Page 20 - The Book of Rumi

The setting of the J¯ataka tales is Banaras, or Varanasi as it is called today.
This northern Indian city is known as the “Abode of Supreme Light” and the
residence of the deity Shiva, the god of destruction and re-creation. Legend
has it that Shiva dug the “well of wisdom” in that city, and its water continues
to carry the “light of wisdom.”
As these Indian stories began their journey west, they seem to have soaked
up the colors of the wisdom/literature of the Parthians and Sasanians, and
the attributes of their main characters seem to have been fused with those of
the pre-Islamic Iranian legends, whose trials and tribulations inform much of
the later heroic and romantic epics of the post–10th century Persianate world.
With the movement of people, the stories continued to wind their way
further west and soon became infused with a body of lore from Arabic,
Hebrew, Coptic, Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian oral and written tra-
ditions. The resultant hybrid interrelated fables have been told throughout
these regions for well over a millennium.
It is in such a culturally rich but historically turbulent region in AD 1213
that we can locate a six-year-old boy by the name of Jal¯al od-Din Mohammad,
living in the city of Samarkand, now in Uzbekistan. Having moved from the
outskirts of Balkh, Jal¯al od-Din’s family, headed by the patriarch scholar and
cleric Bah¯aoddin Valad, had made Samarkand their home, a city described as
one of the most prosperous and beautiful metropolises on the eastern edges
of the Perso-Islamic empire.
A century earlier, the Persian medieval geographer, Istakhri, had depicted
Samarkand and its surrounding districts as “the most fruitful of all the coun-
tries of Allah.” Of the city itself, he wrote: “I know no quarter in it where if
one ascends some elevated ground one does not see greenery and a pleasant
place.” Istakhri recounts that he once traveled out of the city for eight days
through unbroken greenery and gardens, “where every town and settlement
has a fortress . . . where the best trees and fruits are a plenty, in every home are
gardens, cisterns, and fl owing water.”
Despite living and teaching in such paradisal surroundings, the forty-fi ve-
year-old Bah¯aoddin was anxiously contemplating the future of his family as

XVIII