Jalal al-Din was already a respected jurist and teacher in Konya, in his late thirties, with a madrasa and students, when he met the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz in 1244. The encounter demolished the life he had. He abandoned teaching for Shams' company, to the scandal of his circle; Shams disappeared, was retrieved, and vanished finally around 1248, possibly murdered by Rumi's own followers. The enormous body of lyric poetry known as the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi is attributed to Shams as though the lost friend were the author, which is the most extraordinary act of attribution in Persian literature.
The Masnavi, some twenty-five thousand lines dictated in his later years, is the discursive work, stories, digressions, parables, and commentary, opening with the reed torn from the reed-bed and crying for its origin.
The English-language Rumi needs a caveat, and Franklin Lewis's critical study is the place it is made. Most of the popular versions are not translations; they are English reworkings by writers who do not read Persian, working from earlier scholarly translations, and they systematically remove the Quranic quotation, the Islamic legal and ritual references, and the specifically Muslim frame of the whole. The result is a Rumi acceptable as generic spirituality and detached from the religion he practised, taught and never left. He was a Muslim jurist, and the poetry is Islamic mystical poetry throughout.