🇮🇷Rumi

He was born near the edge of the known world as he understood it — in Wakhsh, in what is now Tajikistan, or in Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan — in 1207, as the Mongol storms that would shatter the entire Islamic civilization were just beginning to gather on the horizon. His father, Baha ud-Din Walad, was a renowned Islamic scholar and mystic who fled westward with his family ahead of the Mongol advance when Rumi was still a child, eventually settling in Konya in Anatolia — then part of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, in what is now central Turkey. There, in a city at the crossroads of Persian, Turkish, Greek, and Arab civilizations, Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi would live out his adult life, become one of the most celebrated religious scholars of his age, and then — in his late thirties, through a transformative encounter with a wandering mystic named Shams-i Tabrizi — become the greatest Sufi poet in history and, eight centuries later, the most widely read poet in the United States.

Rumi's early life was that of a conventionally distinguished Islamic scholar. He studied theology, jurisprudence, and the Islamic sciences, following in his father's footsteps. By his mid-thirties he was a respected madrasa teacher in Konya with hundreds of students and a reputation for learning and piety. Nothing in his early career predicted what was coming. Then, in 1244, he encountered Shams-i Tabrizi — a wandering dervish of extraordinary spiritual intensity and unconventional personality — and the encounter broke him open. In Sufi accounts and Rumi's own poetry, the meeting with Shams is described as a kind of annihilation: the dissolution of the bounded, scholarly self into something larger and wilder and more alive. The two men became inseparable companions for months at a time, engaged in extended mystical dialogue that scandalized Rumi's students and family, who resented Shams' influence and, on one occasion, apparently drove him away. When Shams finally disappeared — perhaps murdered by Rumi's disciples, perhaps simply vanishing — Rumi's grief became the engine of one of the most extraordinary outpourings of lyric poetry in literary history.

The Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (The Works of Shams of Tabriz) — named for the lost beloved — contains approximately 40,000 verses of lyric poetry in Persian: ghazals (odes), quatrains, and other forms. It is one of the largest single-author poetry collections in any literature, and it explores with extraordinary range and depth the themes of love, longing, union with the divine, the nature of the self, the transcendence of ego, and the ecstatic dissolution of ordinary consciousness. The poems are rooted in Islamic Sufi spirituality but repeatedly transcend its specific doctrinal framework to speak a language of mystical longing that resonates across religious and cultural boundaries — which is why they are read by Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and secular readers with equal intensity.

The Masnavi-ye Ma'navi (Rhyming Couplets of Deep Spiritual Meaning) is Rumi's other magnum opus and is considered by many to be the supreme work of Persian literature. Composed over the last twelve years of his life and running to approximately 25,000 couplets in six volumes, it is a vast, spiraling, digressive epic of spiritual instruction: part narrative, part allegory, part mystical manual, part collection of stories drawn from the Quran, the Hadith, and folk tradition. Jami, the fifteenth-century Persian poet, called it "the Quran in Persian." It explores the nature of the soul's separation from its divine origin (symbolized famously by the reed flute cut from the reed bed), the path back through love and longing, and the annihilation of ego in union with the divine. Its range and depth are staggering.

Rumi's global reach in the twenty-first century is a cultural phenomenon without parallel in the history of world poetry. In the 1990s, translations by Coleman Barks — loose, free-verse renderings that set aside scholarly fidelity for lyric accessibility — became bestsellers in the United States, introducing Rumi to audiences with no background in Persian culture or Islamic mysticism. By the early 2000s, Rumi was consistently the best-selling poet in America, outselling all living and dead English-language poets combined, according to multiple surveys. His poems appear on posters, in wellness retreats, in motivational talks, in song lyrics, on Instagram. Artists as varied as Madonna, Coldplay, and Jay-Z have quoted or referenced him. This extraordinary reach would have surprised a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic deeply embedded in the specific religious and intellectual world of medieval Persian Islam — and yet it would not entirely have mystified him. He wrote in the Masnavi: "My silence is an ocean of knowledge." His words swim in every ocean now.

On December 17, 1273, Rumi died in Konya. His tomb — the Mevlana Mausoleum — is now a museum and remains one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in Turkey, drawing over a million visitors a year. The Mevlevi Order he inspired — the order of the Whirling Dervishes, who practice the sema meditation ritual of whirling rotation as a form of prayer — is still active today, recognized by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. He left behind more than 65,000 verses. The world is still reading them.