Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi

• 1. Introduction

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  The Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi is a collection of more than 40,000 verses, and its title belongs not to the man who wrote it but to a man who vanished. The Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi assembled these poems, yet he named them for Shams-i Tabrizi, his beloved spiritual teacher. Many of the verses praise Shams. Many more lament his disappearance. The work is also called Divan-i Kabir and Divan-i Shams. It holds over 3,000 ghazals, the lyric form of love and friendship. Why would a poet sign another person's name to a third of his own work? Why did a jurist with no background in poetics suddenly begin composing in a trance-like style unlike other Islamic poets? And how did a grieving man in thirteenth-century Konya end up inspiring American writers six centuries later? The answers begin with a meeting in 1244.

• 2. A Meeting In Konya

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  In 1244 C.E, Rumi was working as a jurist and spiritual counselor at the behest of the Seljuk Sultan of Rûm. In Konya he met a wandering Persian Sufi dervish named Shams-i Tabrizi. Rumi, who previously had no background in poetics, quickly became attached to him. Shams acted as a spiritual teacher and introduced Rumi to music, sung poetry, and dance through Sufi samas. The attachment proved fragile against absence. Shams abruptly left Konya in 1246 C.E, returned a year later, then vanished again in 1248 C.E, possibly having been murdered. During the first separation, Rumi wrote poetic letters to Shams pleading for his return. After the second disappearance, Rumi turned again to verse, this time to laud Shams and lament his loss. He never assembled these poems into a book himself. His students collected them after his death as the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi. Another figure would also draw Rumi's verse: his friend Salah al-Din Zarkub, who died in December 1258.

• 3. The Shape Of A Grief

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  The creation dates of some poems in the Divan are unknown, but a major portion came in the initial aftermath of Shams' second disappearance. Most therefore probably date from around 1247 C.E. and the years that followed, until Rumi had overcome his grief. Seventy more poems arrived later, written after Rumi had confirmed that Shams was dead; these he dedicated to Salah al-Din Zarkub. The full scale of the work is precise in Foruzanfar's edition, based on the oldest manuscripts available. It runs to 44,292 lines. Of these, 3,229 ghazals occupy 34,662 lines across fifty-five different metres. There are 44 tarji-bands across 1,698 lines, and 1,983 quatrains across 7,932 lines. The Divan gathers several Eastern-Islamic poetic styles, including elegies and quatrains alongside the ghazals. Most poems are in Persian, but some are in Arabic. A few are bilingual, written in Turkish, Arabic, and Greek. That mixture of tongues hints at how loosely Rumi held the conventions others obeyed.

• 4. Silence As A Signature

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  Rumi signed off most of his ghazals as either Khâmush, meaning Silence, or Shams-i Tabrizi. By convention, poets writing ghazals adopted poetic personas invoked as pen names at the end of their poems, in what are called takhallos. Rumi followed the form while bending its purpose. The ghazal itself is a lyric type used for love and friendship as well as mystical Sufi theological subjects. Rumi belonged to a long tradition of such poetry, yet he developed something his own. He composed extemporaneously, and that spontaneity gave much of his work an ecstatic, almost trance-like quality unlike other professional Islamic poets. The traditional rules chafed him. In one ghazal he complained that fitting his poems into the standard dum-ta-ta-dum metre was a process so dreadful it nearly killed him. That a poet would lament the very form he mastered points to a deeper argument running through the work: an argument about love itself.

• 5. Love Against Longing

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  Among the most prominent themes in the Divan are love and longing, and scholars disagree sharply about what Rumi meant by them. Unlike Rumi's Masnavi, the Divan is not a didactic work, yet it remains deeply philosophical, expressing his mystical Sufi theology. The scholar Rokus de Groot argues that Rumi rejects longing in favour of a divine unity, or tawhid. De Groot traces this concept to the Shahada's declaration that there is no other god save God. In his reading, longing is a lust to grasp something beyond oneself, which necessarily creates a duality between subjects and objects. Those drunk with love, as Rumi writes, are double, whereas those drunk with god are united as one. De Groot uses this to explain the strangest fact about the book. Rumi signed about a third of the Divan under Shams-i Tabrizi's name. By writing as if he and Shams were the same person, Rumi repudiated the longing that plagued him, choosing instead the unity of all beings found in divine love.

• 6. A Religion Of Love

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  Mostafa Vaziri reads the same poems and reaches a non-Islamic conclusion. In Vaziri's view, Rumi's references to love compose a separate Mazhab-e 'Ishq, or Religion of Love. This outlook was universalist rather than uniquely Islamic. Vaziri holds that Rumi's notion of love designated the incorporeal reality of existence, something that lies outside physical conception. The consequence reshapes who Shams was on the page. According to Vaziri, Rumi's references to Shams in the Divan point not to the person of Shams but to the all-encompassing universality of the love-reality. Where de Groot sees a man dissolving his grief into God, Vaziri sees a man naming a reality that has no body at all. Both readings rest on the same verses that later editors would struggle to arrange.

• 7. Arranging The Verses

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  By the sixteenth century, most editors organized the Divan's poems by alphabetical order, sorting on the last letter of each line. This disregarded the varying meters and topics of the poems entirely. That method still governs modern Iranian editions. Turkish editions take a different path, following the practice of the Mevlevi Order by grouping the poems by metre. The work's printed history began in Europe in 1838, when Vincenz von Rosenzweig-Schwannau produced the first printed copy, with seventy-five poems of dubious authenticity. Reynold A. Nicholson later produced a more selective text of fifty ghazals, though Badi al-Zaman Foruzanfar's critical edition would determine several of Nicholson's selections to be inauthentic. In 1957, Foruzanfar published a critical collection drawn from manuscripts written within a hundred years of Rumi's death. His care over authenticity stands against a later tradition that prized inspiration over accuracy.

• 8. A Reach Across Centuries

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  American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman knew the Divan and drew inspiration from its philosophical mysticism. The work traveled further through translation. Many late Victorian and Georgian poets in England encountered Rumi through Nicholson's version of the Divan. The most popular modern channel proved the most contested. The prominent Rumi interpreter Coleman Barks used selections from Nevit Ergin's translation in his own reinterpretations, drawing controversy over the accuracy and authenticity of his work. A fuller scholarly route reached completion in 2020, when Jeffrey R. Osborne finished a twenty-volume English translation rendered from the original Persian. From a dervish who vanished in Konya, the verses had become twenty volumes in another language, seven and a half centuries on.