"The best-selling poet in the United States for several years running — a 13th-century Persian Sufi mystic whose poems about divine love, longing and the reed flute cut through every cultural barrier to touch something universal in the human heart."
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi — known in the West as Rumi, from Rum (the Byzantine/Roman lands, since he lived most of his life in Anatolia) — was born in 1207 in Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan. His family fled westward when he was a child, ahead of the Mongol invasions, eventually settling in Konya (in present-day Turkey) where his father Baha ud-Din Walad became a respected religious scholar and mystic.
For the first part of his life, Rumi was a respected Islamic scholar and jurist, following in his father's footsteps. The transformation came in 1244, when he encountered the wandering dervish Shams-i-Tabriz — a meeting that shook him to his foundations and released the torrent of poetry that would make him immortal. Shams (the name means 'sun') was a strange, challenging figure who drew Rumi away from his scholarly duties and into an intensive spiritual companionship that scandalized Konya.
When Shams disappeared — possibly murdered by Rumi's jealous disciples — Rumi's grief was so overwhelming that it became the engine of his greatest poetry. The Divan-e Shams-e Tabriz (The Works of Shams of Tabriz) — thousands of lyric poems — was composed in a state of spiritual ecstasy in which Rumi attributed the poetry not to himself but to Shams, using his name as the pen name at the end of each poem. Shams had become for him the embodiment of the divine Beloved.
The Masnavi-ye Ma'navi (Spiritual Couplets) is Rumi's masterwork — six books of poetry totalling approximately 25,000 couplets, begun when Rumi was in his late fifties at the urging of his chief disciple Husam Chalabi, who wrote down the poems as Rumi dictated them. It was called by Jami, the great 15th-century Persian poet, 'the Quran in the Persian tongue' — a description that captures both its spiritual depth and its central place in the Persian literary tradition.
The Masnavi is structured as a series of stories that lead into other stories, each illustrating a spiritual principle, each capable of being read at multiple levels simultaneously — literal, moral, allegorical and mystical. The opening verses — the Song of the Reed (Ney) — set the key of the entire work: the reed flute cut from the reed bed cries for its origin, as the human soul longs for its divine source. This image of separation and longing for reunion is the emotional centre of all Rumi's poetry.
The Western reception of Rumi — particularly the Coleman Barks translations — has been criticised for stripping the poetry of its Islamic context and presenting a decontextualised 'universal' Rumi that the historical Rumi would not recognise. Rumi was a devout Muslim and a Sufi master; his poetry cannot be properly understood apart from that context.
The enormous commercial success of Rumi in the West has produced a kind of Rumi industry — greeting cards, inspirational posters, social media quotes — that reduces some of the most demanding spiritual poetry ever written to motivational slogans. This is not Rumi's fault, but it is a significant distortion of what he was and what he taught.