The Song the Reed Remembers
A scholar met a wandering dervish, and the lectures turned into poetry the world still recites. A complete 21,000-word book, free and yours to keep. Not a sample chapter.
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The storytellers give the date as the fifth of Jumada al-Thani, in the year 642 of the Hijra, the twenty-ninth of November, 1244, by the reckoning that came later. Konya in that season smelled of woodsmoke and crushed coriander, of the horse-sweat and wet wool that gather in any market at the edge of winter. The plane trees along the street of the booksellers had gone bare. Copper pots rang against each other where the metalworkers had set up their stalls near the caravanserai of the sugar merchants, and somewhere behind the noise a reed flute was playing, thin and unhurried, the way it always played in that city, as though Konya itself could not stop humming. Through this crowd came Jalal ad-Din Muhammad, son of Baha al-Din Walad, mounted on his mule, moving with the unhurried authority of a man the whole city already called Master. He was thirty-seven years old that autumn. Students walked at his stirrup, the sons of Konya's finest families, come to hear him lecture at one of the four madrasas where he taught, or to catch him afterward and ask their questions in the street, the way pious young men have always trailed after the scholar whose words they cannot get enough of.
9 movements, carrying the whole life of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi from beginning to enduring memory.
- The Stranger at the Fountain
- A Boy Carried Out of Balkh
- The Making of a Master
- The Fire That Had No Name Until Shams
- Husam al-Din and the Reed's Long Song
- The Shaykh Among His People
- The Turning, and the Wedding Night
- The Flame Sultan Walad Carried
- The Doorway
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