Meet Rumi: The Jurist Who Lost His Friend and Became a Poet

Balkh to Konya

He was born in Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan. His family fled west ahead of the Mongols and settled at Konya, in modern Turkey, where his father taught. When his father died, Rumi inherited the teaching position at twenty-four.

For the next twelve years he was what he had been raised to be: a respected Hanafi jurist and preacher with students and a congregation.

Shams

In 1244 he met a wandering dervish called Shams of Tabriz, and the settled scholar stopped being one. They spent months in each other's company, to the scandal of Rumi's students.

Then Shams vanished — probably murdered, quite possibly by people close to Rumi who wanted their teacher back. The grief is where the poetry comes from. Rumi composed much of it aloud while walking or turning, with students writing it down as it came, and he named the great collection of lyrics after Shams rather than himself: a poet signing another man's name to his work.

The reed

The Masnavi runs to some 25,000 verses across six books and has been called the Persian Quran. It opens with a reed cut from the reed bed, crying because it has been separated from the bed it grew in. The whole book is an argument about longing — and about what the separation is for.

What he left

The whirling of the Mevlevi dervishes was established by his followers after his death, as a form of remembrance rather than performance.

Christians, Jews and Muslims are all recorded at his funeral in 1273. He wrote in Persian and is claimed today as a national poet by Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan at once.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when you have lost someone and cannot see what to do with it. He is the case for grief as a productive force rather than a wound to be closed — and he will not let you keep the consolation cheap.