Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī

Rūmī was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, and Sufi mystic, born in present-day Afghanistan and settled in Konya in Anatolia, whose work has made him one of the most widely read poets in the world. A respected scholar in midlife, he was utterly transformed by his encounter with the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, whose companionship—and traumatic disappearance—ignited the outpouring of ecstatic poetry collected in the Dīwān-e Shams and the vast spiritual epic the Masnavi, often called “the Quran in Persian.” His followers founded the Mevlevi order, famous for the samāʿ, the whirling dance that enacts the soul’s turning toward the divine.

Rūmī’s central teaching is that love is the supreme transformative force—the fire that burns away the ego and the gravitational pull that draws the soul back to its source. For the mind-power lineage he represents the fullest flowering of the love-and-surrender stream that began with Rabia and ʿAṭṭār: not love as sentiment but as an ontological engine of transformation and union.

His imagery of the reed torn from the reed-bed, crying to return, gives the tradition one of its great metaphors for the separated self longing for reunion with the whole. In the modern era Rūmī has been heavily absorbed (and often softened or decontextualized) into Western New Age and self-help spirituality, where his verses circulate as touchstones for “alignment,” surrender, and the primacy of love—making him a major, if frequently flattened, transmitter into contemporary culture.