Rumi

Poet, spiritual teacher, mystical dancer, and cultural leader: The writer known as Rumi held many roles in the 13th century, and continues to be one of the most popular poets in the world today. Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī was born in Afghanistan in 1207. He traveled through Uzbekistan, Iran, and Syria, and spent much of his life in Turkey before his death in 1273. He wrote in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Greek, and is widely seen as the most influential mystical writer in the Muslim tradition. His deeply human and universally inspiring works have now been translated in more than 20 languages and sold millions of copies.

Rumi’s father and grandfather were traditional Muslim preachers and scholars, and Rumi followed in their footsteps. But when he met a wandering holy man named Shams of Tabriz in 1244, he embarked on a new life journey into mysticism and poetry. Rumi’s relationship with Shams and his mourning of Shams’ death a few years after they met fueled his prolific writing.

Rumi wrote tens of thousands of individual pieces, many of which were devotional songs for Shams, the prophet Muhammad, and God, along with his masterwork, The Masnavi, which is composed of 26,000 couplets (two lines of verse that form a poetic unit). He described transcendent love, the holy nature of everyday experiences, joy, grief, and more with an accessible, lyrical voice. Many of his poems were written as he spun in a whirling dance or were composed to be sung in gatherings of Sufis (Islamic mystics).

Both during his life and after, Rumi’s vibrant musings appealed to people of many faiths and backgrounds. As one of the key translators of Rumi’s work, Coleman Barks, wrote, “He wants us to be more alive, to wake up... He wants us to see our beauty, in the mirror and in each other."