Masnavi

In the mid-1200s, Konya was a busy city in Anatolia, the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum. Refugees and scholars poured in from the east, fleeing the Mongol armies. Among the people who had made that journey years earlier was Jalal al-Din Rumi, a respected teacher of Islamic law who preached in the mosques and taught students.

Then came the change everyone remembers. In 1244 Rumi met Shams of Tabriz, a wandering mystic with no patience for scholarly pride. The two spent months in intense conversation. Rumi stopped lecturing and started writing poetry. When Shams vanished a few years later, the grief seems to have opened something permanent in him.

The Masnavi came later, in Rumi's last decades. It is a vast poem in Persian, roughly 25,000 rhyming couplets in six books. Rumi did not sit and write it. He recited it aloud, often while walking or leaning against a wall, and his devoted student Husam al-Din Chelebi wrote the lines down and read them back. Husam had begged him to compose a teaching poem, and tradition holds that Rumi pulled the opening lines from his turban at that very moment. The poem is a chain of stories, jokes, animal fables, Quranic episodes and sudden bursts of direct address, all circling one idea: the soul is separated from its source and aches to return. It opens with the sound of a reed flute crying because it was cut from the reed bed.

The sixth book breaks off unfinished. Rumi died in 1273, and Konya's Christians, Jews and Muslims all joined the funeral processions, which contemporaries recorded with some astonishment.

His followers became the Mevlevi order, known in the West as the whirling dervishes. The Masnavi was copied, memorized and commented on for centuries from the Balkans to Bengal, so widely that Persian speakers came to call it "the Quran in Persian tongue." Modern English versions, some faithful and some loose, made Rumi one of the best-selling poets in the United States, seven hundred years after his death.