I Walked Beside The Sun: Untold Story of Rumi: A Novel

Three hours before Jalal al-Din Muhammad entered the world, another boy was born in the same eastern town.His name was Yusuf ibn Rahim.For sixty-six years, Yusuf would walk beside the child who became Rumi-first as a playmate, then as a bookbinder, copyist, confidant, and keeper of the words that would outlive them both. History would remember the poet. It would forget the man who stood close enough to witness the cost of becoming immortal.Now Jalal is dying in Konya, and Yusuf has seven nights to write the confession he has buried for decades.At its heart lies the disappearance of Shams of Tabriz, the wandering mystic whose arrival transformed Jalal and shattered everyone who loved him. Yusuf remembers a false message. A meeting beyond the city gate. A choice made from envy, fear, and devotion. And the terrible possibility that he helped send Shams toward his death.As Yusuf's confession carries him from a childhood darkened by Mongol conquest to the crowded courtyards and candlelit rooms of thirteenth-century Konya, he must confront the truth of the life he shared with a man the world now calls a saint. A life marked by loyalty and resentment, tenderness and betrayal, words preserved with care-and truths deliberately lost.Because loving a great man can be its own form of erasure.And before the sun sets on them both, Yusuf must decide whether the final gift he offers his oldest friend will be mercy, absolution, or the truth.I Walked Beside the Sun is an intimate, sweeping historical novel about friendship in the shadow of genius, the wounds left by spiritual transformation, and the devastating price of being remembered only as the man who stood beside the light.