Mevlana; Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī — known simply as Rumi — was a 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic whose verses on love, longing, and the dissolving of the self remain among the most read poetry in the world. These are a small selection of his poems, given voice.
Rumi was born around 1207 in Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan, and settled as a young man in Konya, in present-day Turkey, then part of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum — the source of the name by which the West came to know him.
His life changed after he met the wandering dervish Shams-e Tabrizi in 1244. Their friendship, and Shams’s sudden disappearance a few years later, became the wellspring for the tens of thousands of verses that followed: the Masnavi, the Divan-e Shams, and a body of poetry that has since been translated into dozens of languages and read by millions who have never set foot in Konya.
Rumi died in 1273. The order his followers founded, the Mevlevi — known in the West for the practice of the whirling dervishes — continues to carry his teaching forward.