Shams, Rumi and Shafiei Kadkani

Two pieces of news met this week from opposite ends of history. The shrine of Shams-e Tabrizi in Khoy was entered in Iran's national heritage register and, after twenty years of work, opened its doors. And Mohammad-Reza Shafiei Kadkani, who has spent half a century with Rumi's ghazals, turned eighty-seven.

Iran's Ministry of Cultural Heritage registered the shrine on October 3, 2026, as number 34594 on the list of national monuments. Four days later a complex of seven thousand square meters opened, with a domed hall, a gallery, research rooms and a library of eight thousand volumes. The library is named for Mohammad-Ali Movahed, the scholar who edited the "Maqalat" of Shams and made the text we read today available to everyone.

We know little about Shams himself. He was born in Tabriz, spent his life on the road and never settled anywhere. He wrote no book. What remains is the "Maqalat", notes that his listeners took down from his talk. The man who speaks in those pages has no patience for displays of learning, is sharp with the sheikhs and jurists of his day, and asks his listener to say something of his own instead of quoting others. In one place he compares himself to a script that neither its writer nor anyone else can read.

In the autumn of 1244 he arrived in Konya. Scholars estimate that he was close to sixty. Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi, known in the West as Rumi, was thirty-seven, a jurist and teacher with many students. Several accounts of their first meeting survive, and none can be treated as a record. In one, Shams throws Rumi's books into water. In another he asks a question about Bayazid and the Prophet, and Rumi faints. What is clear is what followed. Rumi left his teaching and his pulpit, withdrew with Shams, and sang:

I was dead, I came alive. I was tears, I became laughter.
The fortune of love arrived, and I became fortune that lasts.

The friendship was short. Rumi's followers could not bear Shams. He left once for Damascus, and Rumi sent a ghazal after him:

Go, friends, and bring our beloved back.
Bring me, at last, the idol who runs away.

Shams returned, and in 1247 he disappeared for good. Some said he was killed, others that he simply left. Rumi wrote ghazals in his memory for the rest of his life, and at the end of many of them, where a poet signs his own name, he put the name of Shams. That is why his collected ghazals, more than three thousand of them, are known as the "Divan-e Shams".

— محمدرضا شفیعی کدکنی، ۲۰۲۳. Mohammad-Reza Shafiei Kadkani, 2023. Photo: Damavand2024, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The question of where Shams went leads to Khoy as well. Aflaki, who wrote the lives of Rumi and his companions in the following century, places his grave in Konya, where a shrine bears his name. The oldest text that names Khoy is the "Mojmal-e Fasihi", written in 845 of the Islamic calendar, two centuries after Shams, which says he was buried there. Outside Khoy stands a minaret that has carried the name of Shams-e Tabrizi since at least the fifteenth century. Movahed takes this as good reason to accept Khoy. Franklin Lewis, the American scholar of Rumi, is more cautious and says there is no convincing evidence for Khoy and none against it. The office that registered the shrine says the site was identified from historical documents and the judgment of researchers and confirmed by archaeological excavation. Registration protects the building. It does not close the argument.

Shafiei Kadkani was born in October 1939 in Kadkan, in Khorasan. He never went to primary or secondary school. He learned Arabic and literature from his father and from Adib Nishaburi, and studied jurisprudence in the seminary of Mashhad. He then read Persian literature at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad and took his doctorate at the University of Tehran. He published poetry under the name M. Sereshk, and "In the Garden Lanes of Nishapur", which appeared in 1971, placed him among the leading poets of those years. "Safe Journey" comes from that book. It opens with the thornbush asking the breeze where it is rushing to, and it has found its way into school textbooks. In 2015 a Dutch translation was painted on a wall in the city of Leiden. His "Imagery in Persian Poetry" and "The Music of Poetry" are two books no student of Persian literature can yet do without.

In 1973 he published a selection of the ghazals of Shams, a small book that was reprinted many times and through which many Persian readers first came to know Rumi. In the late 2000s the same work appeared in two volumes from Sokhan Publishers under the title "Ghazaliyat-e Shams-e Tabriz". The two volumes hold 1,075 ghazals and 256 quatrains, with a long introduction, a corrected text and a commentary on the verses.

The strength of the book is that its author is both a poet and a scholar. His ear knows the meter and music of a ghazal, and his patience extends to manuscripts and sources. He explains the hard word, points out the reference to the Quran or a hadith, and says where the melody of each ghazal comes from. The reader ends up facing a poet who lived in a particular time, language and faith.

That work stands out more today. Rumi has been called the best-selling poet in America, yet the most widely read English versions are by Coleman Barks. According to The New Yorker, Barks does not read or write Persian. He turned nineteenth-century translations into American verse and reduced the references to Islam. These versions have brought many readers, and along the way they have left behind the Quran, Konya and the Persian language. Shafiei Kadkani's two volumes keep the road back to the text open. Rumi described that return himself at the opening of the "Masnavi", here in R. A. Nicholson's translation:

Every one who is left far from his source
wishes back the time when he was united with it.

Anyone who walks out of the shrine in Khoy wanting to know what that man did to Rumi has to go to the ghazals. These two volumes are a good place to begin.