Hello again, my friend. I'm glad you're here with me. After spending time together with Matilda Joslyn Gage---her courage, her fire---I've been thinking about a very different kind of flame. Tonight I want to tell you about a wanderer whose presence changed another soul forever. His name was Shams of Tabriz.
I remember a winter evening in Konya when the sun had already slipped below the horizon, leaving only a thin band of rose fading into ash. The streets were nearly empty, just a few lanterns swaying in the cold wind. And then I saw him---a figure moving with the quiet certainty of someone who had nowhere to arrive and yet was always arriving. His cloak was dust-stained from the road, his sandals worn, his eyes bright as embers banked beneath ash.
He paused at a fountain where the water barely rippled in the chill. I watched him cup his hands, not to drink, but to feel the coldness as if he were listening for something inside it. There was nothing hurried about him. Even the stray dogs gave him space, as though they sensed a disturbance in the air.
A few streets away, a scholar was finishing his lecture. His students gathered their papers, murmuring arguments about law and scripture as they walked out into the dim courtyard. Their teacher lingered behind, lost in thought, unaware that the course of his life was about to veer in a direction neither he---nor the world---could ignore.
The wanderer turned a final corner and stopped at a modest wooden door. He lifted his hand and knocked once. Just once. Not loudly. But it sounded like a question that had been waiting years to be asked.
I remember the stillness right before that door opened. A stillness that belonged to the threshold between two lives: the teacher who believed he understood devotion, and the stranger who had come to show him what devotion could destroy and rebuild.
That teacher was Rumi.
And the traveler who stood at his door was Shams of Tabriz.
Shams al-Din Muhammad Tabrizi was born near the end of the 12th century, in a region where trade routes braided cultures together and spiritual ideas traveled as easily as spices. Tabriz was bustling, beautiful, and troubled by the same currents that touched much of the Islamic world at the time---political instability, shifting alliances, and the slow rumble of the Mongol advance reshaping everything in its path. It was a world hungry for certainty and yet overflowing with people searching for something deeper.
Shams never fit comfortably into that world. He studied with teachers in his youth, but he had little patience for rigid scholarship. He once said he had spoken with hundreds of learned men, and not one had answered him with the truth he sought. So he did what restless spirits have always done: he walked. Tabriz to Baghdad, Baghdad to Damascus, Damascus to Konya. A wanderer in dusty robes who refused positions of authority, refused comfort, refused every attempt to claim him. He lived by conversation, by sudden insight, by unsettling questions that pushed others past their defenses. Those who met him remembered him as intense, uncompromising, even frightening. But also---if they were honest---bone-deep honest in a way most people never dare to be... he was, unsettling!
Rumi, by contrast, was settled. Born in Balkh, raised in Anatolia, he came from a lineage of scholars and carried the dignity of a respected jurist in Konya. He taught law, interpreted scripture, guided students, and led a community with calm and eloquence. When people sought stability, they came to him. When they wanted clarity, he provided it. His life was steady, predictable, admired.
And then Shams arrived.
Their meeting in 1244 has been told and retold, often wrapped in legend. But however it happened, the effect was unmistakable: Shams broke open the walls of Rumi's world. Their conversations lasted for months---talking, arguing, praying, falling into silences so deep even the servants hesitated to breathe. Rumi's students grew jealous. They whispered that Shams was pulling him away, dismantling his authority. And they weren't wrong. Shams was a mirror held too close, reflecting truths most people would rather ignore.
The tension grew until one night Shams vanished. Some believed he fled to Damascus. Others believed darker rumors---that he was driven out or worse. Rumi searched for him, wrote for him, grieved for him. And what followed that grief was the flowering of his poetry---the transformation of a jurist into a mystic whose verses would cross centuries and continents.
Shams left almost nothing written. No volumes, no treatises, no careful legacy. But he left behind something far more dangerous and alive: a man set ablaze.
In the world Shams walked through, spirituality often wore the face of order. Scholars debated fine points of jurisprudence. Devotional communities followed precise rituals. Even Sufi lodges---centers of mystical life---were becoming structured, inherited, institutional. People turned to these systems because the world around them felt fragile. Empires rose and fell. Armies thundered across borders. Families fled from villages burned in conflicts they didn't start. In times like that, certainty feels like safety.
