encounter with a fakir, a nomadic Holy Man called Shams of Tabriz. In fact, ‘Holy Man’ is a term that some would not have bestowed upon this itinerant eccentric. Deepak Chopra, in A Gift of Love: The Love Poems of Rumi, describes Shams (whose name means ‘Sun’), kindly, as “A sudden, elusive warrior who demanded everything life could give”.
Others were less kind, and regarded him as rude, antisocial, rebellious, and even possessed; at best a spiritual madman, but more likely a waster and vagabond. Others, still, believed that Shams, whose origins remain obscure, had been tutored in a highly unorthodox sect of Sufism which was involved with radical plant spirit practices, such as the use of hallucinogens as a means of breaking through spiritual barriers, and that this had affected his mind.
Shams would spend days in mystical reveries, lost in flight to God, weeping in the ecstasy of unconditional love. Then he would snap out of his soul-intoxication and work for days as a mason, carrying blocks of stone to ground himself and restore the balance of body and mind. But he would never stay anywhere long. His nickname was Paranda (‘Bird’ -“The flier” or “The winged one”), because birds are always in flight. He would arrive in a new town and a crowd would gather to hear his teachings, alerted by the reputation of this contradictory madman-spiritual genius, whereupon Shams would excuse himself for a moment and vanish into thin air, called back to the wild by the whispers of spirit. He seemed always to be searching for something: a deeper and more intensely-felt connection to – God knows what – the Infinite, the void, the world-beyond-forms; that special state that Sufis know as fana, where the