مولانا

Before the meeting, Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad of Balkh was heir to his father's pulpit in Konya: a respected jurist, a mufti and teacher with disciples at his feet. He had learning, rank and a good name — but, in Abdolkarim Soroush's phrase, he had not yet made the great gamble. He was a scholar who knew love from books, not from fire.

One day in 1244, a burned and fearless dervish stopped his path in Konya: Shams of Tabriz. He hurled a question like lightning — about Bāyazīd and the Prophet, about drunkenness and capacity. Everything that followed is commentary on that single moment: Mowlana came down from his mount, and never fully climbed his old pulpit again.

Soroush takes the name of this transformation from Rumi himself: the loving gamble. Love is staking everything on the hope of everything; and Mowlana lost it all — the lectures, the standing, the jurist's reputation — to be born again in samāʿ and poetry, things once unthinkable for him. The scholar became a lover, and out of that fire poured a Divan.

Shams left twice. The first time to Damascus — Mowlana's letters and envoys brought him back. The second time he vanished without trace. Mowlana searched, wandering, and did not find him — until he understood that what he sought was no longer outside him: the seeker had already become the found.

The seal of that union is his Divan: Mowlana signed his ghazals not with his own name but with "Shams" — the Divan of Shams of Tabriz. In Soroush's reading, Shams was the mirror in which Mowlana saw the sun already within himself; when the mirror departed, the sun remained. Mowlana became another Shams — the same fire, in another hearth.

Years later, at the urging of Hosām al-Dīn Chalabi, that settled fire became the Masnavi: six books, more than twenty-five thousand verses, opening with a reed cut from the reed-bed, singing of separation. The Masnavi is the ripened fruit of the years after Shams — the same love, now teaching the way.