Shams’s disappearance turned a jurist into Rumi
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273) fled Mongol Central Asia for Konya and seemed destined for his father’s scholarly pulpit—until wandering dervish Shams Tabrīzī arrived on 15 November 1244. Infatuation, neglect of duties, then Shams’s vanishing ignited the Divan and a poet the world still calls its most popular.
Persian-speaking parents raised him in Wakhsh (today’s Sangtuda, Tajikistan), where Bahāʾ ud-Dīn Walad preached; the family moved to Samarkand about 1212 when Rumi was five. Mongol pressure between 1215 and 1220 drove them west through Nishapur, Baghdad, Mecca, and Anatolian towns to Karaman, then—invited by ʿAlāʾ ud-Dīn Key-Qobād—into Konya on 1 May 1228. The byname Rumi marks the old Roman/Byzantine land of Rum. After Burhan ud-Din’s training, the twenty-five-year-old inherited the madrasa, issued fatwas, and preached—until Shams remade him from jurist into ascetic.
On the night of 5 December 1248 Shams stepped to a back door and never returned; theories blame murder, blasphemy charges, or a wanderer’s exit. After forty days of denial Rumi mourned in black and poured lyric grief into the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. Later companions Salah ud-Din Zarkub and scribe Hussam-e Chalabi steadied him. Walking Meram vineyards, Hussam urged a book like Sanai’s or Attar’s; Rumi produced eighteen opening Masnavi lines on the spot and spent twelve years dictating six volumes Hussam copied—often called a “Qur’an in Persian,” second only to the Quran for many in the Turko-Persian sphere.
Followers and son Sultan Walad founded the Mevlevi “whirling” order after his 1273 death; the Konya shrine draws pilgrims. Attar and Sanai shaped his lineage of love mysticism. Translated everywhere, he has been named the world’s most popular poet and, in the United States, recent years’ best-selling poet—an Anatolian voice still outselling the living.
Source: Rumi
