Rumi

Rumi a thirteenth-century Persian poet, jurist and Sufi mystic (1207-1273) whose vast body of verse, especially the Masnavi, has made him one of the most widely read poets in the world. Writing in Persian, he transformed the encounter with the divine into poetry of ecstatic longing and became the spiritual founder of the Mevlevi order.

Life and Background

Jalal al-Din Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan, then part of the Khwarazmian empire, into a family of scholars and preachers. His father was a respected theologian and mystic, and the family left their home before the Mongol advance, travelling through Persia, Arabia and Anatolia in search of safety and patronage. They finally settled in Konya, in present-day Turkey, a flourishing Anatolian city under the Seljuk sultanate, where his father was welcomed and appointed to a teaching position.

Rumi received a thorough education in the religious sciences, law and Arabic and Persian letters, and he succeeded his father as a religious teacher and jurist, respected for his learning and his sober conduct. He married and raised a family, and by middle age he was an established scholar preaching in the mosques and teaching a circle of students. Nothing in this conventional career foreshadowed the poetic torrent that would later pour from him, until a single encounter altered its course entirely.

Shams of Tabriz and the Birth of Poetry

About 1244 Rumi met a wandering dervish named Shams al-Din of Tabriz, whose intense spiritual presence transformed him. The two men became inseparable, absorbed in mystical conversation and companionship, and Rumi withdrew from his teaching and public duties, neglecting his students and family to be near his friend. The scandal and jealousy their intimacy provoked drove Shams to leave Konya, perhaps more than once, and on one occasion he disappeared for good, probably murdered by hostile associates.

Rumi was devastated, and the grief of separation opened in him the poetic voice that had been dormant for decades. He searched for Shams and, failing to find him, discovered his beloved within himself, a spiritual union the poems celebrate. Out of this experience came the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, a collection of some thirty-five thousand lines of lyric verse, mostly ghazals, many of which ecstatically invoke Shams by name and mark a complete break with his earlier scholarly austerity.

The Masnavi and the Teaching Poems

Rumi's masterpiece is the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, a vast didactic poem in six books of rhyming couplets, comprising around twenty-five thousand couplets. According to tradition he began dictating it in later life at the request of his disciple Husam al-Din, and it was composed in an unbroken flow of inspiration over many years. The Masnavi weaves together stories from the Quran, from folktales, from everyday life and from earlier mystical writing, and each narrative opens into commentary on the soul's journey toward God.

Its fables, including tales of a parrot, a merchant, a lion and a mouse, are at once entertainment and allegory, and its recurring themes are separation, yearning, purification and union. He also left the Fihi ma Fihi, a collection of discourses, and numerous quatrains and occasional pieces. Together these works present a complete mystical theology expressed in pictures and parables rather than in system, and they have been studied and recited in Persian-speaking lands for centuries as a treasury of devotion and wisdom.

Mysticism, Music and the Mevlevi Order

Rumi's spirituality centres on love as the force that draws the separated soul back to its origin. He taught that the human being is a stranger exiled from the divine beloved, and that longing, suffering and self-annihilation are the stages of return. Ritual prayer, poetry and music were for him vehicles of remembrance, means of dissolving the self into the presence of God. His followers gathered around him and, after his death, formed the Mevlevi order, known in the West as the whirling dervishes.

Their distinctive practice of rotating in prayer, accompanied by reed flute and drum, is traditionally traced to Rumi himself and to the idea that the turning of the body echoes the turning of the spheres around the divine centre. His funeral in Konya in 1273 was attended, according to tradition, by Muslims, Christians and Jews alike, and his tomb became a place of pilgrimage. The Mevlevi order spread through the Ottoman lands and beyond, influencing music, poetry and architecture, and his verses are still sung in devotional settings throughout the region.

Influence and Legacy

Within Islamic culture Rumi ranks among the greatest of poets, and the Masnavi has been called the Quran in the Persian tongue, an emblem of its spiritual authority. Theologically and poetically he stands beside Attar, Saadi and Hafez, and his influence pervades Persian, Turkish and Urdu literature and the devotional life of Sufi communities. Scholars in Iran and Turkey have produced critical editions and commentaries that recover the full range of his mystical and legal thought.

In the modern West his reputation has grown extraordinarily since the twentieth century, largely through free verse translations by poets such as Coleman Barks, which have reached a broad popular audience, and he is now among the best-selling poets in English. Specialists caution that these versions often soften the religious frame of his work and present him chiefly as a teacher of love. Whether read as devotional scripture, literary masterpiece or universal wisdom, his poetry of longing continues to cross the boundaries of language and faith.

See also

• The Masnavi
• Sufism
• Mevlevi Order
• Shams of Tabriz