Rumi

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.

The whirling ceremony the world now attaches to Rumi's name was given its institutional form after his death. Rumi himself whirled, spontaneously and sometimes in the street, and grief for Shams is bound into the practice's origin stories, but he organised nothing. It was his son, Sultan Walad, who gathered the Konya circle into a lineage, secured patronage, and built the Mevlevi order with the founder's tomb at its centre; later generations fixed the sema into the precise liturgy it remains, the white gowns, the tall camel hair caps, the slow unfolding from crossed arms into rotation, each element assigned a meaning in a ceremony that is prayer and not performance. The order became one of the most influential in Ottoman lands, cultivating music and calligraphy, and Mevlevi composers shaped Ottoman classical music for centuries. The other vehicle of his afterlife is the Masnavi, the long didactic poem in six books that his companion Husam al-Din encouraged him to dictate: tale nested inside tale, fable and commentary interleaved, opening with the reed flute crying for the reed bed it was cut from.

Persian tradition honoured it with the epithet the Quran in Persian, a phrase usually credited to the poet Jami. In 1925 the Turkish Republic closed the dervish lodges, and the ceremony survived by becoming, officially, heritage; it is still danced in Konya each December on the anniversary of his death, which the order calls the wedding night.