Death of Jalal al-Din al-Rumi

# Jalal al-Din al-Rumi: The Poet of Divine Love

A Scholar Before a Poet

Jalal al-Din Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Husayn al-Balkhi al-Rumi was born in Balkh (in modern Afghanistan) on 6 Rabi al-Awwal 604 AH (September 30, 1207 CE). He died in Konya, the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia, on 5 Jumada al-Thani 672 AH (December 17, 1273 CE). He was 66 years old.

He is known to the Persian-speaking world as Mawlana (Our Master) and to Turkish tradition as Mevlana. Western audiences, who have encountered him through translations and adaptations of his poetry, most commonly call him simply Rumi — a name derived from "Rum," the medieval Islamic term for the Byzantine Roman lands of Anatolia where he spent the majority of his adult life.

Before understanding the Rumi of poetry and spiritual love, it is essential to understand that he was formed first as a scholar of Islamic sciences. His father, Baha al-Din Walad, known by the title Sultan al-Ulama (Sultan of the Scholars), was a famous jurist, preacher, and mystic — a man of considerable religious learning and spiritual depth whose own journal (Ma'arif) reveals a rich inner life. Rumi received a comprehensive education: Quran, hadith, fiqh, Arabic language and literature, theology, and the Sufi spiritual tradition.

The Refugee: Flight Before the Mongols

When Rumi was a young child, his family left Balkh. The exact timing and motivation of this departure are debated — some sources suggest it was before the Mongol invasion of Khwarezm, driven by his father's theological disputes with local authorities; others suggest the Mongol threat directly motivated the departure. What is clear is that the family joined the vast wave of refugees from Khorasan and Transoxiana who fled westward before the Mongol advance in the second decade of the 13th century CE.

The family's journey took years: from Balkh to Nishapur (where Rumi reportedly met the elderly Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar, who is said to have given him a copy of his Asrar-nameh), then to Baghdad, Mecca (hajj), Anatolia, and eventually to Konya, where they settled around 626 AH (1228-1229 CE) under the patronage of the Seljuk Sultan of Rum.

This journey shaped Rumi profoundly. He had seen, as a child and young man, the destruction of the civilization he was born into. He knew what it meant to be a refugee. He had encountered the diverse world of the medieval Islamic ecumene — Arab, Persian, Turkish, Sufi, jurist — and absorbed its multiplicity.

The Scholar in Konya

In Konya, Rumi followed his father into the role of scholar and teacher. After his father's death (628 AH / 1231 CE), he studied for several years in Aleppo and Damascus under the guidance of Sayyid Burhan al-Din Muhaqqiq Tirmidhi, a disciple of his father. He returned to Konya around 633 AH as a qualified Islamic scholar and preacher who attracted a circle of students and disciples.

For approximately a decade, Rumi functioned as a conventional (if gifted) scholar of Islamic law and spirituality. He gave legal opinions, taught in the madrasa, led prayers. His reputation was that of a serious jurist and teacher. This phase of his life is often overlooked in popular presentations of Rumi, but it is essential: the spiritual depths he would later express were built on a foundation of solid Islamic learning.

The Encounter with Shams-i-Tabrizi

The transformation came with the arrival in Konya of Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Malikdad al-Tabrizi — known as Shams-i-Tabrizi (the Sun of Tabriz). The precise date of their first meeting is given in various sources as 642 AH (1244 CE) or nearby years. Shams was a wandering, unconventional Sufi mystic, apparently middle-aged, who had spent decades seeking a spiritual companion capable of receiving the highest levels of spiritual understanding he wished to transmit.

The impact of their meeting on Rumi was transformative and, by all accounts, immediate. Rumi abandoned his formal teaching schedule; he spent days and weeks in private conversation (sohbet) with Shams. His students and family were bewildered, then increasingly resentful — the great scholar had seemingly abandoned his proper role for obsessive companionship with a stranger.

The nature of the Rumi-Shams relationship has been interpreted and misinterpreted widely. Classical Sufi understanding frames it as the encounter between a seeker and a spiritual master of the highest order — the relationship that unlocks the student's latent spiritual capacity. Contemporary popular presentations, especially in the West, have sometimes read a romantic or erotic dimension into their friendship. Muslim scholars generally reject this interpretation as both historically unfounded and theologically inappropriate: the classical Sufi tradition of spiritual friendship (sohbet) between master and disciple has no such dimension in orthodox understanding.

Shams disappeared from Konya, probably around 645 AH (1247-1248 CE). He may have been killed by Rumi's resentful disciples — the sources are not definitive. His disappearance, and the grief it caused Rumi, became the emotional catalyst for the torrent of poetry that followed.

The Masnavi: The Quran of the Persian Language

The Masnavi-yi Ma'navi (Spiritual Verses of Meaning) is Rumi's masterwork: approximately 25,700 verses in six books, composed over the last twenty years of his life, often at the prompting of his devoted disciple Husam al-Din Chalabi who served as his amanuensis. Rumi reportedly dictated verses while spinning, walking, or in states of spiritual absorption.

The Masnavi's admirers called it "the Quran in the Persian language" — a title that was intended as the highest possible praise but that requires qualification. It is not revelation; it is poetry, and its author was human. Persian literature has celebrated it as the greatest work in the Persian language, and this assessment has merit: the Masnavi's command of imagery, narrative, and spiritual psychology has rarely been matched.

