Rumi was thirty-seven years old and the head of the great madrasa of Konya. His father, Baha al-Din Walad, had been called Sultan al-Ulama, Sultan of Scholars, and Rumi had inherited the chair. He was a respected Hanafi jurist. He taught fiqh in the mornings and Quranic exegesis in the afternoons. He had hundreds of students. Konya was the Seljuk capital in Anatolia, and Rumi was the chief religious authority in it. He was a Sufi as well, but a discreet one, in the classical Anatolian style: prayer, retreat, service.
Late one afternoon in the year 1244 CE, he was riding through the market square of Konya. He was surrounded by disciples. His books were being carried behind him on the back of a mule. A wandering dervish stepped out of the crowd and grabbed the bridle of his horse.
The dervish was a stranger. He was later identified as Shams al-Din of Tabriz. Shams was a wandering Persian Sufi in his sixties, dressed in rough black wool, with piercing eyes and a difficult reputation. He had traveled from teacher to teacher across the Muslim world looking for someone who could bear his company. Sufi tradition says he had asked Allah for a companion who was strong enough to take direct spiritual conversation without recoiling.
He now stood in front of Rumi in the market, holding the bridle. The disciples were alarmed. The Mawlana was being manhandled by a filthy wanderer. They moved to intervene. Shams held up a hand.
He asked Rumi a question. The exact wording differs across the sources, but the essence is preserved: he asked which was greater, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ or the Sufi master Bayazid al-Bistami. Bayazid was famous for having said, in a moment of ecstatic union with Allah, subhani, glory be to me. The Prophet ﷺ, at the summit of his own spiritual experience, had said: I have not known you, Allah, as you deserve to be known.
Shams was asking Rumi: was Bayazid's ecstatic claim greater, or the Prophet's confession of insufficiency?
Rumi understood the question. He gave an answer of a scholar. He said: the Prophet ﷺ was greater. Bayazid was a saint of the ummah, but the Prophet ﷺ was the one who received the revelation. The distance between them was fixed.
Shams pressed further. He asked: but why? What was different between the two moments? Both men were speaking to Allah. Both were at the peak of their experience.
Rumi thought. Then he said: Bayazid was full, and could not take any more. So he cried out. The Prophet ﷺ was thirsty, and the thirst kept growing the more he drank. The greater the vessel, the more capacity to receive more, and the more awareness of what has not yet been received. Bayazid's ecstasy came from being satisfied. The Prophet's ﷺ humility came from knowing there is no end.
Shams looked at him. Then, according to the Manaqib al-Arifin of Aflaki, Shams fainted. He fell off his feet in the middle of the market. The disciples rushed to him. Rumi got off his horse. When Shams recovered, he embraced Rumi. Rumi embraced him back.
They went to Rumi's house. They locked themselves in a room. They did not come out for weeks. When they emerged, Rumi's entire life had changed. He stopped teaching. He stopped delivering the Friday sermon at the mosque. He spent every hour with Shams, in conversation, in meditation, in reciting poetry, in silence, in whirling. Rumi's students, seeing their master ignore them for a stranger, grew jealous. Some of them began to plot against Shams.
The friendship lasted, on and off, for three years. Shams disappeared once and Rumi sent his son to find him. Shams was in Damascus. He returned. Then he disappeared again, in December 1247 CE. He was probably murdered by a group of Rumi's jealous disciples. His body was never found. Rumi searched Damascus. Rumi searched Konya. He never found him.
The grief broke something open in Rumi. Poetry poured out of him. He composed the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi, forty thousand lines of lyric poetry, most of it addressed to Shams, most of it also addressed to Allah. He composed the Masnavi, twenty-five thousand couplets, over the next twenty years. Rumi is often called the greatest mystical poet in the history of the Persian language.
He founded a Sufi order that used whirling as its central practice. The Whirling Dervishes, the Mevlevi, are still active. They whirl in white robes, one arm turned up to receive from heaven, one arm turned down to give to earth, the head tilted, the body a channel. Rumi taught the practice as a physical enactment of the truth Shams had brought to him: the greater the vessel, the more the receiving, and the more the giving.
Rumi died in December 1273 CE, at sixty-six. His funeral was attended by Muslims, Christians, and Jews of Konya. He is buried under the Green Dome, in the city where he had once been merely a great scholar.
What the story teaches. A single question in a marketplace, asked by a stranger, can dismantle and rebuild a life. Rumi did not become a poet because he decided to. He became a poet because Shams asked him a question that could not be answered from the pulpit. When the answer required his whole heart, and not his scholarly training, poetry poured out. The Masnavi came from that. The Whirling Dervishes came from that. The Divan came from that. Everything that made Rumi Rumi came from three years with Shams, and three years of grief for Shams, and a lifetime of answering a question a stranger had asked him in a market.