Rumi

In one line

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi was a 13th-century Persian-speaking Muslim jurist, preacher and Sufi master in Konya, Anatolia. After a life-changing friendship with the mystic Shams of Tabriz he poured out tens of thousands of verses, above all the Masnavi, a vast teaching poem on the soul's longing to return to God, and the ecstatic lyrics of the Divan-e Shams.

The life

The main early sources are Rumi's own works; a verse account by his son, Sultan Walad (the Ebteda-nameh, finished around 1291); a prose life by Faridun Sipahsalar; and the long hagiography Manaqeb al-arefin (Feats of the Knowers) by Shams al-Din Aflaki, written in the first half of the 14th century. Aflaki loved miracles, and many of the best-known Rumi stories come from him. Historians use these sources with care, and where a story rests only on Aflaki, we say so.

Rumi was born on or about 30 September 1207, into a family of scholars and preachers in Khorasan, the eastern Persian world. Tradition names Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan; the historian Franklin Lewis has argued that the family was living in the small town of Wakhsh, in present-day Tajikistan. His father, Baha al-Din Walad, was a preacher and teacher of religious law with a mystical bent, whose own book, the Ma'aref, Rumi would later study closely.

Around 1217, as the Mongol storm gathered over Central Asia, the family moved west. Later legend says that on the way, in Nishapur, the aged poet Attar met the boy and gave him a book; that story appears only centuries later and is likely legend. The family made the pilgrimage to Mecca and settled for some years in Anatolia, at Larende (now Karaman), where Rumi married and his son Sultan Walad was born in 1226. Around 1228, at the invitation of the Seljuk sultan, they moved to Konya, the capital of the Sultanate of Rum. That name, "Rum," the old Roman lands, gave Jalal al-Din the name the West knows him by. In Iran and Afghanistan he is usually called Mowlana or Mawlavi, "our master."

When his father died in 1231, the young Rumi took over his teaching post. A former student of his father's, Burhan al-Din Muhaqqiq, came to Konya and trained him in Sufi practice for about nine years, and Rumi also studied in Aleppo and Damascus. By his late thirties he was a respected jurist, preacher and teacher with many students, a pillar of Konya's religious life.

Then, in late 1244, a wandering dervish in his sixties named Shams al-Din of Tabriz arrived in Konya. The accounts of their first meeting vary and are embroidered by Aflaki; what is certain is the result. The two became inseparable, spending months in private conversation. Rumi's students and family grew jealous of this rough stranger who had taken their teacher away. In 1246 Shams left for Damascus. Rumi sent Sultan Walad to bring him back, and he returned, but the resentment flared again, and around 1247 or 1248 Shams vanished for good. A later story claims he was murdered with the help of one of Rumi's sons; there is no firm evidence for it.

The loss broke something open. Rumi, who had been a preacher, became a poet. He searched for Shams, even traveling to Damascus, and then concluded that he had found Shams within himself. He signed many of his lyrics with Shams's name. The Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, his collected lyric poems, holds around 3,000 ghazals and nearly 2,000 quatrains.

Later, his companion and student Husam al-Din Chalabi urged him to write a long didactic poem for the circle, in the tradition of the mystic poets Sanai and Attar. Rumi began the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, "Rhyming Couplets of Inner Meaning," around 1258 or a few years later, dictating it to Husam over the rest of his life. It runs to six books and about 25,000 couplets, and it is unfinished. There is also a book of his talks, Fihi ma fihi ("In It What Is In It"), and letters and sermons.

Rumi died in Konya on 17 December 1273. Christians, Jews and Muslims of the city are said to have joined the funeral procession. His followers call the anniversary Sheb-i Arus, "the wedding night," because they see his death as reunion with the Beloved. His son Sultan Walad and later descendants organized his followers into the Mevlevi order, known in the West as the "whirling dervishes" for their turning ceremony, the sema. His tomb under the Green Dome in Konya is now a museum and still a place of pilgrimage.

The big ideas

The reed's lament

The Masnavi opens with a reed flute. Our translation of the first couplet: "Listen to the reed, how it tells a story, complaining of separations." The reed was cut from the reed bed, and every note it plays is longing to go back. The image is the soul's exile from its source, and the poem that follows is a long, winding answer to that longing.

Love as the way

For Rumi, love is not one virtue among others. It is the force that moves the world and the path back to God. It is meant in a religious sense; Rumi's Beloved is God, and his poetry belongs to a long Islamic mystical tradition rooted in the Quran. Human love, including his love for Shams, is a door into that larger love.

The ego and its death

Sufism speaks of fana, the passing away of the self in God. Rumi returns again and again to the image of dying before you die: the grain that must be ground to become bread, the grape that must be crushed to become wine. What dies is the self-centered ego, not the person.

