Jalal al-Din Rumi

Born in 1207 in the Persianate east and settling in Konya in Anatolia, Rumi was a respected scholar and teacher until his transformative meeting with the wandering mystic Shams of Tabriz turned him into a poet of ecstatic love. After Shams's disappearance he poured his longing into tens of thousands of verses; he died in Konya in 1273.

The pivot of his life was the loss of Shams — his beloved friend and spiritual mirror — who vanished, some say killed by jealous disciples. Grief was transfigured into poetry; Rumi's struggle was the mystic's yearning for union with the divine, dramatized in a human loss he could not undo.

Rumi taught the path of love as the way to God: the annihilation of the ego, tolerance of all seekers, and the finding of the divine within longing itself. His image of the reed torn from the reed-bed, crying for its origin, expresses the soul's exile and its desire to return.

A mystic and poet, Rumi fought no wars; he lived through the trauma of the Mongol devastation of the Islamic east, which shadowed his world, but his response was inward and poetic rather than martial.

Rumi is claimed by many and debated among them: read by some as a strictly Islamic mystic and by others, especially in Western popular reception, as a universalist detached from Islam — a reading scholars criticize as stripping his Qur'anic roots. The circumstances of Shams's disappearance remain a mystery. His figure here complements the philosophers' entry devoted to him.

Rumi is among the most widely read poets in the world, and the Mevlevi order (the "whirling dervishes") founded in his memory carries his practice of music and sacred dance. His Masnavi has been called "the Qur'an in Persian," and his verse of love and longing speaks across faiths to the present day.