Rumi
Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi was born on the 30th of September 1207, and the name the world knows him by is not really a name at all. Rumi means "the Roman." His family came from Balkh, far to the east, yet he carried the label of a place he reached only as a refugee. The Anatolian peninsula where he settled had once belonged to the Eastern Roman Empire. Arabs, Persians, and Turks still called that geographical area Rum. So a Persian-speaking mystic from Central Asia became, forever, the man from Rum. Why did a child of preachers and jurists end up wandering across Iran, Baghdad, and Damascus before he turned nineteen? What happened in the city of Konya that turned an accomplished scholar into an ascetic? And how did a poet who never wrote in English become, centuries later, the best selling poet in the United States? The answers run through a vanished friendship, a six-volume poem, and a dance that survived a government's attempt to ban it. Rumi died on the 17th of December 1273, but the questions he raised about love and the divine outlived him by seven hundred years.
Wakhsh, a village on the East bank of the Wakhsh River, sits in present-day Tajikistan, and this is where Rumi was born to Persian parents. His father, Baha ud-Din Walad, worked there as a preacher and jurist until 1212, when Rumi was around five and the family moved to Samarkand. The family trade ran for generations: Islamic preachers of the relatively liberal Hanafi Maturidi school. Greater Balkh, culturally adjacent to Wakhsh, was then a major centre of Persian culture where Sufism had developed for several centuries.
The Mongols changed everything. When they invaded Central Asia sometime between 1215 and 1220, Baha ud-Din Walad set out westwards with his whole family and a group of disciples. The migrating caravan was long and the road longer. From Nishapur they went to Baghdad, met scholars and Sufis, then traveled to Hejaz and performed the pilgrimage at Mecca. The caravan passed through Damascus, Malatya, Erzincan, Sivas, Kayseri, and Nigde.
Karaman held them for seven years, and the place took a heavy toll. Rumi's mother and brother both died there. In 1225, Rumi married Gowhar Khatun in Karaman, and they had two sons, Sultan Walad and Ala-eddin Chalabi. When his wife died, Rumi married again and had a son, Amir Alim Chalabi, and a daughter, Malakeh Khatun. On the 1st of May 1228, most likely at the insistent invitation of Ala ud-Din Key-Qobad, ruler of Anatolia, the family finally settled in Konya, within the westernmost territories of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum.
On the 15th of November 1244, a wandering dervish named Shams-e Tabrizi arrived in Konya, and the meeting completely changed Rumi's life. By then Rumi had inherited his father's position at twenty-five, become an Islamic Jurist issuing fatwas, and given sermons in the city's mosques. He had trained for nine years under Sayyed Burhan ud-Din Muhaqqiq Termazi, until that teacher died in 1240 or 1241. He was, in short, settled. Shams undid all of it.
Shams had traveled throughout the Middle East searching for someone who could "endure my company." A voice answered his prayers. It asked what he would give in return, and Shams replied, "My head!" The voice told him, "The one you seek is Jalal ud-Din of Konya." The two men became infatuated with each other, and Rumi began to neglect his duties as teacher and jurist.
On the night of the 5th of December 1248, Shams was called to the back door while the two men were talking. He went out and was never seen again. Theories crowd around the disappearance. The most popular hold that Rumi's youngest son killed him, that he was killed for blasphemy, or that Shams, a known wanderer, simply chose to move on. For more than a month Rumi refused to believe the rumours of death. After forty days he accepted it and began dressing in black. He journeyed to Damascus searching, and there he realized, "Why should I seek? I am the same as He. His essence speaks through me. I have been looking for myself!"
"Listen to the reed and the tale it tells, how it sings of separation." These were the opening lines of the Masnavi, and Rumi produced them at a particular moment, in the Meram vineyards outside Konya. His scribe and favourite student, Hussam-e Chalabi, had been wandering with him and described an idea. If Rumi wrote a book like the Ilahinama of Sanai or the Mantiq ut-Tayr of Attar, troubadours would fill their hearts from the work and compose music for it. Rumi smiled and took out a piece of paper bearing the opening eighteen lines.
The Masnavi grew into a vast thing over the next twelve years, which Rumi spent in Anatolia dictating six volumes to Hussam. It contains approximately 27,000 lines, each a couplet with an internal rhyme. Commentators have called it the greatest mystical poem in world literature, and many Muslims rank it second only to the Quran. The metre Rumi used became the mathnawi metre par excellence. Its first recorded use for such a poem took place at the Nizari Ismaili fortress of Girdkuh, between 1131 and 1139.
