Who Was Rumi?

1. Balkh, the flight from the Mongols and the road to Konya

Rumi was born Jalal al-Din Muhammad in about 1207, in Balkh, a city in what is now Afghanistan, the son of Baha al-Din Walad, a noted theologian, teacher and mystic. The family left Balkh in about 1218, either because of a dispute with the local ruler or because of the approaching Mongol armies, who would destroy the city a few years later, and they travelled westwards through Persia, visiting Nishapur, where according to legend the young Rumi met the poet Farid al-Din Attar, who blessed him and gave him a book of his poems. The family made the pilgrimage to Mecca and travelled through the Middle East before settling in Anatolia, the land of Rum, from which Rumi took his name, meaning the man from Rum.

They reached Konya, the capital of the Seljuq sultanate, in 1228, after a stay at Laranda, where Rumi's mother died and his first son was born. His father taught at one of the religious schools of the city, and when he died in 1231 Rumi succeeded him as a teacher, a post he held for the rest of his life. He was, by all accounts, a respected scholar and a popular preacher, a man of learning and of piety, and there was nothing in his early life to suggest that he would become a poet. He had written little poetry, and he was known as a teacher of law and theology, not as a writer of verse.

A year after his father's death, a former disciple of his father, Burhan al-Din Muhaqqiq, arrived in Konya and deepened Rumi's education in the mystical theories that had developed in Persia, and Rumi is said to have travelled to Syria, where he may have met the great theosophist Ibn al-Arabi. By 1240 he was a mature scholar, a father and a teacher, and his life seemed settled. It was about to be overturned by a meeting that would make him a poet, and that would change the course of Persian literature.

2. Shams of Tabriz: the meeting that made a poet

The decisive moment of Rumi's life occurred on 30 November 1244, when in the streets of Konya he met Shams al-Din of Tabriz, a wandering dervish, a holy man who belonged to none of the established mystical orders and whose personality was overwhelming. The two men spent months in close companionship, talking, praying and, according to the accounts, neglecting everything else, and Rumi's disciples and family were scandalised. In February 1246 Shams was forced to leave the city, and Rumi was heartbroken, until his eldest son, Sultan Walad, brought Shams back from Syria. The family, however, could not tolerate the relationship, and one night in 1247 Shams disappeared forever.

In the twentieth century it was established that Shams had been murdered, and that Rumi's sons knew about it, and that he was buried hurriedly near a well in Konya. The loss turned Rumi into a poet. His lyrics, some thirty thousand verses of them, and many quatrains, reflect the stages of his love and his longing, until, as his son wrote, he found Shams in himself, radiant like the moon. He signed many of his poems not with his own name but with the name of Shams, and the collection of his lyrics is called the Divan-e Shams, the Collected Poetry of Shams, because the poems are, in a sense, addressed to the friend he had lost.

The story of Shams is the heart of Rumi's poetry, and it is also a story about the nature of love itself. The love between the two men was spiritual, not physical, and it was the love of a disciple for a teacher who had shown him a new way of seeing the world. Rumi's poems are full of the language of lovers, of separation and union, of longing and fulfilment, but the beloved is God, and the lover is the soul, and the poems are a record of the soul's journey towards the divine. That is why they can be read by people of every faith and of none, because the experience they describe, of loving something greater than oneself, is universal.

3. The Masnavi: six books of stories and teaching

A few years after the death of Shams, Rumi formed a similar, although less intense, attachment to an illiterate goldsmith, Salah al-Din Zarkub, and after Salah al-Din's death to Husam al-Din Chelebi, who became his deputy and his closest companion. It was Husam al-Din who asked Rumi to write a long didactic poem, following the model of Attar and Sana'i, who had laid down mystical teachings in verse interspersed with stories, fables and anecdotes, and Rumi agreed, composing nearly twenty-six thousand couplets of the Masnavi, the Spiritual Couplets, over the following years.

The Masnavi is Rumi's greatest work, and it is often called the Quran in Persian, because of its importance in the Persian-speaking world. It is a poem in six books, written in rhyming couplets, that moves freely between stories, jokes, parables, theological arguments and lyrical passages, following the associations of the author's mind rather than a fixed plan. It is said that Rumi would recite the verses even in the bath or on the road, accompanied by Husam al-Din, who wrote them down, and the poem has the feeling of a spoken teaching, full of digressions, repetitions and sudden insights.

The most famous passage of the Masnavi is its opening, in which the reed flute laments its separation from the reed bed, a metaphor for the soul's separation from its origin. In the translation of R. A. Nicholson, the great English scholar of Rumi, it begins: 'Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations.' The image has become one of the most famous openings in world literature, and it states the theme of the whole poem: that human beings are separated from the divine, and that the longing to return is the deepest fact of life. The Masnavi is not an easy book, and it is long, but it rewards patience, and it is the book by which Rumi is judged as a poet and a teacher.

4. The whirling dance, the disciples and the Mevlevi order

Rumi's poetry was often composed to music, and he accompanied his verses with a whirling dance, turning in circles to the sound of the flute and the drum, a practice that became the signature of his followers. The dance, which is now known as the whirling of the dervishes, was a form of prayer, a way of losing oneself in the music and in the movement, and it expressed the central idea of his teaching, that the soul should turn towards God as the planets turn around the sun. Rumi found in the sounds of the world, the hammering of the goldsmiths, the sound of the water mill, the music of the flute, a reflection of the divine, and his poems are full of the rhythms of work and of nature.

