Fragments from a Pilgrimage: Rumi, Shams, and the Rest of Us

I didn’t think much of it back then - Konya. A few days carved out from a longer trip. A loosely held plan. But now, years later, I can still recall how it felt.

Getting to Konya wasn’t easy, or at least not emotionally. I took a ten-hour overnight coach from Gaziantep. It wasn’t just a geographic shift. It was me, testing myself. Years ago, on my first trip to Istanbul in the late 2000s, I was mugged; trapped, manhandled, left shaken. That experience embedded a quiet anxiety whenever I thought about returning to Turkey. But this trip was different. I needed to reclaim something. I wanted to prove to myself that I could be in this country, move through it alone, and feel safe. And I did. Nothing happened. Not in Konya, not elsewhere. That, in itself, was a kind of healing.

Now mind you, Konya wasn’t dramatic. There was no thunderclap, no burning bush. Just presence.

And silence. Not empty silence, but the kind that listens back.

I stayed two nights. Walked between Rumi’s tomb and Shams’ more times than I can count. That back and forth settled into its own rhythm. You start to notice the way the wind turns corners, the scent of roses near the graveyard, the mosque with its unique turrets, how the mosaic light shifts across the marble, cobblestone, or both, just before noon.

Rumi’s tomb was, in a word, breathtaking. The crowd, the architecture, the reverence. But also, how still one feels even in the middle of all that motion. I sat for hours in a niche near the tomb, tucked into a bay-windowed edge of the mausoleum. Meditated. Wept. Something in me gave way.

It wasn’t sadness exactly. More like the overwhelm of Rooh ki Bhookh (hunger of the soul). And maybe the start of a quiet kind of filling.

I retreated to a small prayer area inside the tomb complex when it got too much. Carpeted, dark, simple. I cried there too. Not from collapse; more from clarity. Something was being released.

And then there was Shams.

People don’t always make the walk to his tomb. It’s about ten or fifteen minutes from Rumi’s. Modest, almost anonymous if you don’t know where to look. But the contrast is unforgettable. Where Rumi’s tomb is curated and ceremonial, Shams’ resting place is plain. Minimalist. Honest.

The space is small. A square stone chamber, worn smooth in parts, sharp-edged in others. Low ceiling. No grand architecture. Just a wooden screen surrounding the grave and a cloth draped over it, black with gold trim.

On that cloth, in unmistakable calligraphy, was the word Heech - Nothingness. Or more accurately, sacred nothingness.

The word pulled me back to Nietzsche. His struggle with the void: always trying to name it, fight it, explain it. But here, at Shams’ grave, Heech didn’t ask to be explained. It just was. Present. Intact.

Atop the grave is a tall, unusual headpiece. Like the kind worn by dervishes, but not quite. More angular, more defiant. Almost like Shams was still standing, not resting. Watching.

A Rastafarian couple sits quietly in the corner. Maybe they are hippies, maybe not. Long dreadlocks, layered clothes that don’t quite match the muted stone surroundings. But the way they sit still, as if been there forever feels oddly fitting. They don’t look local, but they belong.

And now comes an elderly caretaker who insists I have chai and cake. I say no. He ignores me. “No one leaves hungry from Shams’ tomb,” says he, handing me a chipped saucer and smiling like it’s not up for debate.

None of it is flashy. But all of it feels like something is moving under the surface. The kind of moments that register as spiritual; not because they shout, but because they don't need to.

Shams’ place isn’t designed to impress. It simply exists. And that, perhaps, is why it moves you. Even at Rumi’s tomb, I kept thinking of Shams. Like a missing person in a full room. Or maybe the echo of an unfinished conversation. The kind that leaves questions, not answers.

And that, maybe, is the real kashish – attraction – undeniable, it lets you sit with what you don’t know, without needing to solve it.

One afternoon, I wandered across a small cemetery just opposite Rumi’s museum. There, tucked between others, was the tombstone of Allama Iqbal: Pakistan’s national poet and a seeker who had once made his own journey to Konya. I hadn’t known. Seeing it anchored something: a shared lineage of seeking, yearning, of crossing borders to find a center. That unexpected moment felt like another silent thread pulling me inward.

I stayed in a small motel. No distractions. Just enough in its bareness. Worked for me perfectly. That word – Heech - kept circling back. I’d been reading Nietzsche, but it was in Konya where the tension between Nietzsche’s existential despair and Sufi surrender really settled. Nihilism met nothingness, but not as absence. As release.

There was a dhabba- small local café - near Shams’ tomb, run by a man who had once acted in the Turkish soap Ertugrul, dubbed in Urdu hence immensely popular in Pakistan. He poured me chai, refused money, made me a meal one evening.

We smoked together.

No Js - just quiet. Love.

He didn’t perform kindness.

He just lived it.

Love.

And that stayed with me longer than most orchestrated gestures ever could. In that neighborhood, no one treated me like a tourist. That mattered.

Another afternoon I walked uphill and found a quiet park. Big trees, wide branches, not many people around. There was a lovely aerial view of the city and a kind of calm I hadn’t felt in a long time. No epiphany. Just sleep. Pine needles above. Dust below.

That evening I was leaving for Istanbul (another overnight coach affair), I caught a whirling dervish performance in Rumi’s rose garden. I hadn’t planned on it - it was pure serendipity. A small group gathered under the twilight sky as the dervishes turned, trance-like, amidst the scent of blooming roses. It felt like a gift. As though the universe was saying: yes, this is for you too.

I think about Amir Shariff often. He’s the reason I went to Konya, though he never knew it. Just a few conversations about Rumi the prior half-year planted the seed. I never got to tell him. Never got to say: I went because of you.

And then there’s my Shaahid. The one who has witnessed me in ways I have barely managed to witness myself. That presence was with me in Konya, too. Not physically, but deeply. The moment I look at those old photographs - especially the ones where I’m not posing - I see it. In my eyes. Something unguarded. Something true.

Stories within stories, I had messaged her.

And it’s true. It wasn’t just me on that journey.

It was Rumi. Shams. Amir. Shaahid. The dhabba-wala (café owner). Nietzsche. Even the city itself.

I don’t walk away from that memory with conclusions. Only fragments. A red carpet. The weight of light. Steam rising from a cup of tea. Cake. A door closed gently behind me as I sat and listened to the silence.

And a feeling that it never really ended. Only folded back into who I am today.

References:

·   Mian A. (2022). https://anitinerantobserver.blogspot.com/2022/05/erdogan.html

·   Mian A. (2022). https://tribune.com.pk/story/2374792/finding-meaning-in-the-meaninglessness-nietzsche-meets-rumi

    Acknowledgment: Guided by Shaahid, shaped with GenAI. Fragments of a journey, 2021.