generalised, creedless spiritual awakening available to anyone, regardless of discipline or formation. The encounter was, in fact, the product of decades of preparation on both sides. Shams had spent thirty years searching for the right companion. Rumi had spent decades in study, in teaching, in the slow interior formation that made him, at the age of thirty-seven, ready to receive what Shams had to offer. The meeting was not accidental. It was, as the tradition holds, willed by God and prepared for by two men of extraordinary seriousness across entire lifetimes.

Finally, there is the misreading that arises from Shams’s own obscurity. Because so little is known about him directly, and because he is known almost entirely through Rumi’s poetry, he has been absorbed into Rumi’s image. He is spoken of as Rumi’s beloved, Rumi’s inspiration, Rumi’s sun as if his significance is entirely derivative, a function of what he unlocked in someone else. This is the opposite of what the tradition holds. The scholars and mystics who knew Shams, and who recorded the Maqalat, were clear that they were in the presence of someone of extraordinary and independent spiritual authority. 

The burial place of Shams Tabrizi is itself a controversy. The tradition most strongly supported by Iranian scholarship locates his tomb in the city of Khoy, in northwestern Iran, where a shrine and a minaret monument have been associated with his name since medieval times. The site has been nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status. A second tomb, in Konya itself, has been associated with Shams by the Turkish tradition. A third claim, recently advanced, locates his grave in Pakistan.

The uncertainty about his tomb is fitting. Shams Tabrizi was a man who spent his life in deliberate concealment, who lodged among merchants and locked empty rooms, who disguised his spiritual station so effectively that it took sixty years of searching to find the one person capable of receiving it. That he should now lie in a disputed grave, his resting place uncertain, his voice audible only through the poetry of another, there is something in this that corresponds perfectly to the kind of man he was. He was never interested in being found by the wrong people. Without Shams the world might never have known Rumi as the mystic poet whose verses transcend language and time. It was Shams who broke open the gates of Rumi’s heart.