Jalaluddin Rumi was born on September 30, 1207 CE in a small town near
Balkh in
Khorasan (now
Afghanistan). When he was about five years old, his
father took the family to
Samarqand, and then sometime between 1215 and 1220, he made his way west to
Damascus. He then moved to
Anatolia either at the request of the
sultan (www.encyclopedia.com) or possibly because of the impending
invasion by the
Mongols (Schimmel, 1992).
He married a young woman at age 18 who had come with them from
Khorasan. His first child, a son named
Sultan Walad, was born in 1226. When his father died in 1231, Rumi took over his father's teaching position at the
university in
Konya and taught traditional
theological sciences for several years.
In late October of 1244, Rumi was approached by a
stranger who asked him a
question which made him
faint. The stranger,
Shamsuddin of Tabriz, awakened in Rumi a
mystical awareness and the two became inseparable. Rumi's family was
jealous of Shams, and perhaps sensing the increasingly dangerous atmosphere, Shams one day disappeared.
Rumi was
heartbroken, but it was at this point he became a
poet, transforming his longing for the Divine Sun that he saw in Shams into
ecstatic poetry,
music, and
whirling dance. After a while, Shams was found in Damascus, and Rumi sent his son Sultan Walad to bring him back. With Shams return, the
sohbet continued, but the jealousy in the family grew to a point where Shams disappeared again, this time probably
murdered by Rumi's son
Alaeddin.
Rumi's
collective work is called the
Diwan-i Shams-i Tabriz. While Rumi was teaching and writing, his students urged him to compose a mystical
mathnawi, which he did with
Husamuddin, a student of his, starting around 1258. He continued to teach until his death on December 17, 1273.