Rumi

Here is an unlikely sentence: the best-selling poet in the United States has been dead for over 700 years, wrote in medieval Persian, and was a devout Muslim mystic. In 2014 the BBC reported that Jalal al-Din Rumi outsells every homegrown American poet, his verses printed on wedding invitations, greeting cards, and Instagram feeds. How a 13th-century scholar from Anatolia became a fixture of Western spirituality is a story about love, loss, and translation.

Konya and the man who broke him open

Rumi was born in 1207, probably in what is now Tajikistan or Afghanistan, and his family fled west ahead of the advancing Mongols, finally settling in Konya, a cultured city in Seljuk Anatolia (which is why he is called Rumi, meaning 'from Rum,' the land of the former Romans). By his late thirties he was a respected, rather conventional jurist and preacher running a religious school.

Then, in 1244, he met Shams of Tabriz, a fierce wandering dervish who challenged everything about his settled life. Their friendship was so intense that Rumi's students grew jealous, and Shams eventually vanished, possibly murdered. The loss did not silence Rumi; it turned him into a poet. Grief and longing poured out as tens of thousands of verses, many gathered in a vast collection, the Divan, named for Shams himself. Rumi wrote as a man who had lost the beloved and understood, in that wound, the soul's longing for God.

The reed and the whirling

Rumi's masterpiece is the Masnavi, roughly 25,000 couplets of stories, parables, and teaching that later admirers called 'the Quran in Persian.' It opens with one of the most famous images in Islamic literature: a reed cut from the reed bed, hollowed into a flute, crying because it has been separated from its source. That, for Rumi, is the human condition, everyone aching to return to the divine origin they were torn from.

After his death in 1273, his followers organized into the Mevlevi order, whose members became known in the West as the whirling dervishes. Their sema ceremony, the slow spinning dance with one palm turned up to heaven and one turned down to earth, is not entertainment but a moving meditation, the body turning as the planets turn, emptying the self to make room for God.

Two Rumis

The Rumi on the American nightstand is often a smoothed-over sage of universal love, quoted with the Islam quietly removed. The popular English versions, above all Coleman Barks', are loose, beautiful reworkings that rarely mention the Quran, prayer, or the Prophet, though Rumi's originals are saturated with them. Scholars call this a 'spiritual but not religious' makeover, and it says as much about modern Western hunger as about the poet. The real Rumi was a Muslim theologian for whom every line of verse was an act of worship. He remains both: the mystic the West adopted, and the devout believer he never stopped being, still asking the reed why it weeps.