Rumi
1207 – 1273 · Persia
Known for: Mystic poet whose verses crossed every border
“Do not look for my grave in the earth. Look for it in the hearts of people.”
Biography
Rumi belonged by birth to a family of Persian scholars in Wakhsh, a village in what is now Tajikistan, within the cultural orbit of Balkh, where he came into the world on 30 September 1207. His father, Bahā ud-Dīn Walad, was a preacher and jurist of the Hanafi school whom later generations called the Sultan of the Scholars, and his mother was Mu'mina Khātūn. The family had produced preachers for generations, and the son was expected to continue the line. When the Mongol armies moved into Central Asia the household set out westwards, travelling for years through Iranian cities, Baghdad and Damascus before settling at Konya in Anatolia, where Rumi arrived at about nineteen. The region had until recently belonged to the eastern Roman world, and it is from that older name for the land, Rum, that he is known.
In Konya he took up his father's work, teaching law and preaching to a large following, and he might have remained a respected scholar and nothing more. The turning point was the arrival of a wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz. The two became inseparable, to the dismay of Rumi's students, and when Shams vanished as suddenly as he had come, the grief that followed opened in him what scholarship had kept closed. Out of it came the collected lyric poems he attributed not to himself but to his lost friend, the Divan of Shams of Tabriz, and then the long work of his later years, the Masnavi, six books of stories, parables and commentary that Persian readers have called a Qur'an in the Persian tongue. He also left prose: the discourses gathered as Fihi Ma Fihi and a set of sermons. What runs through all of it is the conviction that love is not a departure from religious law but its inner meaning.
Rumi died at Konya on 17 December 1273 and was laid to rest beside his father, and the shrine raised over him has drawn pilgrims ever since. His son Sultan Walad and his closest followers gathered his teaching into the Mevlevi order, known beyond the Islamic world for the turning dance of the sama, in which listening and movement become a form of prayer. The Masnavi took its place among the greatest poems in Persian and, in the Turkic and Persian speaking world, among the most read Islamic books after the Quran. His verse has since been translated into most of the world's languages and has found readers who share neither his faith nor his century, so that a preacher who fled the Mongols on foot has become one of the most read poets alive or dead.