Refugee From the Mongols
Jalal al-Din Muhammad was born in 1207 in the Persian-speaking world of Khorasan, traditionally at Balkh in present-day Afghanistan, though modern scholars argue for the nearby town of Vakhsh in Tajikistan. His father, Baha al-Din Walad, was a preacher and mystic who moved the family west, probably ahead of the Mongol armies that would soon obliterate the cities they had left. After years of travel through Baghdad, Mecca, and Damascus, they settled in Konya in Anatolia, the old Roman lands that gave him the name Rumi.
He inherited his father's teaching position in 1231 and became an established religious authority: a jurist of the Hanafi school, a preacher with hundreds of students, and a scholar deeply trained in the Quran and hadith. Nothing in the first thirty-seven years of his life suggested a poet. He was, by every account including his own, a respectable man of the mosque and the madrasa in a prosperous Seljuk city crowded with refugees from the east.
Shams of Tabriz
In 1244 a wandering dervish named Shams al-Din of Tabriz arrived in Konya and asked him a question that, in the stories, knocked him from his horse or his senses. The two withdrew into months of intense private conversation, abandoning students and family. Rumi began to listen to music, to turn in the spinning movement that became the ritual of the whirling dervishes, and to compose poetry in enormous quantity. His disciples and one of his sons resented the intruder bitterly.
Shams left, was persuaded back, and in 1247 or 1248 vanished for good. The most credible accounts hold that he was murdered, possibly with the knowledge of Rumi's own circle, and that Rumi searched for him in Damascus before concluding that what he sought was inside himself. He named the vast collection of lyrics that followed the Divan of Shams of Tabriz, attributing his own work to his lost friend, which is either an act of love or of grief and probably both.
The Masnavi and Its Modern Mistranslation
In his last years he dictated the Masnavi to his disciple Husam al-Din Chelebi, roughly twenty-five thousand rhyming couplets of stories, jokes, arguments, and Quranic commentary, sometimes called the Persian Quran by later admirers. It opens with a reed torn from the reed bed, crying for the marsh it came from, an image of the soul separated from God that the whole poem elaborates. He died in December 1273, and Christians, Jews, and Muslims are all reported to have joined the funeral procession.
His son Sultan Walad organized the followers into the Mevlevi order, whose ceremony of turning to music survives as a living tradition and, since 1925, a complicated relationship with the Turkish state. Rumi is now among the most widely read poets in English, largely through versions by writers who work from earlier translations rather than Persian, and who often remove the Quranic references that saturate the originals. The result is beautiful and popular, and it is not quite the man who wrote it.
