Rumi began the Masnavi, properly the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, the spiritual couplets, at the request of his closest disciple, Husam al-Din Chelebi, late in his life in Konya, and dictated its roughly twenty five thousand couplets to Husam al-Din over more than a decade, breaking off, tradition holds, at a family death and resuming afterward. The poem is organized into six books, each opening with a formal exordium and proceeding through a loosely linked chain of parables, animal fables, Quranic episodes and direct spiritual instruction, a structure closer to a teacher's running commentary than to a planned treatise. Its most famous opening lines, the reed's lament for separation from the reed bed it was cut from, set the poem's governing image, that the soul's condition in the world is a condition of exile, and that spiritual practice is the discipline of finding the way back.
Rumi died in Konya in 1273 before completing the poem's intended scope, and it passed into the keeping of the order his son Sultan Walad organized formally around his father's teaching, the Mevlevi order, known outside Turkey as the whirling dervishes for its sema ceremony of ritual turning. Mevlevi lodges made sustained study and recitation of the Masnavi a central discipline for advanced initiates for centuries, and commentaries on it in Persian, Ottoman Turkish and later other languages form one of the largest bodies of exegetical literature attached to any work of Islamic mystical poetry.