From the Sun of Tabriz to the Sun of the Soul: Reassessing Shams-i Tabrizi's Influence on Rumi Through an Esoteric Reinterpretation of the First Tale of the Masnavi.

The conventional narrative have painted a larger than life picture of the tremendous influence that Shams-i Tabrizi had on Rumi. This narratives has been fueled by fantastical hagiographical tales of Aflaki and Mevleviya commentators and many modern scholars such as Forouzanfar and Schimmel also reaffirmed it. After all Rumi's Divan is filled with extraordinary adulation and adorations of Shams in which he is raised to a divine status. Yet within the Divan one also comes across verses such as "Shams-i Tabriz is only an excuse" and few similar lines which depict an alternative image about the fantastic tale of love and passion between Rumi and Shams. Furthermore what almost all of the commentators and scholars fail to address is the fact that while the name of Shams is mentioned more than a thousand time in the Divan, his name almost entirely disappeared from the Masnavi. There are only three instances in the Masnavi in which Shams's name is mentioned and in all those instances the language that Rumi employs in describing his relationship with Shams is tremendously ambiguous. The most enigmatic of all three instances is in the first tale of the Masnavi which is the subject of my investigation in this paper.
I am proposing that by the time Rumi had started to compose the Masnavi he was in a vigorous struggle to free himself from the spiritual influence of the Shams and therefore the lack of remembrance of Shams in the Masnavi was a conscious and deliberate attempt to demonstrate his spiritual libration. This argument is based on concrete examples from Masnavi and the Divan as well as some of the anecdotes from hagiographical works of Aflaki, Sipahsalar and Sultan Valad. Most important evidence of this struggle however is in the first tale of the Masnavi and through an esoteric interpretation of it I am going to demonstrate that, contrary to all previous commentaries, the entire theme of the fist tale is about how Rumi through the metamorphosis of characters of the tale attempts to declares himself librated of the empowering grip of the Shams, some twenty years after his departure from Konya. This esoteric interpretation is significant not only in reexamining the hermeneutics of the first tale but more importantly in reassessing the true influence of Shams on Rumi specially in the last two decades of his life.