Rumi

Signed With the Lost Man's Name

Rumi was born Jalal al-Din in 1207, in the far east of the Persian-speaking world, in Central Asia, and moved west with his family, fleeing Mongol armies, settling in Konya, in Anatolia (modern Turkey) — once called "Rum," after the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire that had ruled the region, so he became "Rumi," meaning "from Rum." He inherited his father's position as an Islamic scholar — until Shams arrived. Shams left Konya once, in 1246, for reasons no source explains, and Rumi sent his eldest son to bring him back. Shams came back, and about a year later disappeared again, this time for good. Later biographies claim Shams was murdered, and that a different son, Ala al-Din, may have been involved. Nothing confirms it. Rumi never recovered, and the poetry came out of the not recovering: forty thousand lines of verse that he signed with Shams's name instead of his own, as though Shams were still speaking through him. Separately, under his own name, came the Masnavi, twenty-five thousand couplets so revered it's called the Quran in Persian. He took to turning in the streets of Konya, looking for someone who was not there — turning is traditionally the source of the whirling, a spinning meditation meant to bring worshipers closer to God, later formalized by his followers.

Called It the Wedding Night

He died in Konya on 17 December 1273. He had told those around him not to grieve — the night is called Şeb-i Arûs, the wedding night, the night of the meeting with God, and it is still marked in Konya every December. His funeral is described as taking most of a day because Christians, Jews and Muslims all came, each reading from their own scripture — the Bible, the Torah, the Quran — and when asked why, they said he had made them better at their own faith. The description comes from a devotional biography — meant to celebrate him — composed some fifty years later.