Rumi

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, known in English simply as Rumi and in Iran as Mawlana ("our master"), was a Persian poet, Sufi mystic, jurist and theologian born in Balkh in 1207. He is one of the most influential figures in Persian literature and Islamic mysticism, and his work is read across the world today.

He came from a family of religious scholars. His father, Baha ud-Din Walad, was a respected theologian. Around 1219-1220, when Rumi was still a boy, the family fled the advancing Mongol armies of Genghis Khan. After years of travel through Persia, Iraq and Syria, which took them to Baghdad, Damascus and Mecca, they settled in Konya, in the Sultanate of Rum in what is now Turkey, around 1228-1229. Rumi inherited his father's teaching post and for nine years practised Sufism under the guidance of Burhan ud-Din, one of his father's former students. He then worked as a jurist, issued legal opinions, preached in Konya's mosques and taught at the madrasa.

Everything changed in 1244, when he met the wandering dervish Shams-e Tabrizi. According to tradition, Shams had travelled the Middle East looking for someone who could bear his company. Rumi gave up his legal career and took up an ascetic life. Their bond became the core of his spiritual development, and he came to see it as a path towards fana, the dissolving of the self into the divine. In 1248 Shams vanished without explanation. Several theories circulate: that Rumi's younger son killed him, that he was executed for blasphemy, or that he simply chose to leave. Rumi's grief poured into a vast body of lyric poetry, gathered in the Divan of Shams of Tabriz, with over forty thousand verses of intense feeling.

His other major work, the Masnavi, is a long didactic poem of some 26,000 couplets mixing anecdotes, parables and Sufi teachings. Many readers call it the "Qur'an in Persian" for its depth. Written in Persian, his verse uses accessible language rich in images of love, wine, dance and nature.

At the heart of his thought lies divine love (ishq) as the main way to God. Rumi championed tolerance, the overcoming of the ego (nafs) and direct mystical experience over rigid dogma, and he held that all religions point toward one essential truth. After his death in Konya in 1273, his son Sultan Walad and his disciples founded the Mevlevi Order, known as the Whirling Dervishes, whose sama ceremony, a spinning dance, symbolises the planets turning around the sun and the quest for union with God. His tomb in Konya remains an important place of pilgrimage.

His influence reaches mystical literature, contemporary spirituality and interfaith dialogue. His poems have been translated into many languages, and in the United States he has become one of the best-selling poets of recent years.