Rumi's Love Letter to Shams — The Divan-e Shams

The Rumi and Shams relationship is one of those stories that sounds made up. A 37-year-old respected scholar and religious teacher meets a wandering mystic in the street, and within minutes his entire life changes. He stops teaching. He stops writing legal opinions. He starts spinning in circles and reciting poetry. His students think he's lost his mind. His family is furious. And then the wandering mystic disappears. possibly murdered. and Rumi spends the rest of his life writing about him. Over 40,000 lines of poetry. All addressed to one person.

That's the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (دیوان شمس تبریزی). It's the largest collection of lyric poetry in Persian literature, and it's basically one long love letter. Whether you read it as spiritual devotion, romantic obsession, or something between the two, the intensity is unlike anything else in the canon. I've covered Rumi twice before in this series. Episode 3 on "Bāz Ā" and Episode 8 on "Morde Budam Zende Shodam". but those were individual poems. Today we're going into the heart of the Divan itself.

Who Was Shams-e Tabrizi?

Shams (شمس) means "sun" in Arabic and Farsi. His full name was Shams al-Din Mohammad, and he was from Tabriz. hence Tabrizi. Beyond that, almost everything about him is disputed.

What we know: he was a wandering dervish, a qalandar (قلندر). the kind of mystic who rejected formal religious structures, dressed roughly, said provocative things, and moved from city to city. He wasn't interested in impressing anyone. By most accounts he was sharp, confrontational, and impatient with pretension.

The famous meeting happened in Konya (in present-day Turkey) around 1244. The story goes that Shams approached Rumi. then Mowlana Jalal al-Din, a prominent Hanafi jurist and preacher. and asked him a question that cracked his worldview open. Different sources give different versions of the question, but the result was the same: Rumi abandoned his lectern and spent months in seclusion with Shams, talking, discussing, doing samā' (سماع. the Sufi listening/whirling practice).

Rumi's students and family hated Shams. They saw him as a disruptive outsider who'd stolen their teacher. After a period of escalating tension, Shams left Konya. Rumi was devastated. He sent his son Sultan Walad to find Shams and bring him back, which worked. temporarily. Then Shams disappeared a second time, and this time he never returned.

The most widely accepted theory is that Shams was murdered, possibly by Rumi's own students. There's a grave attributed to him in Konya, another in Khoy (Iran). Nobody knows for certain what happened. And that uncertainty. that permanent not-knowing. feeds directly into the poetry. Rumi never stopped looking.

The First Ghazal. "Man Bandeh-ye Ānam Ke..."

Let me start with one of the most quoted ghazals from the Divan. The opening beyt:

من بنده‌ی آنم که به یک حال نباشد

man bande-ye ānam ke be yek hāl nabāshad

I am the slave of the one who isn't bound to one state

هر لحظه به رنگی بت عیار برآید

har lahze be rangi bot-e 'ayyār barāyad

Every moment the cunning idol appears in a new color

Let's unpack this. "Bande" (بنده) means slave or servant. but in Sufi poetry, calling yourself a slave of someone is the highest form of devotion. "Ānam ke" (آنم که) = "that one who". Rumi doesn't name Shams directly. He uses "ān" (آن), "that one," which creates both reverence and mystery.

"Bot-e 'ayyār" (بت عیار) is loaded. "Bot" means idol. in Islamic context, idol worship is the ultimate sin. But in Persian Sufi poetry, "bot" became a standard term for the beloved. The beloved is so beautiful they're worshipped like an idol. "'Ayyār" means cunning, shapeshifting, tricky. So the beloved is a "cunning idol" who appears "har lahze be rangi". every moment in a different color. Shams as a shapeshifter. Shams as someone you can never pin down.

This is the whole Divan in miniature. Rumi trying to describe someone who won't stay still long enough to be described.

The Second Ghazal. "Bi To Nemitavānam"

This one hits different. It's raw need.

بی تو نمی‌توانم، بی تو نمی‌توانم

bi to nemitavānam, bi to nemitavānam

Without you I cannot, without you I cannot

بی تو به سر نمی‌رسد، عمر گران بها

bi to be sar nemiresad, 'omr-e gerān bahā

Without you, this precious life doesn't reach its end

The repetition in the first line. "bi to nemitavānam" said twice. breaks the normal ghazal structure where each hemistich should carry different content. Rumi doesn't care. He repeats it because one time isn't enough. The grammar itself becomes emotional: "nemitavānam" without an object. I cannot. what? He doesn't say. I just cannot. The incompleteness is the point.

And "'omr-e gerān bahā" (عمر گران بها). "precious life". uses an unusual construction. "Gerān bahā" literally means "expensive-priced," which is a compound adjective modifying "'omr" (life). The ezafe chain. 'omr-e gerān bahā. links them. If you're working on understanding Farsi sentence structure and word order, Rumi is both a masterclass and a headache, because he regularly inverts standard SOV order for emotional effect.

تو آفتاب و من سایه، تو را به هر طرف بروی من از پی توام

to āftāb o man sāye, to rā be har taraf beravi man az pey-e to-am

You are the sun and I the shadow. wherever you go, I am behind you

Sun and shadow. Āftāb (آفتاب) and sāye (سایه). Note that Shams literally means "sun". so when Rumi says "you are the sun," it's both metaphor and name. The shadow can't exist without the sun. Where the sun goes, the shadow follows. It's physics as devotion.

