The wandering dervish whose disappearance turned Rumi into a poet of longing
In November 1244 a stranger dressed in black checked into a Konya inn, looking for someone. He found the scholar Rumi, and their friendship upended Rumi's life. When Shams Tabrizi later vanished, Rumi poured his grief into verse and signed much of it with his lost teacher's name.
Shams, whose name means sun in Arabic, lived from 1185 to 1248 and was an Iranian dervish and poet. He studied in Tabriz under Baba Kamal al-Din Jumdi and seems to have roamed from town to town making baskets and selling girdles. Biographers later called him the embroiderer, a label that probably drifted onto him from an Ismaili imam who had worked incognito as an embroiderer in Tabriz. Even his parentage is disputed: one early source names Imam Ala al-Din as his father, while the hagiographer Aflaki names a man called Ali and claims Shams reached Konya aged sixty, a figure scholars treat warily.
Legends about the first meeting circulate in rival versions. In one, Rumi dismisses the ragged visitor's question about his reading, Shams tosses the pile of books into a pool, and they come out dry. In another the pages burst into flame. Both end with Shams turning Rumi's put-down back on him. Tradition says the two spent forty days in seclusion before Shams left for Damascus.
After several years together Shams departed again. Sufi lore holds he vanished, and some claim jealous disciples of Rumi killed him, but much evidence points to him settling and dying in Khoy, where his tomb stands beside a tower monument in a memorial park and has been put forward for UNESCO recognition. Rumi's son Sultan Walad recorded only that Shams disappeared. Rumi's great collection, the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi, honours him as a guide lighting the way to divine love.
Shams left his own Persian prose book, the Maqalat, apparently written in old age. It offers a mystical reading of Islam, prizes joy over sorrow and praises the subtlety of Persian over Arabic. A large body of devotional verse also carries his name, especially among the Ismailis of Badakhshan. Gabrielle van den Berg has questioned his authorship, and later scholars suggest the name may have belonged to more than one person.
Source: Shams Tabrizi
