The 13th-century Persian Sufi poet, born in the eastern Islamic world and settled in Konya in Anatolia, who began as a respected Muslim scholar and jurist and, after his transforming friendship with the wandering mystic Shams of Tabriz, became the ecstatic poet of divine love whose vast Masnavi and lyric Divan made him one of the most widely read poets in any language — and whose order inspired the whirling sema ceremony of the Mevlevi dervishes.
A learned preacher in his thirties is leading prayers, teaching law, and answering legal questions for the people of Konya. Then a ragged wandering mystic named Shams arrives and asks him a single strange question, and the scholar's settled life breaks open. The two men shut themselves away for months in conversation, and the respected jurist begins to turn toward music, movement, and verse. Out of that disruption came tens of thousands of lines of poetry about a soul longing to return to God. The man was Jalal al-Din Rumi, and the friendship that undid his career made him a poet read across continents.