Jalal al-Din Rumi

Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273 CE; traditionally 604-672 AH), known reverentially as Mawlana/Mevlana ("our master"), was a poet and Sufi teacher who wrote chiefly in Persian. He is counted among the towering figures of Sufism, the mystical current within Islam concerned with the inward path to God. He is traditionally said to have been born in or near Balkh (in Greater Khorasan, today northern Afghanistan); several modern scholars, including Franklin Lewis and Annemarie Schimmel, argue the family's actual home was the small town of Vakhsh, in present-day Tajikistan. While Rumi was young, his father, Baha al-Din Walad, a preacher and jurist with mystical leanings, moved the family west, a migration later linked to the advancing Mongols. After years of travel they settled around 1228 in Konya, in the Seljuk sultanate of Rum (from which "Rumi" derives). There Rumi became a respected teacher of religious law. His life was transformed by an intense friendship with the wandering mystic Shams-i Tabrizi (traditionally met 1244); after Shams vanished, Rumi poured his longing into poetry. His major work, the Mathnawi, a vast didactic poem of rhyming couplets, was dictated over years to his disciple Husam al-Din Chalabi. Rumi died in Konya in December 1273. He did not found an order himself; his son Sultan Walad and successors organized his followers into the Mevleviyya, famous for its turning meditative dance. Reverence for Rumi crosses Sunni, Shia, and Sufi lines.