Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh — one of the great cities of the Persian-speaking world, in what is now northern Afghanistan — at a moment when that world was approaching its most catastrophic rupture. The Mongol conquests of Genghis Khan and his successors, beginning in earnest in the 1220s, would within a generation reduce the great cities of Central Asia and Persia — Samarkand, Bukhara, Nishapur, Merv, Baghdad — to rubble and mass graves. The 1258 sack of Baghdad, in which the last Abbasid Caliph was executed and the city's libraries thrown into the Tigris, is often described as the definitive end of the Islamic Golden Age. Rumi's family fled Balkh before the Mongols arrived, beginning a westward migration that would eventually bring them to Konya in Anatolia — the city with which Rumi is inseparably associated and from which he takes his poetic name: Rumi, the man from Rum, the Byzantine lands.

The Anatolia in which Rumi settled was itself a remarkably pluralistic society. The Seljuk Sultanate of Rum governed a territory whose population included Muslims, Greek Christians, Armenians, Jews, and the remnants of many older communities — a cosmopolitan, multilingual world in which Persian was the language of high culture, Arabic the language of religion and scholarship, and Rumi himself preached, taught, and conversed in Greek and Turkish as easily as in Persian. His circle of disciples included Christians and Jews as well as Muslims. This pluralism was not incidental to his thought; it was its living embodiment.

The Sufi tradition that Rumi inherited and transfigured had been developing within Islam for over three centuries. Beginning as a movement of individual ascetics and mystics reacting against the worldliness of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, Sufism had by Rumi's time produced a rich literary tradition — the ecstatic poetry of Hallaj, who was executed in 922 for proclaiming "Ana'l-Haqq" ("I am the Truth / I am God"); the theological systematisation of Al-Ghazali; the visionary philosophy of Ibn Arabi, a contemporary of Rumi's father; and above all the Persian mystical poetry of Sanai and Attar — the tradition Rumi would inherit, dwarf, and pass on transformed beyond recognition.

Rumi's early life was that of an exceptionally gifted religious scholar following in his father's distinguished footsteps. Baha ud-Din Walad was a renowned Sufi theologian — the Sultan of the Scholars, his followers called him — and Rumi received the finest Islamic education available, studying theology, jurisprudence, and the mystical sciences in Samarkand, Damascus, and Aleppo during the years of his family's long migration west. The great Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, encountering the young Rumi and his father on the road near Nishapur, is said to have told Baha ud-Din: "Soon this son of yours will set fire to all the world's lovers." By the time the family settled in Konya around 1228, Rumi was already a respected jurisprudent and theologian with thousands of students. He was comfortable, honoured, and, by all the standards of his world, a success.

Then, in November 1244, a wandering dervish arrived in Konya. Shams-i-Tabrizi — the Sun of Tabriz — was a fierce, unconventional, sometimes frightening mystic who had been travelling the Muslim world for decades searching for a spiritual companion who could bear the intensity of his presence. The story of their first meeting varies in the telling, but its effect was seismic. Rumi, then thirty-seven and at the height of his scholarly career, abandoned his students, his teaching, his public life, and spent months in seclusion with Shams in what contemporaries described as a state of complete spiritual intoxication. The respectable jurist disappeared; in his place emerged a poet of overwhelming force.

The relationship between Rumi and Shams — which some scholars read as purely spiritual, others as containing an element of human erotic love transfigured into divine longing — lasted only a few years. Shams vanished twice: once when Rumi's disciples, resentful of their master's absorption, drove him away; and finally, around 1248, permanently — possibly murdered, possibly simply departed. Rumi spent the rest of his life writing poetry in the name of Shams, using the dervish's name as his own pen name in the Divan. The loss became the engine of creation: over the remaining twenty-five years of his life, Rumi composed approximately 35,000 verses of lyric poetry, 26,000 verses of the encyclopaedic Masnavi, and a further 2,000 quatrains. He also founded, with his son Sultan Walad, the Mevlevi Order — the Whirling Dervishes — whose ceremony of sema (spiritual listening and turning) embodied his theology in movement, music, and silence.

Rumi's theology is, at its core, a theology of love — not love as sentiment or emotion, but love as the fundamental metaphysical force that drives all existence. Creation, for Rumi, is God's self-disclosure: the universe exists because the Divine — hidden, self-sufficient, beyond all categories — desired to be known. Everything that exists is a lover seeking to return to its source. The human soul, separated from God at creation like the reed cut from the reed bed, spends its earthly life in an aching longing whose true object it often mistakes for earthly pleasures, human loves, or intellectual achievements. The Sufi path is the process of recognising that longing for what it truly is — and following it home.

