Mevlânâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî
1207–1273
Biography
Mevlânâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî, known in English as Rumi, was a mystic and poet who wrote in Persian in the thirteenth century. He was probably born in 1207 at Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan, and his family left the region in the years when Mongol armies were advancing across Persia. After long travels they settled at Konya, in Anatolia, where he lived out his days and died in 1273. The nickname Rumi refers to the Anatolian lands that had once been part of the Eastern Roman world.
He was brought up to follow his father into religious scholarship, but the arrival at Konya of the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz changed the course of his life. His devotion to Shams, and then Shams's sudden disappearance, left him in deep grief, and that grief is the source of the lyric poems gathered in the Divan of Shams of Tabriz. His other great work is the Masnavi, a long poem in six books of rhyming couplets, which has been called the Quran in Persian and is counted among the masterpieces of that language.
The Mesnevi on this site is the first of the six books of the Masnavi, in a Turkish edition titled Mesnevî-i Şerîf, 1. Defter, translated by Ahmed Avni Konuk. Much of the poem is made of stories and parables that lead back to the seeker's spiritual life. After Rumi's death his followers formed the Mevlevi order, named after his title Mevlânâ, and it has kept his poetry and teaching alive in Turkey and far beyond.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Mesnevî-i Şerîf, 1. Defter
by Mevlânâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî (translated by Ahmed Avni Konuk)
Rumi opens the Masnavi with the reed flute's lament for the reed bed it was cut from, then teaches through stories: the king and the slave girl, the parrot and the grocer, the lion and the hares. Ahmed Avni Konuk gives the first book's four thousand couplets in plain Turkish…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.