Rumi (Jalal al-Din)

About this figure

Jalal al-Din Muhammad, known to later generations as Rumi, was a Persian-speaking poet and Sufi mystic of the thirteenth century. He was born in 1207 in the town of Wakhsh, in the Khwarazmian Empire in what is now Tajikistan, though some traditional accounts instead place his birth in the nearby city of Balkh, and the two towns are sometimes conflated in later biographical sources. As a child he traveled westward with his family, likely fleeing the advancing Mongol armies, on a long journey that eventually brought them to Konya, in the Sultanate of Rum in present-day Turkey, where his father, a preacher and scholar, found a position and where Rumi would spend most of his adult life; the name "Rumi" itself simply means "from Rum," referring to this Anatolian homeland rather than to his Persian origins.

Rumi succeeded his father as a respected teacher and jurist in Konya, but his life changed decisively in 1244 with the arrival of a wandering dervish, Shams-e Tabrizi, whose intense friendship with Rumi became the central relationship of his later life and the subject of much of his poetry. Shams's disappearance, and possible murder, some years later plunged Rumi into grief that he channeled into an enormous outpouring of poetry, including the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, a collection of lyric poems attributed to his lost friend, and the Masnavi (also transliterated Mesnevi), a six-book didactic poem of tens of thousands of couplets that weaves together stories, Quranic commentary, and mystical teaching, and remains one of the most widely read works of Sufi literature.

Rumi's teaching emphasized love and longing for the divine as the central path of spiritual life, and his followers in Konya, organized after his death by his son Sultan Walad, developed into the Mevlevi Sufi order, known in the West for the practice of whirling as a form of meditative prayer. He died in Konya in 1273.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.