The Masnavi begins with the famous reed flute passage — the ney (reed flute) complaining of its separation from the reed bed, used as a metaphor for the soul's longing for its divine origin. This opening is one of the most quoted pieces of Persian poetry ever written and expresses, in beautiful form, a central Islamic spiritual concept: the soul's longing for return to Allah.

The work is structured as a series of stories, parables, and digressive meditations, each illustrating spiritual and ethical points. Many stories are drawn from the Quran (the stories of the Prophets), from hadith, and from Persian literary tradition. Rumi quotes Quran and hadith extensively throughout the Masnavi, grounding his spiritual teachings in recognized Islamic sources.

The Divan-e Shams-i-Tabrizi

Rumi's lyrical poetry was collected in the Divan-e Kabir (Great Divan), also known as the Divan-e Shams-i-Tabrizi because he signed many poems not with his own name but with Shams's — attributing the poems to the spiritual master who had unlocked his capacity for expression. This collection contains tens of thousands of verses in ghazal and ruba'i forms, among the most emotionally intense spiritual poetry in any language.

The Mevlevi Order and the Sama Ceremony

After Rumi's death, his son Sultan Walad systematized the community of disciples into a formal Sufi order — the Mevlevi (in Turkish) or Mawlawi (in Arabic) order. The order developed a distinctive spiritual practice centered on the sama ceremony: a musical gathering involving chanted poetry, particular musical instruments (including the ney, drum, and lute), and the famous whirling movement that has made the "whirling dervishes" among the most recognized images in the world.

The sama is one of the most debated practices in Islamic jurisprudence. The majority position among classical Sunni scholars is that the formal sama ceremony as practiced in the Mevlevi order is an innovation (bid'ah) without foundation in the Prophet's ﷺ practice or that of the early Muslim community. Ibn Taymiyyah (may Allah have mercy on him) was among the most explicit critics of sama. Most Hanbali, Shafi'i, and many Maliki scholars have historically been skeptical or opposed. The argument for permissibility has been made by some scholars, but it remains a minority position in classical Sunni jurisprudence.

This does not negate the sincerity of those who practice it, but Muslim readers should understand that the sama is controversial rather than universally accepted.

The Ahl us-Sunnah Assessment: Reading Rumi Rightly

Any honest assessment of Rumi must hold multiple things in tension simultaneously:

What is beyond dispute: Rumi was a Muslim scholar with solid traditional training. His love for Allah, the Prophet ﷺ, and the Quran permeates his poetry. His knowledge of Quran, hadith, and the Islamic sciences was genuine and his references to them are accurate. His works contain profound insights into spiritual psychology — the nature of the ego, the experience of spiritual longing, the stations of humility and love — that have benefited Muslims for centuries. He was not a heretic in his personal intentions.

What requires critical engagement: Some passages in the Masnavi contain ideas that commentators — both Muslim and non-Muslim — have found difficult to reconcile with orthodox Sunni theology. Certain passages about the relativity of religious forms, certain images that appear to equate or merge the believer with the Divine, and certain stories that seem to privilege spiritual intuition over legal compliance have been read in ways that go beyond Ahl us-Sunnah theological bounds. Muslim scholars have always read such passages within the broader context of Rumi's Islamic identity, but they must be engaged with scholarly care rather than accepted uncritically.

The Western misappropriation: The most widely read "Rumi" in the contemporary West is largely a fabrication — poems stripped of their Islamic context, reframed as generic spirituality, with references to Allah, Muhammad ﷺ, and Islamic practice systematically removed or translated into vague terms. The Rumi who is quoted on motivational posters and in secular wedding ceremonies is not the Rumi who lived and died as a Muslim scholar in 7th century AH Anatolia. Muslims should be aware of this appropriation.

Death and Burial

Rumi died in Konya on 5 Jumada al-Thani 672 AH (December 17, 1273 CE). According to accounts preserved by his biographers, as his health declined in his final days, he reportedly expressed equanimity about death — seeing it as a reunion (wissal) rather than a departure. His funeral was attended, according to the hagiographical sources, by people of many communities including Christians and Jews who had been moved by his presence — a detail that reflects the broader context of multi-religious Anatolia.

He was buried in Konya, where his tomb (the Yeşil Türbe, Green Tomb) became one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the Islamic world. Ibn Battuta visited the tomb on his travels and noted the reverence in which Rumi was held. The site is today a museum open to all, the Mevlana Museum, one of the most visited sites in Turkey.

From the Athari perspective, traveling specifically to a grave as a site of pilgrimage (ziyara for tawassul purposes) is problematic regardless of whose grave it is — the Prophet ﷺ warned against taking graves as places of worship and against making his own grave a festival site ('id). Visiting graves with the intention of remembering death and making du'a for the deceased is permitted and encouraged; transforming a grave into a devotional pilgrimage destination is the innovation that classical Hanbali scholars, including Ibn Taymiyyah (who addressed Rumi's tradition explicitly), warned against.

Rumi should be read as what he was: a Muslim scholar and poet of extraordinary gifts, whose works reflect both the heights of Islamic spiritual insight and the complexities of Sufi theological development. Neither uncritical hagiography nor dismissive rejection does justice to his legacy.

Sources:

• Rumi, Masnavi-yi Ma'navi (tr. Jawid Mojaddedi, Reynold Nicholson)
• Sultan Walad, Ibtida-nameh (earliest biography by his son)
• Aflaki, Manaqib al-'Arifin (Hagiography of the Mevlevi Order)
• Sipahsalar, Risala (early biography)
• Ibn Battuta, Rihla (visit to Rumi's tomb)
• Annemarie Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaluddin Rumi
• Franklin Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West