1207 - 1273

I want to begin this one differently, because for me, this is not simply a profile of a historical figure. Rumi has been with me since before I had the language to understand what was happening to me when I heard him. I was a child the first time his words entered the room — and they have never, in any meaningful sense, left it.

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi was born in Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan, in 1207, in the final luminous decades of the classical Islamic world before the devastation of the Mongol invasions. He died in Konya, in what is now Turkey, in 1273. In between, he produced one of the most extraordinary bodies of mystical poetry in any language: the Masnavi, six volumes of spiritual verse drawn out of him line by line by his companion Husam Chalabi; the Divan-e Shams, an ocean of lyric poetry composed in the white heat of his encounter with the wandering mystic Shams-e Tabrizi; and the Fihi ma Fihi, a collection of spoken discourses revealing the precision and rigour of his theological mind.

I want to be direct about something here, because it matters to me deeply. The Masnavi is not simply great poetry. In my own spiritual development, it has functioned as something closer to scripture’s truest companion — what I would call the most faithful and accurate tafsir, the most complete exegesis, of the Quran that exists. One of my own teachers once told me something I have never forgotten: that you do not require a second commentary. The Masnavi is sufficient. It is, in itself, a doorway into the entire tradition. I have found this to be true every single time I have returned to it.

This is why his words appear, again and again, in my own work — not as ornament, but as necessity. In ALIVE, featuring Homayoun Shajarian, his poetry carries the emotional centre of the piece. And in Ecstasy, the title track of my new album, Homayoun once again sings Rumi’s words — across eight centuries, his voice still finding new throats to live through.

There is a dimension of Rumi that is criminally underappreciated, even by those who claim to know him well: he was, in addition to everything else, a master musician. A genius composer in his own right. This is not poetic flattery on my part — it is a technical observation, and one that both my own teachers and I have arrived at independently. Read the Masnavi closely, with a musician’s ear, and you will notice something extraordinary: he frequently breaks metre. Deliberately. Knowingly. In a manner that only someone with a profound, internalised understanding of rhythm could execute — the same way a master composer will break a rule precisely because he has fully mastered it first. This is not the work of a poet who happened to love music. This is the work of a musician whose primary instrument happened to be language.

There is a story — told and retold across the tradition — of a young Rumi encountering the great poet Attar, author of The Conference of the Birds, while still a boy travelling with his father. Attar is said to have looked at the child, then turned to his father and remarked, with something between astonishment and prophecy, that this boy would soon set fire to the hearts of the lovesick everywhere. [Speculation regarding precise historical accuracy of this account, though it is widely transmitted within the tradition.] Whether or not every detail of that meeting survived intact through the centuries, the impression it left is unmistakable: even as a child, something in Rumi was already visible to those capable of seeing it.

But it was a second encounter, decades later, that truly broke Rumi open. In 1244, in the marketplace of Konya, a wandering, fierce, and entirely unconventional dervish named Shams-e Tabrizi crossed paths with him. The accounts of what passed between them vary in detail, but the substance is consistent: Shams is said to have approached Rumi — by then an established and widely respected jurist and scholar — and posed a question so disarming, so unanswerable by conventional learning, that it stopped Rumi in his tracks. One well-known version of the story has Shams asking who was greater: the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, or the mystic Bayazid Bastami, who had once declared “Glory be to me, how great is my majesty” in a state of ecstatic annihilation, while the Prophet ﷺ prayed, “Glory be to You, we have not known You as You deserve to be known.” The question cut to the very heart of spiritual station, sincerity, and the difference between intoxicated utterance and perfected servanthood. [The precise wording and circumstances of this exchange are recorded with some variation across different historical sources, and should be understood as part of the oral and hagiographic tradition surrounding their meeting rather than a single verified transcript.] Whatever was actually said, something in that exchange dismantled the scholar Rumi had built himself into, and revealed the lover that had been waiting underneath.

What followed was one of the most intense and consequential friendships in the history of mysticism. For a period of months, Rumi essentially withdrew from his students and his public role, retreating into the company of Shams almost entirely — in conversation, in contemplation, in a companionship so absorbing that it scandalised many around him, including, it is said, members of his own household and following. This was not eccentricity. It was transformation in real time. Shams became, for Rumi, what the tradition calls a mirror — not a teacher in the conventional sense, but a presence so unguarded and so spiritually undefended that Rumi, in looking at him, finally saw himself. The poet that the world now knows did not exist before Shams arrived. He emerged because of him.

And then, as suddenly as he had appeared, Shams vanished. Most accounts suggest he was murdered — possibly with the involvement of those close to Rumi who resented the hold this stranger had over their master. [The exact circumstances of Shams’s disappearance and death remain historically uncertain and disputed among scholars.] What is not in dispute is the effect. Rumi’s grief became the furnace from which the Divan-e Shams was forged — an entire body of ecstatic poetry written, remarkably, not in Rumi’s own name but in Shams’s. He gave away his own authorship to the friend he had lost. Even now, I find that almost unbearably moving.

