SSaint
Sayyid Burhan al-Din Muhaqqiq of Tirmidh
The master and tutor of Mevlânâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî; a Sufi buried at Kayseri. He is known by the epithet "Muhakkık" (the verifier). He was born in 561 (1166) or 565 (1169) at Tirmidh. He was the grandson of Seyyid Kāsım Tirmizî and the son of Seyyid Hasan Tirmizî. Since his lineage went back to Husayn, he was known by the epithets "Seyyid" and "Hüseynî", as well as "seyyid-i sırdân" for knowing the secrets of hearts or for foretelling to Mevlânâ the coming of Şems-i Tebrîzî to Konya, "Burhâneddin, burhân-ı dîn, burhân" as Mevlânâ called him, and "muhakkik", marking him as a Sufi of verification. After studying at Tirmidh he went in 605 (1208) to Balkh and attached himself to Mevlânâ's father Sultânülulemâ Bahâeddin Veled. Having kept his company for forty days and received his licence, he returned to Tirmidh. The following year he came again to Balkh and stayed there some two or three years; during this period he took charge of the tutorship of Mevlânâ , then still a child. When Bahâeddin Veled emigrated from Balkh with his family, he settled in Tirmidh (616/1219). He reached Konya a year after his master's death and withdrew into seclusion in the Sincârî Mosque; at this time he wrote to Mevlânâ, then at Lârende, pointing out that the place would not be fit to live in because of the Mongol invasion and calling him to Konya. He told Mevlânâ that his father had been a perfected master in both the outward and the inward sciences, and that he must attain in the inward sciences the eminence he had reached in the outward; upon this Mevlânâ became his disciple. The following year he sent Mevlânâ to Damascus to advance further in the outward sciences (630/1233), accompanying him on this journey as far as Kayseri. According to Eflâkî, when Mevlânâ returned to Kayseri after studying in the medreses of Aleppo and Damascus, Sâhib İsfahânî wished to lodge him in his palace; Seyyid Burhâneddin would not consent, saying that he must enter seclusion "so as to scatter the pearls of the knowledge of the divine", and put him into seclusion three times in succession over a total of 1001 days , after which he gave him the licence to guide. While staying as a guest in the house of his disciple Selâhaddîn-i Zerkûb at Konya he said, "I have bestowed my state upon you and my speech upon Mevlânâ", indicating that two legacies passed from him. Eflâkî records that Seyyid Burhâneddin taught in the medrese adjoining the Huand Hatun Mosque at Kayseri, that he led the prayers at the Hakırdaklı Mosque in the Mükremin quarter, and that because he stood for long periods in prayer on account of his absorption he asked the congregation's pardon, gave up the office and withdrew into the seclusion cell beside the mosque. The Kayseri Mevlevi lodge was built on the site of that cell. His date of death cannot be established exactly; but taking into account that he came to Konya a year after the death of Bahâeddin Veled and served as Mevlânâ's master for nine years, it may be said that he died at the end of 638 (1241) or the beginning of 639 (1241). The present tomb was built in 1892 by the governor of Kayseri Mehmed Nâzım Pasha with the aid of Âbidin Pasha, governor of Ankara, and its Persian inscription was written in the hand of Ali Emîrî Efendi. His Poetry and Sufi Line — Taking into account the accounts of the sources and his words in the Ma'ârif , he appears as a figure who set great store by ascetic discipline and fasting in particular, who constantly experienced states of rapture, madness and absorption, who held Sufism to be the true knowledge and the summit of all the sciences, who uttered sayings of the ecstatic kind, who often quoted couplets of Sanâ'î in his gatherings, who possessed a knowledge of medicine, and who was witty with a strong strain of self-blame. His work the Ma'ârif — formed from the record of his mystical gatherings, in which the topics of the spiritual path and the knowledge of God are set out in concise sayings, written mostly in Persian and partly in Arabic — contains poems from Sanâ'î, Farîd al-Dîn Attâr and Nizâmî of Ganja, and the views of famous Sufis from Hasan al-Basrî to Bahâeddin Veled. The oldest manuscript of the work is dated 5 Muharram 687 (10 February 1288). Note: The section "His Counsels and Teachings" has been left empty in this round. His own work the Ma'ârif exists and has been published; but it was not read for this round. The source's description of the work has been written into the biography, and no counsel has been transmitted from an unread work.