The other great body of work carries the name of the lost friend. The Diwan-e Kabir, also called the Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, holds roughly 35,000 Persian couplets and 2,000 Persian quatrains. It also contains 90 Ghazals and 19 quatrains in Arabic, a couple dozen couplets in Turkish, and 14 couplets in Greek. Rumi's prose survives too, in the seventy-one talks of Fihi Ma Fihi, the seven sermons of the Majales-e Sab'a, and the letters of the Makatib, which he wrote to disciples, family members, and men of state. The letters testify that Rumi kept very busy administering a community of disciples that had grown up around him.
"Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries." That line captures what Rumi placed at the centre of his teaching: a love which infuses the world. He framed tawhid, the oneness of God, as something lived most fully through love. Love, in his verse, is "that flame which, when it blazes up, burns away everything except the Everlasting Beloved." Shams-e Tabrizi had cited a single Quranic verse as the essence of prophetic guidance, commanding humanity to know there is no god but He, and to ask forgiveness for sin.
Music carried that love into the body. Rumi believed passionately in music, poetry, and dance as a path for reaching God. Music helped devotees focus their whole being on the divine, so intensely that the soul was both destroyed and resurrected. From these ideas the whirling of the Dervishes developed into a ritual form. In the Mevlevi tradition, the sama represents a mystical journey of spiritual ascent through mind and love to the Perfect One. The seeker turns towards the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego, and then returns with greater maturity to serve the whole of creation without discrimination among beliefs, races, classes, and nations.
Rumi's spiritual vision reached beyond narrow sectarian concerns, yet it stayed rooted in Islam. He praised the Quran as a tool to distinguish truth from falsehood, and held Muhammad as the most perfect example of all previous prophets. Traces of religious pluralism run through his work all the same. He wrote that "the lamps are different, but the Light is the same; it comes from beyond." He also declared, "I am the servant of the Qur'an as long as I have life. I am the dust on the path of Muhammad, the Chosen one." His favourite musical instrument was the ney, the reed flute whose voice opens the Masnavi.
In December 1273, Rumi fell ill and predicted his own death, composing a ghazal that asks, "How doest thou know what sort of king I have within me as companion?" He died on the 17th of December 1273 in Konya. The mourning crossed every line of faith. Local Christians and Jews joined the crowd that converged to bid farewell as his body was carried through the city. His epitaph reads, "When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men."
A Georgian princess and Seljuq queen sponsored the building that would hold him. Tamar Gurju Khatun, a close friend of Rumi, paid for the construction of his tomb. Rumi was interred beside his father, and a splendid shrine rose over the grave, the "Green Tomb," known in Turkish as Yesil Turbe and today as the Mevlana Museum. The 13th-century Mevlana Mausoleum, with its mosque, dance hall, schools, and living quarters for dervishes, remains a destination of pilgrimage. It is probably the most popular pilgrimage site regularly visited by adherents of every major religion.
The order Rumi inspired outlived him by centuries. His followers founded the Mevlevi Order in 1273, and his son Sultan Walad organized it. Leadership stayed within Rumi's family in Konya without interruption. The Mawlawiyah became a well-established Sufi order in the Ottoman Empire, with members serving in official positions of the Caliphate. During Ottoman times the order produced notable poets and musicians, including Sheikh Ghalib and Esrar Dede, all buried at the Galata Mevlevi Khana in Istanbul.
On the 13th of December 1925, a law closed all the tekkes and zawiyas across Turkey. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had removed religion from public policy and restricted it to personal morals, behaviour, and faith. Istanbul alone had held more than 250 tekkes. The law dissolved the Sufi Orders, prohibited their mystical names, titles, and costumes, impounded their assets, and banned their ceremonies, with penalties for anyone who tried to re-establish them.
