Rumi

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi, known as Rumi, was born on 30 September 1207 in Balkh in present-day Afghanistan (some scholars place the birth in Vakhsh, Tajikistan), into a family of Islamic scholars. His father Baha al-Din Walad was a noted jurist and mystic, and Rumi was steeped from boyhood in classical Islamic learning and the Sufi tradition. The early 13th century in Central Asia was the era of the advancing Mongol armies. To avoid the turmoil, the family travelled west across Baghdad, Nishapur, Mecca and Damascus, and around 1228 settled in Konya, the Seljuk capital in Anatolia. After his father's death, Rumi inherited his position as a respected jurist and preacher in Konya. The turning point came in 1244, when the 37-year-old Rumi met the wandering Sufi master Shams of Tabriz. The two formed an intense spiritual bond and for months Rumi withdrew from public life into conversation with him. Shams disappeared in 1248 (some accounts say murdered), and Rumi's grief crystallized in roughly 30,000 verses of love and loss in the Divan-i Shams—personal love transmuted into universal mystical experience. For the next 25 years he dictated to his disciple Husam al-Din Chelebi the Masnavi, more than 25,000 verses drawing on the Quran, hadith, biblical stories, folk tales and even animal episodes to map the ego's limits and the soul's return to God. Later Islamic culture has called it "the Quran in Persian." After his death on 17 December 1273 in Konya, his disciples were organized by his son Sultan Walad into the Mevlevi order, whose whirling sema dance became known worldwide. His tomb in Konya remains a major pilgrimage site, with the annual Sheb-i Arus marking the wedding night of union with God. English translations made him an unexpected bestselling poet in the late 20th century. He is read widely today across religious lines, though scholars note the cost of cutting his work off from its Islamic context.