The central image of Rumi's poetry — recurring across the Masnavi and the Divan like a great musical theme — is the reed flute (ney). Cut from the reed bed, the ney cries with a grief that is also music: its very wound is what makes it sing. The soul, separated from God, is this reed; its longing is not pathology but the truest expression of its nature, and the only honest response to the human condition. "The fire of love," Rumi writes, "is what I want. I want to burn." This is not masochism; it is the Sufi recognition that the self must be consumed before it can become transparent to the Divine light within it.

What distinguishes Rumi from every other Sufi poet — and what explains his universal reach across religious and cultural boundaries — is his absolute insistence that love transcends all religious categories. The famous lines from the Masnavi — "I am not of the East or West, not of the land or sea. I am not of nature's mine, nor of the circling stars. My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless" — are not relativism but mystical universalism: the soul in its deepest nature belongs to God alone, not to any tradition, institution, or cultural identity. When his disciples asked how he could welcome Christians and Jews and fire-worshippers into his circle, he replied that the Kaaba of love has no direction — every heart that longs for the Real is already pointing home.

The institutional expression of Rumi's vision was the Mevlevi Order — founded by his son Sultan Walad after Rumi's death, based in Konya, and centred on the ceremony of sema: a carefully choreographed ritual of music, prayer, and the characteristic spinning movement of the whirling dervishes that has given the order its popular name. The sema is not performance but prayer: the outstretched right hand receives divine grace from above while the left hand directs it downward to the earth; the turning itself embodies the soul's orbit around the Divine Beloved, simultaneously dying to the ego and rising to God. Rumi described it as the movement of the planets and the atoms: all things turn, and in their turning praise their Maker.

For six centuries the Mevlevi Order was one of the most influential institutions in the Ottoman Empire — the sultans were initiated into it, and the ceremony of girding a new sultan with the sword of Osman was performed by the Mevlevi sheikh at Konya. When Atatürk suppressed all Sufi orders in 1925 as part of his secularisation of Turkey, the Mevlevis were formally disbanded — but they never disappeared. In 1953 the Turkish government permitted the sema to be performed as a "cultural event," and today the ceremony has been inscribed by UNESCO on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The Mevlevi Order continues to operate outside Turkey, with branches in Syria, Egypt, and across the diaspora.

In Persian literature, Rumi's influence is simply total. The great poets who came after him — Hafez, Jami, the entire tradition of classical Persian ghazal poetry — wrote in his shadow. In the Urdu literary tradition of the Indian subcontinent, which is saturated with Persian Sufi influence, Rumi's imagery pervades the work of Iqbal, Mir, Ghalib, and every major poet of the tradition. Across the Balkans, Central Asia, South Asia, and the Arab world, his verses are memorised, sung at weddings and funerals, recited at shrines, and used as ethical guides. In Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, he is simply called Mawlana — Our Master — with no further identification required.

The fact that a thirteenth-century Persian Sufi theologian is consistently the best-selling poet in the United States — outselling every living English-language poet, year after year — is one of the most remarkable cultural phenomena of the contemporary world, and one that deserves careful reflection. The translations responsible for this popularity are primarily those of Coleman Barks, an American poet who has worked from scholarly cribs to produce English versions of Rumi that read as contemporary free verse — luminous, accessible, and stripped of their specifically Islamic theological context. These versions have reached millions of readers who would never otherwise encounter Persian mystical poetry, and they have genuinely conveyed something of Rumi's power. They have also, critics argue, domesticated a fiercely Muslim, technically demanding poet into a universalist spiritual self-help voice — "Rumi-lite" — that the historical Rumi would have found baffling.

In the Muslim world, the reception is very different and the discomfort with Western decontextualisation is palpable. Afghanistan and Iran both claim Rumi as their national poet; the two governments have engaged in genuine diplomatic rivalry over his legacy. In Turkey, the annual commemoration of Rumi's death — the Sheb-i Arus (Wedding Night), December 17, marking the night he "met his Beloved" — draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Konya each year, and the Mevlana Museum (the former dervish lodge housing his tomb) is consistently among Turkey's most visited sites.

What the global reach of Rumi's poetry demonstrates — in whatever form it travels — is that his central subject is genuinely universal. The experience of longing; the hunger for something larger than the self; the sense that ordinary life is a kind of exile from a home one has never seen but somehow remembers; the possibility that love itself — love in its fullest, most consuming form — might be the very nature of the universe rather than an accident of biology: these are not exclusively Islamic or Persian concerns. They are the perennial preoccupations of the human soul in every age. Rumi found language for them of such piercing beauty that eight centuries have not blunted its edge. The reed still cries. The field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing is still waiting.