Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi was born on September 1207 in Vakhsh, now in Tajikistan. His family was Persian, from Balkh in today’s Afghanistan, and his father was an intellectual with a strong leaning towards mystical Islam.
Rumi’s family left their home around 1216, perhaps in fear of the advancing Mongols. They travelled around the Middle East, including Damascus, Baghdad, and Mecca, before settling in Anatolia. The region was widely known as Rum (Rome), hence his name: Rumi.
Aged 17, Rumi married Gowhar Khatun, and they eventually had two sons. (After her death, Rumi remarried, and had a further son and daughter.) By 1228, the family had made its home in Konya, but when his father died, Rumi travelled to Damascus and Aleppo for several years to deepen his classical religious studies.
On returning to Konya, he took up teaching at the institution where his father had taught, all the while becoming increasingly fascinated with mystical Islam, and undergoing the arduous ascetic training of a Sufi.
A short while later, when Rumi was 37, his life changed forever. While walking across the market place in Konya, he fell into conversation with Shams ad-Din Tabrizi, a charismatic dervish. Their discussion electrified Rumi, and he embarked on a series of ever-deeper mystical explorations and reflections.
During this period, Rumi and Shams became inseparable, with Rumi seeking to learn everything he could from his new-found master. Modern efforts to claim the men were lovers remain speculative, but the relationship was intense and all-consuming.
However, to Rumi’s anguish, Shams disappeared forever in December 1248. Hagiographical tradition says that Rumi’s neglected disciples and sons killed him out of jealousy, although the real reason for his disappearance remains a mystery.
Rumi felt shattered at the loss of Shams, but found an outlet for his pain in poetry, which he wrote in Persian, with smatterings of Arabic, Turkish, and Greek. He composed around 3,000 verses of ghazals (Persian love-and-loss poems) and 2,000 ruba’iyat, or quatrains, frequently using the pen name Shams.
In these writings, his love of God, Muhammad, and Shams intertwined in an intense outpouring of ecstasy and agony. He and his disciples had already taken up regular dancing to flutes and drums, and these sessions also became occasions for the recital or singing of his poetry. Rumi’s son noted that eventually, filled with mystical poetry, Rumi finally found Shams in himself, radiant like the moon.
Some while after Shams’s death, Rumi became friendly with an illiterate goldsmith named Salah ad-Din Zarkub, who Rumi saw as an incarnation of Shams, and the relationship helped inspire a further torrent of poetry. After Zarkub’s death, Rumi found a new spiritual companion in Hussam ad-Din Chelebi.
Encouraged by his new friend, Rumi set about composing the Masnavi-yi Ma’navi, or Spiritual Couplets. The result was a multi-layered work of mystical Sufism, comprising 26,000 couplets blending the radiance of divine and earthly love with an encyclopaedic collection of theosophical thoughts and experiences. The impact of the book down the ages has been so enormous that Sufis sometimes call it the Persian Qur’an.
In addition to poetry, Rumi also wrote talks, sermons, and letters. Towards the end of his life he was a pillar of the establishment in Konya, and revered by the city’s non-Sufi Muslims, Christians, and Jews, as well as by his own immediate followers.
Rumi died on December 17, 1273 in Konya. His disciples bound themselves together into the Mawlaw’iyyah order – better known today as the Whirling Dervishes – which venerates Rumi as its founder.
Rumi’s poetry remains a gem of medieval literature, and is widely treasured in Iran, Turkey, and India. In the twentieth century, his poetry has also become popular in the West, and he is widely quoted on social media as a type of New Age guru.
He ranks consistently among the best-selling poets in the United States, and was the overall bestselling poet of the 1990s according to the LA Times. His tomb in the family mausoleum in Konya remains a highly popular pilgrimage site, and is the venue for an annual Sufi festival every December, 17.