The Third Ghazal. "Ey Del Koja Mīravi?"

This ghazal opens with a question directed at his own heart:

ای دل کجا می‌روی، بنشین به جان بشنو

ey del kojā mīravi, beshin be jān beshno

O heart, where are you going? Sit down, listen with your soul

عاشق شدی هان هان، سر در بیابان شو

'āsheq shodi hān hān, sar dar biyābān sho

You've fallen in love. ha!. go lose yourself in the desert

The word order here is inverted from normal Farsi. Standard spoken Farsi would say "del-e man kojā mīri?". my heart, where are you going? But Rumi drops the possessive and uses "ey" (ای), the vocative particle, turning the heart into a separate person he's addressing. Then "beshin" (بنشین). "sit down". is a colloquial imperative. Even in 13th-century poetry, there's a spoken register creeping in.

"Sar dar biyābān sho" (سر در بیابان شو) literally means "put your head into the desert". meaning lose yourself, go wandering, let go of everything civilized. Biyābān (بیابان) in Persian poetry is always the space where social rules dissolve. The desert is where lovers go when the city's judgment becomes unbearable.

And "hān hān" (هان هان). that exclamation in the middle of the line. is untranslatable. It's somewhere between "well well," "ha!," and a knowing laugh. Rumi is talking to himself and laughing at himself at the same time. You fell in love? Of course you did. Now deal with the consequences.

"Were They Lovers?". The Question Everyone Asks

I get this question in almost every class where Rumi comes up. Were Rumi and Shams romantically involved? Were they lovers in the physical sense?

Here's my honest take. I don't know, and neither does anyone else. The historical record doesn't tell us. What I can tell you is what the poetry says, and what the cultural context was.

The poetry is the most intense expression of love in the Persian language. Lines like "bi to nemitavānam" and "to āftāb o man sāye" are not the words of a casual friendship. Whether that love was physical, spiritual, or something that doesn't fit neatly into either category. that's where interpretation starts.

In the Sufi tradition, the relationship between a murshid (مرشد. spiritual guide) and a murid (مرید. seeker) can be deeply intimate without being sexual. The murshid breaks the murid's ego, strips away pretension, forces confrontation with the self. It's a kind of love that doesn't have a clean Western equivalent. Shams was Rumi's murshid. or more accurately, his mirror.

But I also think it's reductive to automatically desexualize the relationship just because they were both men and this was the 13th-century Islamic world. Same-sex desire existed. It was sometimes acknowledged, sometimes punished, sometimes expressed through poetry where the beloved's gender was ambiguous. The Persian ghazal tradition deliberately blurs gender. the beloved is often "u" (او), which means "he/she/they" without distinction.

My position: the relationship was real, it was intense, it changed both of them permanently, and the poetry it produced is the most honest record we have. Whether it included a physical dimension isn't something I can prove, and I'm not sure it matters for understanding the poems. The love in these ghazals is unmistakable regardless of how you categorize it.

How These Lines Appear in Daily Life

Rumi's Divan isn't a museum piece. These ghazals are alive in Iranian culture in ways that might surprise you.

At weddings. "Bi to nemitavānam" gets recited or sung at Iranian weddings constantly. The couple standing there, someone reads it, half the room is crying. The fact that Rumi wrote it about a male mystic and it's being read at a heterosexual wedding doesn't register as contradictory. The love is the love. The words fit.

At Sufi ceremonies. The Mevlevi Order (the "whirling dervishes" in Konya) still uses the Divan in their samā' ceremonies. The poems are chanted while the dervishes whirl. the spinning itself is a form of prayer, and the Divan provides the text. If you ever visit Konya during the December Şeb-i Arus festival (the anniversary of Rumi's death, which Sufis celebrate as his "wedding night" with the divine), you'll hear these ghazals performed live.

In daily speech. "Ey del kojā mīravi" has become a standard expression for when you're about to do something stupid for love. Your friend tells you they're texting their ex at 3 AM and you say "ey del kojā mīravi". where is your heart taking you? Everyone gets the reference.

On gravestones. Lines from the Divan appear on graves throughout Iran and Afghanistan. The idea that death is a reunion with the beloved. which Rumi explicitly states in multiple ghazals. makes these poems appropriate for mourning. At Rumi's own tomb in Konya, the inscription includes his famous line about death being a union, not a separation.

Vocabulary From the Ghazals

Frequently Asked Questions

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Want to learn the vocabulary from this poem? Try ZabanYar. it's free and works offline.

Reading Rumi in translation is one thing. Reading him in Farsi. hearing the sounds, catching the puns, feeling the rhythm. is something else entirely. If you want to get to the point where you can read a ghazal in the original and actually feel it, let's work on it together. book a Preply lesson and we'll start with whichever Rumi poem makes you stop scrolling.

More Rumi and other Persian poets with full breakdowns: Persian Poetry for Language Learners.

Get it wrong and the worst that happens is a warm laugh and a story they’ll tell for years. Get it right — refuse the tea twice, accept on the third — and you’ll watch a face open up. You didn’t just speak Persian. You played the game.