Rumi

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Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273) was a Persian poet, jurist, and Sufi teacher whose verse on divine love became, for the order that formed around his memory, not literature to admire but a path to walk. In the Persian-speaking world he is known as Mawlana, “our master”; the name by which the West knows him, Rumi, simply marks where he lived — Rum, the old Islamic term for the formerly Roman lands of Anatolia.

He was born in the eastern Iranian world, at Balkh or nearby, into a family of respected preachers. While he was still young the household left ahead of the advancing Mongols, an itinerant exile that ended in Konya, in present-day Turkey, where his father held a teaching post and Rumi in time succeeded to it. By his late thirties he was an established scholar of law and theology with a circle of students — a settled, conventional eminence. What undid it was a person. Around 1244 a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz arrived in Konya, and the encounter between the two men consumed Rumi entirely; the sober jurist became a poet. When Shams vanished a few years later, most likely killed, Rumi’s grief turned into the enormous lyric collection he titled not under his own name but under his friend’s: the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi.

His other great work is the Masnavi, a poem of some twenty-five thousand couplets that his followers came to call the Persian Qur’an — meaning a commentary on the Qur’an in verse, not a rival to it. It moves by stories: animal fables, jokes, scenes from the bazaar, each opening onto a teaching about the soul’s distance from God and the ache to return. The library holds two early English renderings: Redhouse’s translation of its first book, and Whinfield’s abridgment of the whole. The poem’s governing image is the reed cut from the reed-bed, crying because it has been severed from its source — separation, in the Sufi reading, as the condition of every living thing and the engine of its longing.

What Rumi taught belongs to the broad current of Sufism: that the aim of human life is the dissolving of the self in God, fana, reached not chiefly through argument but through love, music, and remembrance. After his death his disciples organized into the Mevlevi order, whose ritual turning dance — the sema, the source of the European phrase “whirling dervishes” — enacts that longing as motion, the dancer revolving with one palm raised to receive and one lowered to give. The order keeps his tomb in Konya as a shrine to this day.

Outside the tradition Rumi has had a second, looser life. Modern English versions, many of them free adaptations rather than translations, have made him a best-selling poet in the West, often shorn of the Islamic devotion that every line assumes. Scholars note the gap between that figure and the working jurist of Konya. The resemblance readers feel to the love-mysticism of other traditions is real and worth tracing; it is also, in his case, a specifically Qur’anic love, and means what it means inside that faith.

→ In the library: Rūmī — The Mesnevī, Book the First (Redhouse, 1881) · Rūmī — Masnavi i Maʿnavi, abridged (Whinfield, 1898)

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Logos