Rumi

Jalal al-Din Muhammad, known in the West as Rumi and in the Muslim world as Mawlana, "our master", was a 13th-century Islamic scholar and Sufi who wrote some of the most admired poetry in Persian. A refugee from the Mongol invasions, he spent most of his life in Konya in Anatolia, where his followers founded the Mevlevi order, the "whirling dervishes". Today he is one of the most widely read poets in the world, though often in versions far removed from what he wrote.

Rumi was born on 30 September 1207 at Wakhsh, in today's Tajikistan, in the cultural orbit of Balkh, where his father, Baha al-Din Walad, was a preacher and jurist. His name Balkhi refers to that region; Rumi means "from Rum", the name Muslims still gave to formerly Byzantine Anatolia. When the Mongols invaded Central Asia, sometime between 1215 and 1220, the family moved west through Iran to Baghdad, made the pilgrimage to Mecca and passed through Damascus before settling for some years at Karaman. Rumi married at Karaman in 1225, and in 1228 the family settled in Konya at the invitation, it seems, of the Seljuk sultan of Rum.

When his father died, Rumi, aged about twenty-five, succeeded him as head of a religious school. He trained in Islamic law and in Sufism under his father's student Burhan al-Din until about 1240, and then worked as a jurist, issuing legal opinions, preaching in Konya's mosques and teaching. He belonged to a family of Sunni Hanafi preachers, and his surviving sermons and talks show a scholar steeped in the Quran and the hadith.

On 15 November 1244 Rumi met the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, and the encounter transformed him from a respected teacher into an ecstatic mystic. Their intense attachment unsettled Rumi's students and family. On the night of 5 December 1248 Shams went out and was never seen again; whether he was murdered or simply left is unknown. Rumi's grief poured out in thousands of lyric poems, gathered as the Divan of Shams of Tabriz, which contains about 35,000 Persian couplets as well as verses in Arabic and a few in Turkish and Greek.

Later, encouraged by his disciple Husam al-Din Chalabi, Rumi spent about twelve years dictating the Masnavi, a poem in six books of roughly 27,000 lines that weaves stories, everyday scenes, Quranic commentary and mystical teaching. Rumi himself called it the roots of the roots of religion and an explainer of the Quran, and it is sometimes called "the Quran in Persian". He believed music and dance could carry the soul to God, and the Mevlevi ritual of turning grew from his practice.

Rumi died in Konya on 17 December 1273. Christians and Jews joined the Muslims who mourned him, and he was buried beside his father under what became the Green Tomb, now a museum. His son Sultan Walad organised the Mevlevi order, which spread across the Ottoman world until Turkey closed all Sufi lodges in 1925.

Rumi wrote in Persian within an explicitly Muslim framework, and modern scholars warn against separating his ideas of universal love from that context. Many of the best-selling English "Rumi" books are free adaptations by poets who do not read Persian, based on older translations, and they often remove Islamic references; one widely shared couplet about a field "beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing" replaces Rumi's words for faith and unbelief. Some New Age books sold under his name bear little resemblance to his writing, and one such author admits his poems are not Rumi's words. Short aphorisms attributed to Rumi also circulate constantly on social media, so a quotation's source in his works is worth checking against a scholarly translation.

Our 1200 map shows the Seljuk-ruled Anatolia where Rumi made his home, and our 1279 map shows the region soon after his death, under the shadow of the Mongol Ilkhanate.