For those who want to go further into this particular relationship, I would point you toward Rumi and Me, presented as the autobiography of Shams-e Tabrizi himself. It is an unusual and genuinely illuminating book — written from the other side of the encounter, so to speak — and it offers a perspective on this friendship that most accounts, understandably focused on Rumi, simply do not provide. I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to sit inside this story a little longer.

There is a lesson in all of this for any artist, or indeed any human being. The encounter with the living presence of truth — whether in a teacher, a friend, a piece of music, or an act of love — does not leave us unchanged. And the loss of that presence does not end the encounter. It deepens it. Rumi kept writing to Shams for the rest of his life. His name appears thousands of times across the Divan. The beloved, once truly seen, cannot be unfound.

It is worth pausing, too, on something easily glossed over: Rumi was, for the greater part of his adult life, an immigrant. Born in Central Asia, he and his family fled westward ahead of the Mongol advance, eventually settling in Konya, in Anatolia — a foreign land, a foreign court, far from the soil and language of his earliest years. I think about this often. To have lost a homeland, to have rebuilt an entire life and identity in unfamiliar territory, and still to have produced a body of work of such staggering universality — this could not have been easy. There must have been loneliness in it. Displacement leaves its mark on every soul that endures it. And yet what emerged from that displacement was not bitterness, but one of the most expansive, generous spiritual visions in human history. He taught and was sought after by students from beyond his own immediate tradition — Christians, Jews, and others crossed considerable distances to sit before him, and were welcomed.

This, I think, tells us something essential. Genuine spiritual depth does not contract. It widens.

It is said that at his funeral, people of every faith present in Konya — Muslims, Christians, Jews — came to mourn him, each praying in their own language, according to their own tradition. [This account is widely reported within Islamic and Mevlevi historical sources; I note it as tradition rather than independently verified historical record.] Whether one treats this as precise history or as something closer to legend, what it communicates is unambiguous: the scale of a man whose impact could not be contained within a single community’s grief. Eight hundred years later, he remains among the most read and most beloved poets anywhere in the world — a permanence almost no other literary figure in human history can claim.

I will not dwell long on this, because it does not deserve extensive attention, but it must be named. In recent decades, there have been persistent efforts — particularly in certain popular Western readings — to present Rumi as a kind of generic, tradition-free mystic, detached from Islam, detached from the Quran, detached from the Prophet ﷺ. Anyone with even modest, sincere engagement with his actual writings will recognise this immediately for what it is: a serious misreading.

Rumi himself left no ambiguity on the matter. He wrote, with characteristic directness: “I am the servant of the Quran as long as I have life. I am the dust on the path of Muhammad, the Chosen one.” This is not the language of a man working outside his tradition, or merely borrowing its vocabulary for effect. The Masnavi itself opens by declaring itself a commentary on the deeper meaning of the Quran. His entire metaphysical architecture — fana (spiritual annihilation), the dissolution of the nafs (the ego), the journey of return — is built from within the Islamic and Sufi inheritance, not adjacent to it. To remove Rumi from this context is not to liberate him. It is to lose him entirely.

For those who wish to go deeper, a few recommendations. The Masnavi, translated by Jawid Mojaddedi, remains the most faithful scholarly translation available, and the place to begin if you want Rumi rather than an approximation of him. The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, is more freely rendered, and for many people, the gateway through which they first encountered him. Rumi: Past and Present, East and West by Franklin D. Lewis is the most comprehensive scholarly biography in existence.

And above all — The Garden of Truth by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. This book holds a particular place in my own life. My copy was gifted to me personally by Dr Nasr, signed in his own hand. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most powerful books I have ever read — a work that situates Rumi precisely within the broader landscape of Sufi metaphysics, written by someone who has lived inside that landscape his entire life. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Eight centuries on, and Rumi has not dimmed. If anything, the noise of the modern world has only made his voice more necessary, not less. Because in the end, what Rumi asks of us is not complicated, even if it is not easy. He does not ask for theological sophistication. He does not ask for perfect doctrine, perfect practice, perfect anything. He asks for two things only: to be, fully and honestly, stripped of pretence — and to love, without condition, without calculation, without the armour we spend our lives constructing around our hearts.

That is the whole of it. That has always been the whole of it. And it is, I suspect, the reason his reed flute is still crying out, eight hundred years later, in a language every grieving, longing, searching human heart somehow still understands.

I would love to know what Rumi means to you — whether he found you young, as he found me, or arrived later in life, at a moment you needed him most. Do share your thoughts and reflections below. I always look forward to reading them.

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With love and reverence,

Sami