Rumi

Jalal al-Din Muhammad, later known simply as Rumi, was born on September 30, 1207 in or near Balkh, a city of learning in the region of Khorasan, in what is now Afghanistan ^[1]. His father, Baha al-Din Walad, was a preacher, jurist, and mystic who held the respect of local scholars and left behind a collection of visionary writings. The family belonged to a Persian-speaking milieu of religious professionals, and the boy grew up surrounded by Qur'anic study, jurisprudence, and the devotional culture of eastern Islam ^[2].

When Rumi was still a child, Baha al-Din Walad took his household west, away from Khorasan. Scholars have offered several explanations for the departure: friction with local rulers and rival theologians, and, more urgently, the approach of the Mongol armies that would devastate Balkh and much of Central Asia within a few years ^[1]. The family traveled through Iran and into Anatolia, with traditions recording stops at Nishapur and Baghdad and a pilgrimage to Mecca along the way.

After years of movement, the family settled in Anatolia, then ruled by the Seljuk sultans of Rum. The region's name gave the poet the title by which the world knows him: Rumi, the man of Rum, meaning Roman Anatolia ^[3]. By around 1228 the family had reached Konya, the Seljuk capital, where Baha al-Din Walad was appointed to teach. He died in 1231, and his son, in his early twenties, inherited his position as a religious teacher ^[2].

For anyone asking who was Rumi before he became a poet, the answer is a working scholar. He trained in Islamic law, Qur'anic exegesis, and theology, first under his father's former student Burhan al-Din Muhaqqiq of Tirmidh, who arrived in Konya after Baha al-Din's death and guided the young man's spiritual formation for roughly nine years ^[2]. Rumi also spent time studying in the great colleges of Aleppo and Damascus, centers of Sunni learning in the Ayyubid lands ^[1]. By his mid-thirties he was an established jurist and preacher in Konya with students of his own, a respectable career and, on the surface, a conventional one.

Everything changed in late 1244, when a wandering dervish named Shams al-Din of Tabriz arrived in Konya. The encounter between the two men is the hinge of every Rumi biography. Shams was an uncompromising, elusive figure who demanded total spiritual sincerity, and Rumi found in him a companion unlike any teacher he had known. The jurist withdrew from lecturing and legal disputation and gave himself to intense mystical conversation, music, and the ecstatic remembrance of God ^[3].

The friendship alarmed Rumi's students and family, who resented Shams's hold over their master. Shams left Konya abruptly in 1246, was persuaded to return, and then disappeared for good around 1247. Later Mevlevi tradition claimed he was murdered, possibly with the connivance of members of Rumi's circle, though the historical record does not settle the question ^[1]. Grief and longing for the vanished friend broke Rumi open as a poet. He began pouring out Persian lyric verse, much of it signed not with his own name but with that of Shams, as if the beloved spoke through him ^[4].

Rumi's two great works anchor his reputation. The first is the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, a vast collection of lyric poems (ghazals) and quatrains numbering tens of thousands of verses, composed largely in the ecstatic period after Shams's disappearance. Its themes are separation and union, intoxication with the divine, and love as the force that moves the cosmos ^[4]. The poems were often born in sama, the Sufi practice of listening to music and turning in movement, which Rumi embraced as a form of prayer ^[3].

The second is the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, roughly 25,000 rhyming couplets in six books, begun at the urging of his devoted disciple Husam al-Din Chalabi and dictated over the last dozen or so years of Rumi's life ^[2]. The Masnavi teaches through story: fables, parables, Qur'anic episodes, and everyday scenes are spun into meditations on the soul's exile from its source and its journey home. Persian tradition came to honor it with the epithet 'the Qur'an in Persian,' a measure of the reverence it earned across the Islamic world ^[1].

Among the most cited Rumi facts is the sheer reach of this body of work. The Masnavi and the Divan shaped Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu literature for centuries, generating commentaries from the Balkans to Bengal ^[5]. Beyond the poetry, collections of his prose survive as well, including Fihi ma fihi (a record of his talks), sermons, and letters, which show the teacher behind the poet ^[2]. Counting the whole of it, Rumi's achievements amount to one of the largest and most influential poetic outputs of the medieval world.

