Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī was born in 1207 in the region of Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan, the son of the preacher and scholar Bahāʾ al-Dīn Walad. Around the time of the Mongol invasions the family left, travelled through the Middle East, and settled in Konya, in Anatolia, then called Rūm, which gave him his name. On his father’s death he succeeded him as a teacher of religious law.

In 1244 he met the wandering dervish Shams al-Dīn of Tabriz, and the meeting transformed him. The two were inseparable; Rūmī’s students resented Shams, who left, returned and finally disappeared, perhaps murdered, around 1247. Rūmī’s grief and longing poured out in thousands of lyric poems, gathered in the Dīvān-i Shams-i Tabrīzī, many of them signed with Shams’s name.

In his later years, at the request of his disciple Ḥusām al-Dīn Chalabī, he composed the Masnavī, a long poem in six books of stories and teaching. He died in Konya in December 1273. His son Sulṭān Walad organized his followers into the Mevlevi order, known in the West for the turning ceremony of its dervishes.