Everyone sees part of the elephant

In a story from Book 3 of the Masnavi, people in a dark room touch an elephant. The one who feels the trunk says it is a water pipe; the ear, a fan; the leg, a pillar. Each is partly right. If each had a candle, Rumi says, their words would agree. Our knowledge is a hand in the dark.

The guest house

In Book 5, Rumi writes (our translation): "This body is a guest house, young man. Every morning a new guest comes running." Joy, sorrow and bitterness all arrive as guests. Welcome them, because each may have been sent to clear the house for something new.

Stories within stories

The Masnavi teaches through tales: merchants and parrots, a lion and a hare, Moses and a shepherd who prays in clumsy, loving words. In that last story, Moses scolds the shepherd for his rough language, and God rebukes Moses: what matters is the heart, not the phrasing.

What their lines mean for you

At work. The Moses and the shepherd story is a warning against judging others' effort by its polish. And the elephant in the dark is a model for any team: everyone touching a different part of the problem, each partly right.

In training. The Masnavi is full of the patient grind: wheat that must be threshed, ground and baked. Transformation costs something. Rumi did not write those verses until his late thirties and kept at the Masnavi until he died.

In grief. Rumi's poetry began in loss. When Shams disappeared, Rumi turned the grief into tens of thousands of lines, and came to feel the friend he had lost was present in him. You don't have to share his faith to see what he did: he let the wound make him more open, not less.

In anger. The guest house: treat even a dark mood as a visitor, not a master. Watch it come in, ask what it carries, and let it leave.

On the ocean. The sea is everywhere in Rumi: the drop that longs for the ocean, the fish that cannot live out of water, waves that rise and fall back into the sea they never left. For him the ocean is God, and the self is a wave that thinks it is separate.

With ambition. Rumi was already successful, a respected scholar with students and standing, when he met Shams. He risked his reputation for a deeper life. Ambition, in his terms, means wanting the real thing badly enough to look foolish for it.

Where people get them wrong

• Most "Rumi quotes" online are not translations. The Rumi most English readers know comes from Coleman Barks, an American poet who, from the 1970s on, rewrote earlier scholarly translations (by A. J. Arberry and R. A. Nicholson) into free modern verse. Barks does not read Persian. His versions are beloved, often beautiful, and in copyright, and they frequently drop the Islamic references, a pattern the writer Rozina Ali criticized in The New Yorker in 2017.
• The line about the wound being where light enters you. Very widely shared. No one has found it in Rumi's works in this form, and we don't print it.
• "What you seek is seeking you." Widely credited to Rumi; no source in his works has been identified. It may be a modern compression of his ideas.
• "Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." No known source in Rumi.
• Rumi was a free spirit beyond religion. He was a Muslim scholar who knew the Quran by heart, quoted it constantly, and taught Islamic law. His mysticism was inside Islam, not outside it. He also wrote with real openness toward people of other faiths, which is why both points need saying.
• Rumi founded the whirling dervishes. Rumi did turn in ecstatic dance, and music and movement were part of his circle. The Mevlevi order and its formal ceremony were organized after his death by his son and descendants.
• Rumi and Shams were lovers. Their bond was intense and its exact nature is debated; the sources describe it as spiritual companionship between master and disciple, each seeing himself in the other. Claims beyond that are speculation.

Read them yourself

• Masnavi I Ma'navi, abridged translation by E. H. Whinfield (1887, 2nd ed. 1898): sacred-texts.com/isl/masnavi
• Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz, translated by R. A. Nicholson (1898): search on Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive
• Persian text of the Masnavi and the Divan, free and searchable: ganjoor.net
• Nicholson's literal translation of the Masnavi (from 1926) is the scholarly standard; its earliest volumes are now public domain in the United States and can be found on the Internet Archive.

Translations in this essay are our own from the Persian, or from Whinfield and Nicholson where named.

Timeline

• 1207: born around 30 September in Khorasan (Balkh or Wakhsh)
• c. 1217: the family leaves Khorasan, heading west ahead of the Mongol invasions
• c. 1222 to 1228: the family lives at Larende (Karaman) in Anatolia, where Rumi marries
• 1226: his son Sultan Walad is born
• c. 1228: the family settles in Konya
• 1231: his father dies; Rumi takes over his teaching post
• c. 1232 to 1240: trains under Burhan al-Din Muhaqqiq and studies in Aleppo and Damascus
• 1244: meets Shams of Tabriz in Konya
• 1246: Shams leaves for Damascus and is brought back
• c. 1247 to 1248: Shams disappears for good
• c. 1258 to 1262: begins the Masnavi with Husam al-Din Chalabi
• 1273: dies in Konya on 17 December
• c. 1291: Sultan Walad completes his verse account of his father's life
• c. 1318 to 1353: Aflaki writes his collection of stories about Rumi
• 1898: Whinfield's abridged Masnavi and Nicholson's Divan selections appear in English
• 1925 to 1940: Nicholson publishes the complete Masnavi in English