170 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Then there were the Mevlevi dervishes, darlings of the intellectuals and
cognoscenti. They sprang up around a poet named Jalaludin, who was born
in Ballm, for which reason, in Afghanistan, he is known as Jalaludin-i Balkhi.
He was a boy when Mongol power began to coalesce around Genghis
Khan. His father smelled trouble coming and moved the family west to
what was left of the sultanate of Rum, for which reason most of the world
knows this poet as Jalaludin-i Rumi ("Jalaludin the Roman.")
Rumi's learned father founded a school, and Rumi began teaching there
once he carne of age, for he acquired his own reputation for learning. He
wrote conventional religious treatises that gained him great respect and at-
tracted numerous students, who crowded into his lectures and hung on his
every word.
The key moment in Rumi's legendary biography occurred one day
when a ragged stranger carne into his classroom. The stranger sat in the
back but he wouldn't keep his mouth shut. He kept bursting into song,
disrupting the lecture-he seemed crazy. The stories about this stranger re-
mind one of the young Jack Kerouac ceaselessly shouting "Go!" from the
back of the room when Alan Ginsberg was reading Howl for the first time
in public. Rumi's students grabbed hold of the beggar and tried to throw
him out of the room, but their professor made them stop and asked the
man who he was and what he wanted.
"I am Shams-i Tabrez," the stranger said, "and I have come for you."
To the astonishment of his students, Rumi dosed his book, cast off his
scholar's cloak, and said, "My teaching days are over. This is my master."
He walked out of the classroom with Shams, never to return.
Jalaludin and the beggar became inseparable. These two bonded pas-
sionately but on a purely spiritual level, bonded so utterly that Rumi began
to sign his poetry with his master's name: his lyrics from this period have
been collected as The Works ofShams-i Tabrez. Before Rumi met Shams, he
was a respected writer whose work might have been read for a hundred
years. After he met Shams, he became one of the greatest mystic poets in
the history of literature.
After a number of years, Shams mysteriously disappeared, and Rumi
went on to compose a single thousand-page poem called Mathnawi Ma'nawi
(The Spiritual Manuscript). In the famous opening passage, Rumi poses
a question: why is the melody of the flute so piercingly sad? Then he an-