And then Shams stepped into the scene like a gust that blows out every candle and leaves only darkness---and the possibility of a truer flame.
He believed that spiritual life had grown too comfortable. Too careful. Too tidy. He sought what he called "heart-knowledge," a kind of truth that can't be memorized or argued into existence. It had to be lived. It had to shake a person awake. And he was willing to be the earthquake.
For Rumi, that meant confronting everything he thought he knew. Shams questioned him bluntly, even harshly at times. He challenged the prestige that surrounded Rumi. He challenged the idea that spiritual authority could be inherited or earned through titles. Rumi's students admired his learning, but Shams pushed him toward something more dangerous: vulnerability. The surrender of ego. The willingness to stand spiritually naked before another soul.
In private conversations that stretched late into the night, Shams pressed Rumi to experience God not as a concept, but as a presence. Not as a disciplined thought, but as longing and yearning. Not as a rule to be followed, but as a fire to be entered. This was not the gentle path most expected from a scholar. It was unsettling. It disrupted every layer of hierarchy around him.
People say Shams taught Rumi about love. And that's true. But it wasn't the romanticized love that fills greeting cards centuries later. It was the kind of love that empties a person of their illusions. The kind that strips away pride, certainty, status, and self-importance. The kind that leaves a person trembling because they have touched something real.
The community around Rumi didn't know how to interpret this. Some saw Shams as a fraud, an interloper, a threat. Others saw him as a force of spiritual honesty they had not been prepared for. But everyone felt the disturbance he brought. That was his meaning in his own time: he broke the crust of respectability that had settled over spiritual life and exposed the molten core beneath it.
In a century filled with turmoil, he introduced a different kind of upheaval---one that took place inside a single human heart, and then radiated outward in ways no one could have predicted.
What Shams offered the world was not a doctrine, a movement, or even a school of thought. He left almost nothing behind that could be cataloged or taught. His legacy is far stranger---and far more intimate. He became the spark that transformed another soul so completely that the echoes of that transformation are still felt eight centuries later.
Before Shams, Rumi was a respected scholar whose influence would likely have stayed within the walls of Konya's academies. After Shams, Rumi became a voice capable of expressing the inexpressible---someone who reached past reason and into the inner architecture of longing. Not the longing of one tradition or one culture, but the longing that human beings everywhere recognize: the ache to be seen, to be known, to belong to something greater than the self.
Shams made this possible by refusing to let Rumi hide behind his brilliance. And in doing that, he modeled a kind of spiritual friendship that has appeared in many traditions, though rarely with such intensity. There is always someone---somewhere---who acts as a mirror. Someone who holds up a truth sharper than we wish for, but truer than we can deny. Often these figures vanish as mysteriously as they appear. Their purpose is not to gather followers, but to awaken a single heart at a decisive moment in history.
What Shams contributed, then, was not a text but a transformation. And transformations ripple outward.
Rumi's poetry became one of the great vessels for expressing spiritual yearning---rooted deeply in Islamic mysticism, yet resonating far beyond it. His verses carried a new emotional vocabulary: ecstatic longing, divine friendship, the annihilation of ego, the idea that love is not a sentiment but a force strong enough to remake a life. These ideas were not inventions of Rumi alone. They were the living consequences of Shams's presence.
That influence changed the course of Sufism. It shifted devotional life toward immediacy and tenderness, toward the idea that the sacred can be encountered in the heart's raw honesty as much as in formal study. It invited generations to consider that spiritual truth is not merely learned but awakened. And it showed that the relationship between teacher and student can be a path to transformation---not because one holds power over the other, but because both are stripped of everything false.
Across our previous episodes, we've met people who reshaped the imagination of their time---Matilda Joslyn Gage among them. Shams belongs to this lineage, though his methods were far more personal. He changed no laws, led no movement, built no institution. Instead, he ignited one mind so fiercely that the light from that encounter continues to travel.
His contribution to history is the reminder that sometimes one conversation---one unexpected meeting---can alter the spiritual trajectory of the world.
