Send for Him
1246 · Rumi, after Shams of Tabriz, the mystic who divided his household, has left Konya without warning
He has had a friend for a long while now, and for that same while his household and his students have been losing him.
Before the friend arrived he was a professor of religious law with a full lecture hall and a settled life. Since then he has stopped lecturing, stopped writing what he used to write, and spends whole days behind a closed door with a wandering dervish nobody can place. His students have gone from confused to resentful to something worse. His own family has taken a side.
Now the friend is gone. He left in the night without saying where, and the relief in the house is not being hidden well.
A letter has arrived from Damascus. Somebody has seen him there.
He can let it stand. The household settles, the students come back, and the life he spent forty years building resumes on Monday.
Or he can send his own son to Damascus to bring the man home, back into a house where a good number of people have already decided the problem would be solved if he simply disappeared.
Let him go
Send for himOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Rumi sent his son Sultan Walad to Damascus, and Shams came back. In 1248 he disappeared again, this time for good (probably murdered, and the tradition holds that Rumi's other son, Ala al-Din, was involved). Rumi never found out and never recovered. What came out of not recovering is some forty thousand lines of lyric poetry published under the lost man's name instead of his own, and then the Masnavi, twenty-five thousand couplets that Persian readers have called the Quran in Persian. The whirling his followers later made into a discipline is traditionally traced to him turning in the streets of Konya, looking for someone who was not there.
The philosophers weigh in
Let him go"He is asking whether to go and fetch back the thing that took him apart. The question already contains the answer, and he is going to ignore it, and that is also the answer."
Send for him"I gave back my clothes in a square in front of my father and the whole town. A settled life is not a thing you protect. It is a thing you find out you can put down."