Jalal al-Din Rumi

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi was born, by the traditional date, on 30 September 1207. For a long time Balkh was taken to be his birthplace, but modern scholars place his birth in the small town of Vakhsh, which belonged to the province of Balkh and lies in today’s Tajikistan. His father, Baha al-Din Walad, was a theologian, jurist and preacher; his mother was Mu'mina Khatun. He is also known by the honorific Mawlana (“our master”), while the name “Rumi” refers to Rum, as Asia Minor, where he spent most of his life, was then called.

When he was about five, the family lived for a time in Samarkand. In the second half of the 1210s, on the eve of the Mongol invasion, Baha al-Din Walad set out westwards with his household. Legend has it that in Nishapur the young Jalal al-Din met the poet Farid al-Din Attar. After Baghdad and Mecca the family travelled through Syria and the towns of Anatolia to Larende (today’s Karaman), where they stayed for about seven years. There, in 1225, Jalal al-Din married Gawhar Khatun, the daughter of Sharaf al-Din Lala of Samarkand; their sons were Sultan Walad and Ala al-Din Chalabi. His mother also died in Larende. In 1228, at the invitation of the Seljuk sultan of Rum, Ala al-Din Kayqubad I, the family moved to the sultanate’s capital, Konya.

When his father died in 1231, Jalal al-Din took his place, teaching at a madrasa, preaching in the mosques and issuing legal opinions. In 1232 his father’s disciple Burhan al-Din Muhaqqiq Tirmidhi arrived in Konya and guided him on the Sufi path for nearly nine years. On his advice Jalal al-Din went to Syria and studied at the Hanafi Halawiyya madrasa in Aleppo and then in Damascus. After Burhan al-Din’s death in 1240–1241, Rumi went on living in Konya as a respected jurist and teacher.

The turning point of his life was his meeting with Shams al-Din of Tabriz, a wandering dervish who came to Konya in November 1244. Their closeness drew Rumi away from teaching and preaching and angered his students and the city’s scholars. Shams left for Damascus for a time and was brought back by Sultan Walad, but in 1247 or 1248 he vanished for good. The loss turned Rumi to poetry: he signed many of his ghazals with Shams’s name, and they were later gathered as the “Divan of Shams of Tabriz” (“Divan-e Kabir”), some 35,000 couplets of ghazals and odes and about 2,000 quatrains.

After Shams, Rumi’s closest companion was Salah al-Din Zarkub, a goldsmith of Konya, and after his death in 1258 his disciple Husam al-Din Chalabi. At Husam al-Din’s request Rumi began, in the late 1250s, to dictate the “Masnavi-yi Ma'navi” (“Spiritual Couplets”), and he worked on it for the rest of his life. In six books and more than 25,000 couplets, the poem sets out Sufi teaching through stories, fables and commentary on the Quran and hadith; the sixth book was left unfinished. It was held in such esteem in Persian literature that it was called “the Quran in Persian”.

His prose includes “Fihi Ma Fihi”, his talks as written down by his disciples, “Majalis-e Sab'a”, a collection of seven sermons, and “Maktubat”, his letters to disciples, family and officials. Rumi wrote mainly in Persian, also composed verse in Arabic and used Turkish and Greek words in some couplets. After Gawhar Khatun’s death he married Kira Khatun, who bore him Amir Alim Chalabi and Malika Khatun.

Rumi died in Konya on 17 December 1273 and was buried beside his father; accounts say that Christians and Jews joined the city’s Muslims at his funeral. The mausoleum with the Green Dome, completed over his grave in 1274, has been the Mevlana Museum since 1927. After Husam al-Din Chalabi’s death in 1284, Sultan Walad organised his father’s followers into the Mevlevi order, whose sema ceremony UNESCO proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005. UNESCO marked the 800th anniversary of his birth by declaring 2007 the Year of Rumi. The poet Jamol Kamol translated all six books of the “Masnavi” into Uzbek.