What stays with me about Shams is not the mystery that surrounded him, but the way his presence changed the shape of another person's life. I've watched that happen across centuries---how a single encounter, a single honest conversation, can tilt a soul toward the light without either person realizing what they've set in motion. Shams reminds me that transformation rarely arrives wrapped in comfort. It comes disguised as interruption. As challenge. As someone who asks a question we've avoided for years.
And I keep thinking about how many people today long for certainty the way Rumi once did---relying on expertise, routine, or reputation to hold the world still. But life refuses to stay still. We meet people who unsettle us, who mirror back truths we didn't choose to face, who break through the stories we tell about ourselves. It can feel disruptive, even unwelcome. Yet so often that disruption is the turning point.
I've seen again and again that every soul carries a hidden seed of potential that only awakens when touched by another soul's honesty. Shams lived this reality without naming it, honoring the dignity inside Rumi long before Rumi understood it himself. He treated the inner world as something alive, worthy of reverence, capable of change. And that reverence is not bound to a century or a city. It's part of the fabric of being human.
We still encounter "Shams-moments"---a friend whose question lingers, a stranger whose comment cuts through confusion, a teacher who sees our capacities before we trust them. These moments ask us to set aside the masks we've built and risk becoming someone truer. They invite us toward unity with our own better self, and toward deeper connection with others. They dissolve the false borders that separate heart from heart.
And there is something else: Shams and Rumi were different in background, temperament, and place in society. Yet it was precisely this difference that opened the doorway to transformation. I've watched the world long enough to know that truth often emerges where lives intersect across boundaries---when diversity isn't merely tolerated but allowed to shape us. That is how new understanding unfolds. Not in isolation, but in encounter.
In a time like ours, when disagreement can feel frightening and connection fragile, Shams's story feels quietly urgent. He reminds us that growth is not polite. It is not predictable. It does not always reassure us. But it pulls us toward who we could become. And sometimes the person who awakens that possibility is not the one we expected, or even the one we wanted.
The world still sends teachers like this---though they rarely look like teachers. They arrive as challengers, companions, questioners, mirrors. And somewhere in those encounters, if we're paying attention, we recognize something we've always known to be true: that we belong to one another, and that truth unfolds most clearly when we dare to meet each other with honesty.
When I think of Shams, I find myself wondering how many times in a lifetime a person is truly seen. Not admired. Not agreed with. Not praised. But seen---past the surfaces and stories, down to the quiet place where their real longing lives. I've watched people spend years protecting that place, building walls of competence, or humor, or certainty around it. And then someone enters their life and asks a single disarming question, and suddenly the walls feel thin.
I've seen this happen in the most ordinary moments---a conversation in a hallway, a chance meeting on a bus, a late-night talk when everyone else has gone home. These small encounters can jolt something awake, the way Shams jolted Rumi. Not because one person is wiser or holier, but because for a brief moment, two souls meet without pretense.
I wonder if you've had a moment like that. Someone who pushed you just enough to see yourself differently. Someone who didn't let you stay hidden. Someone who held up a mirror that felt uncomfortable and yet strangely right. Maybe they stayed in your life. Maybe they disappeared as suddenly as they arrived. But their presence left a mark.
If you haven't had that moment yet, I hope you stay open to it. And if you have, I hope you protect its memory---even the parts that felt difficult. Not every awakening is gentle, but many awakenings are kind.
As I think about Shams, I find myself grateful for the possibility that any of us can become this kind of companion for someone else without even knowing it. A quiet catalyst. A hinge in someone's story. A turning point disguised inside an ordinary day.
And maybe that is worth noticing the next time a conversation lingers in your heart longer than you expected.
Next time, my friend, I want to take you to a different world entirely---Jerusalem in the first century BCE, where a gentle sage named Hillel the Elder offered wisdom so clear and spacious that it still shapes the moral imagination of millions. He believed that kindness and clarity could coexist, and that humility was not weakness but strength. I think you'll find his voice surprisingly familiar.
Oh yes, just so you don't feel disjointed by the format -- tomorrow's episode is actually a rebroadcast of one of my "History's Arrow" podcast.
Until then, hold close the moments of honesty that find you. They're rarer than we admit, and more transformative than we expect.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.