Rumi married Gowhar Khatun in his youth, during the family's years in Anatolia, and the couple had two sons, Sultan Walad and Ala al-Din ^[2]. After Gowhar's death he married again, to Kerra Khatun, and had further children. Sultan Walad became his father's most important successor: he organized the disciples after Rumi's death, wrote verse chronicles that preserve much of what is known about the family, and gave the emerging Mevlevi community its institutional shape ^[3].

After losing Shams, Rumi sought spiritual companionship in two further figures. The first was Salah al-Din Zarkub, a goldsmith of little formal education whose plain sincerity Rumi prized; their bond was sealed when Sultan Walad married Salah al-Din's daughter ^[2]. After Salah al-Din died in 1258, the role passed to Husam al-Din Chalabi, the disciple whose questions and encouragement drew the Masnavi out of Rumi book by book. Rumi's willingness to elevate a craftsman and a young disciple over established scholars tells its own story about his values ^[1].

Contemporary accounts and early hagiographies, above all Aflaki's Manaqib al-Arifin compiled in the following century, describe a man of austerity and warmth who kept the obligations of Islamic law while insisting that ritual without love was empty ^[6]. He taught women as well as men among his followers and was mourned, according to tradition, by Christians and Jews of Konya alongside Muslims, a detail that later generations have often repeated as emblematic of his breadth ^[3].

The final phase of Rumi's life, from roughly 1260 onward, was outwardly quiet and inwardly productive. Konya remained under Seljuk rule, though real power increasingly lay with Mongol overlords after the battle of Kose Dag in 1243, and Rumi corresponded with viziers and notables of this uneasy order, sometimes interceding on behalf of others ^[1]. His letters show a public figure enmeshed in the practical life of his city even as his poetry reached toward the timeless.

These were the years of the Masnavi. Working with Husam al-Din, who wrote down the couplets as the master spoke them, Rumi completed six books, with a pause after the first following the death of Husam al-Din's wife ^[2]. The sixth book remained technically unfinished at his death, breaking off in the middle of a tale, and later hands resisted the temptation to complete it.

Rumi fell ill in the autumn of 1273 and died in Konya on December 17 of that year ^[1]. His funeral, by all early accounts, drew an enormous and mixed crowd. His followers came to call the anniversary of his death Sheb-i Arus, the wedding night, treating it as the moment of union with God rather than an occasion for mourning; the commemoration is still held in Konya every December ^[5].

Rumi's son Sultan Walad organized the master's followers into the Mevlevi order, a Sufi brotherhood centered on Konya that formalized the sama into the ceremony Westerners later named the dance of the whirling dervishes ^[3]. The order flourished under Ottoman patronage for six centuries, training musicians, calligraphers, and poets, until the Turkish Republic closed the Sufi lodges in 1925. Rumi's mausoleum in Konya, with its fluted turquoise dome, now operates as the Mevlana Museum and draws well over a million visitors a year, and the December Sheb-i Arus ceremonies were recognized by UNESCO as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2008 ^[5].

In the Persian-speaking world Rumi never needed rediscovery: the Masnavi has been taught, memorized, and sung continuously from Istanbul to Delhi since the fourteenth century ^[4]. The English-speaking world came to him later, first through Victorian orientalists and then, decisively, through the complete scholarly edition and translation of the Masnavi by Reynold A. Nicholson, published between 1925 and 1940 ^[4]. In the late twentieth century, free-verse renderings by the American poet Coleman Barks carried Rumi to a mass audience, and by the 1990s and 2000s journalists were regularly reporting that he ranked among the best-selling poets in the United States ^[7].

That popularity has provoked debate. Scholars such as Franklin Lewis and Omid Safi have argued that popular English versions often strip away the Qur'anic and Islamic framework in which every line of Rumi's verse is rooted, presenting a generic sage in place of a medieval Muslim theologian ^[7]. Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan each claim him, and UNESCO marked the 800th anniversary of his birth in 2007 with commemorations on several continents ^[5]. The argument over who owns Rumi is, in its way, the surest proof of his standing: a preacher from thirteenth-century Balkh whose account of love and loss still finds readers wherever poetry is read ^[1].