The revival came slowly and on the state's terms. In 1927, the Mausoleum of Mevlana in Konya was allowed to reopen, but only as a Museum. In the 1950s, the Turkish government began allowing the Whirling Dervishes to perform once a year in Konya. The Mevlana festival runs over two weeks in December, culminating on the 17th, the Urs of Mevlana, the anniversary of Rumi's death, called Sab-e Arus, the "nuptial night" of his union with God. In 1974, the Whirling Dervishes were permitted to travel to the West for the first time. In 2005, UNESCO proclaimed the Mevlevi Sama Ceremony of Turkey one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
The celebrations grew larger than anyone in 1925 could have predicted. At the proposal of the Permanent Delegations of Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, UNESCO joined the 2007 commemoration of the eight hundredth anniversary of Rumi's birth, declaring it International Rumi Year. On the 30th of September 2007, Turkey staged a giant Whirling Dervish ritual, televised using forty-eight cameras and broadcast live in eight countries. Three hundred dervishes were scheduled to take part, the largest performance of sema in history.
More than half a million copies. That is how many the English interpretations of Rumi's poetry by Coleman Barks have sold worldwide, helping make a 13th-century Persian mystic one of the most widely read poets in the United States. Rumi has been described as the "world's most popular poet," and his work has been translated into Russian, German, Urdu, Turkish, Arabic, Bengali, French, Italian, Spanish, Telugu, and Kannada. The translations arrive in concerts, workshops, readings, and dance performances.
The ties to Iran run especially deep. Rumi's poetry is displayed on the walls of many cities across Iran, sung in Persian music, and read in school books. His verse forms the basis of much classical Iranian and Afghan music, interpreted by performers such as Muhammad Reza Shajarian, Shahram Nazeri, and Davood Azad. In 2007, Shahram Nazeri was awarded the Legion d'honneur for his work on Rumi masterpieces. The reach extends to India, where a famous landmark in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, is the Rumi Gate, named for him.
Scholarship keeps pace with the popular tide. The Mawlana Rumi Review, an academic journal devoted to his poetry, life, thought, and legacy, has been published annually since 2010 by the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Exeter. It works in collaboration with the Rumi Institute in Nicosia, Cyprus, and Archetype Books in Cambridge. Rumi's influence reached Iranians, Afghans, Tajiks, Turks, Kurds, Greeks, and Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, and shaped the literary traditions of Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu, and Bengali. Seven centuries on, the reed still sings of separation to a wider audience than Hussam-e Chalabi could ever have imagined in the Meram vineyards.
Up Next
Common questions
Who was Rumi and what was he known for?
Rumi, whose full name was Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, was a Sufi mystic and poet who lived from the 30th of September 1207 to the 17th of December 1273. He founded the Islamic brotherhood known as the Mevlevi Order and wrote the Masnavi, often called "the Quran in Persian."
Why is the poet Jalal al-Din Muhammad called Rumi?
Rumi means "the Roman," a nisba referring to Rum, the geographical area of Anatolia once held by the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire. He settled in Konya within the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, so he became known as the man from Rum despite his family hailing from Balkh.
Who was Shams-e Tabrizi and how did he change Rumi's life?
Shams-e Tabrizi was a wandering dervish who arrived in Konya on the 15th of November 1244 and completely changed Rumi's life, transforming him from a teacher and jurist into an ascetic. Shams disappeared on the night of the 5th of December 1248, and Rumi's grief produced the lyric poems of the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi.
What is Rumi's Masnavi?
The Masnavi is Rumi's best-known work, a six-volume poem of approximately 27,000 lines that he dictated to his student Hussam-e Chalabi over twelve years in Anatolia. It has been commonly called "the Quran in Persian" and regarded by many commentators as the greatest mystical poem in world literature.
Where is Rumi buried and is his tomb a pilgrimage site?
Rumi is buried in Konya beside his father, beneath a shrine called the "Green Tomb," known in Turkish as Yesil Turbe and today as the Mevlana Museum. The Georgian princess and Seljuq queen Tamar Gurju Khatun sponsored its construction, and it remains probably the most popular pilgrimage site regularly visited by adherents of every major religion.
Why is Rumi so popular in the United States today?
Rumi has become the best selling poet in the United States in recent years, with the English interpretations by Coleman Barks selling more than half a million copies worldwide. His work has been translated into many languages and presented through concerts, workshops, readings, and dance performances.
What is the Mevlevi Order and the whirling dervish dance?
The Mevlevi Order is the Sufi brotherhood founded in 1273 by Rumi's followers after his death and organized by his son Sultan Walad. Its members, known as Whirling Dervishes, perform the Sama, a sacred dance and mystical journey of spiritual ascent, which UNESCO proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005.