Rumi: the World's Greatest Poet

Rumi is the world's greatest poet. His poems and sayings will open the gates of the heart. His words unlock the heart within all souls. His devotion and love for Allah is beyond description. Only souls of the highest elevation can bring such words into reality. The poems of Rumi should part of mandatory study of spiritual materials in high schools and universities.

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207 – 1273 CE)

Commonly known as Rumi, he is widely celebrated for his mystical poetry which captivates readers and inspires spiritual seekers around the world. Rumi was born in the early thirteenth century, in what is now Afghanistan. He later settled in Konya, in present-day Turkey, with his family. His father was a preacher and religious scholar, and he introduced Rumi to Sufism. Rumi continued his theological education in Syria, where he studied the more traditional legal codes of Sunni Islam, and later returned to Konya as a seminary teacher. It was there that he met an elder traveller, Shams-i-Tabriz, who became his mentor.

The nature of the intimate friendship between the two is much debated, but Shams, everyone agrees, had a lasting influence on Rumi’s religious practice and his poetry. Shams pushed Rumi to question his scriptural education, debating Koranic passages with him and emphasizing the idea of devotion as finding oneness with God. Rumi would come to blend the intuitive love for God that he found in Sufism with the legal codes of Sunni Islam and the mystical thought he learned from Shams. Rumi built a large following in cosmopolitan Konya, incorporating Sufis, Muslim literalists and theologians, Christians, and Jews, as well as the local Sunni Seljuk rulers.