After his death on 17 December 1273 in Konya, his disciples were organised as the Mevlevi order, known in the West as the Whirling Dervishes, and the order spread across the Ottoman Empire and beyond, preserving his poems, his music and his dance for centuries. His tomb in Konya, the Green Dome, became a place of pilgrimage, and it remains one of the most visited shrines in Turkey, drawing visitors of every faith who come to pay their respects to a poet who belonged to no single nation or creed.

Rumi's teaching, as it is set out in the Masnavi and in his prose work, Fihi ma fihi, or In It What Is In It, is a teaching of love. He believed that life should be a journey towards union with God, achieved by practising love, by disregarding oneself as an independent being and turning towards the truth of God's oneness. The path is not one of rules and rituals alone, but of the heart, and the guide is love itself, which Rumi called the astrolabe of the mysteries of God. It is a teaching that has appealed to readers far beyond Islam, because it speaks of love in terms that anyone can understand.

5. How Rumi became the world's most read poet

By the end of the twentieth century Rumi's popularity had become a global phenomenon. His poems were translated into English, above all by Coleman Barks, an American poet whose versions, published from the 1970s onwards, made Rumi the best-selling poet in the United States in the 1990s. Barks's translations are free renderings, often closer to paraphrase than to literal translation, and they have been criticised by scholars for removing the Islamic content of the poems and for presenting Rumi as a generic spiritual teacher rather than as a Muslim mystic. But they have also introduced millions of readers to his work, and they are the reason why Rumi is now read in the West as widely as in the East.

The popularity has had a cost, which is the flood of false quotations. Many of the lines attributed to Rumi on social media, in books of quotations and on posters, were never written by him, or are paraphrases so free that they bear little relation to his words. The problem is well known to scholars, and it has been documented by researchers who have traced the most popular supposed Rumi quotations to their sources and found that many of them have none. The rule for readers is simple: if a quotation is not attributed to a specific translation, by a named translator, and to a specific work, it should be treated with suspicion.

Two quotations in this article can be verified. The first is the opening of the Masnavi, 'Listen to the reed how it tells a tale, complaining of separations', in the translation of R. A. Nicholson, the standard scholarly translation. The second is the quatrain rendered by Coleman Barks as 'Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there', a free rendering of a Persian quatrain that is widely attributed to Rumi and that appears in Barks's translations. Both should be read as translations, not as the words Rumi wrote, which were in Persian, and both are included here with their translators named, because that is the honest way to quote him.

6. The problem of the false Rumi: what he did not say

The false quotations matter because they change what Rumi is understood to have said. The real Rumi was a Muslim scholar, a teacher of the Quran, and a Sufi mystic whose poems are full of references to the Prophet Muhammad, to Islamic law and to the traditions of his faith. The false Rumi of the internet is a vague spiritual teacher who says pleasant things about love and the universe, and who could belong to any religion or to none. The difference is not a small one, and it has been pointed out by scholars, by Muslim readers and by the translators who have worked most closely with his texts.

The most famous example is the line 'The wound is the place where the Light enters you', which is widely shared as a quotation from Rumi and which does not appear in his work in that form. It is a paraphrase, by Barks, of an idea that is present in Rumi's poetry, but it is not a quotation, and it should not be presented as one. Similar lines about love, about the universe and about the self circulate in large numbers, and most of them cannot be traced to any Persian text. The lesson is not that these lines are worthless, but that they are not Rumi's, and that attributing them to him is a form of misrepresentation.

Readers who want the real Rumi should start with the scholarly translations: Nicholson's Masnavi, the translations of Annemarie Schimmel, and the more recent work of translators who give the Persian text alongside the English. They should be wary of books and websites that offer hundreds of Rumi quotations without sources, and they should remember that a poet who wrote in Persian in the thirteenth century cannot be quoted in modern English without a translator, and that the translator's name is part of the quotation. Rumi deserves to be read as he was, not as the internet wishes him to have been.

7. Legacy: eight hundred years of reading

Rumi's legacy is measured in centuries. His poems have been read continuously since his death, in Persian, in Turkish, in Arabic and in translation, and his order preserved his work through the centuries when other poets were forgotten. He is claimed by many peoples: by Afghans, because he was born near Balkh; by Iranians, because he wrote in Persian; and by Turks, because he lived and died in Konya. The claims are all true, and they are a measure of his universality, that a poet who belonged to one place can belong to many.

In the modern world his legacy has taken a new form. His poems are read at weddings and funerals, quoted by people who have never read the Masnavi, and set to music by performers of every kind. The whirling dance is performed for tourists in Konya and Istanbul, and his tomb is visited by millions. Some of this is commercial, and some of it would have surprised him, but the core of it is genuine: that a poet who wrote about love, about loss and about the longing for God should still speak to people eight hundred years after his death, in languages he never spoke, in countries he never visited.

The best way to honour him is to read him properly, in a good translation, with the knowledge of who he was and what he believed. He was a scholar, a mystic and a poet, a man who lost his friend and found his voice in the loss, and who wrote a poem of twenty-six thousand couplets about the journey of the soul. His work is not a collection of pretty sayings but a sustained meditation on love, and it repays the effort of reading it as a whole, rather than in fragments on a screen.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Rumi
• Wikipedia — Rumi
• Wikipedia — Masnavi

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• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.