In 1231 a college of religious learning in Konya, in central Anatolia, passed from a father, who had just died, to his son. The father, Baha al-Din Walad, was a preacher and jurist. Around 1216 he had brought his family west out of Central Asia, shortly before the Mongols invaded; by 1229 he had settled in Konya at the invitation of the Seljuk sultan, Ala al-Din Kayqubad. He left behind the Ma'arif, a book of his own mystical teaching. The son was Rumi, and he was raised for a learned career. Burhan al-Din Tirmidhi, a former disciple of his father's, arrived in 1232 and taught him for about nine years. Rumi studied further in Aleppo and Damascus, and by the early 1240s he was a jurist of the Hanafi school, issuing legal opinions and preaching in the town.
In November 1244 a wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, came to Konya, and Rumi, then thirty-seven, attached himself to the stranger so completely that his own disciples resented it. With Shams came sama, worship through music and dance, which many jurists disapproved of; Sultan Walad, Rumi's elder son, later wrote that his father never stopped listening to music and dancing. Shams left for Syria in 1246. While he was away, Rumi wrote lyric poems to call him back, though he later said that where he came from nothing was more shameful than being a poet. Sultan Walad went to Damascus and brought Shams home the next year. Late in 1247 or in 1248 Shams disappeared for good. Some accounts say he was murdered, with suspicion falling on Rumi's younger son, Ala al-Din; whether he was killed or simply left is not known. Rumi went to Damascus to look for him and did not find him.
The claim his poetry makes is what the jurist learned in those years: love, and not learning, is how a human soul finds its way back to God. Every soul, in Rumi's account, has been cut off from the source it came from and lives in longing to return, and that longing is the surest guide it has. Knowledge that leaves its holder unchanged is no guide at all; the arguer who trusts only proof walks, in one of his images, on wooden legs. Love for one human being can open the way, because it takes apart the learned, respected self that stands in the way. Rumi signed about a third of his ghazals, short rhymed love lyrics, with Shams's name instead of his own. None of this took him outside Islam: he remained a Muslim teacher who argued from the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet, and later readers called his longest poem the Qur'an in Persian.
That poem, the Masnavi, is his best known. Around 1260 Husam al-Din Chalabi, the disciple who became his scribe, asked him for a teaching poem, and Rumi spent his remaining years composing it aloud while Husam wrote it down: six books of stories and teaching in some 25,000 couplets, the last left unfinished.
Rumi died in Konya on 17 December 1273. By the account of Aflaki, a later biographer of the Mevlevi order, Christians and Jews joined the crowd that mourned him. Husam led his followers first; Sultan Walad then organised them into that order, built around sama and its whirling dance. In 1898 the Cambridge scholar Reynold Nicholson published a selection of the lyrics in English. From 1976 Coleman Barks, an American poet who read no Persian, reworked such scholarly translations into books that made Rumi a best-selling poet in the United States; critics have faulted those versions for removing the Islam from the poems. In Konya his tomb is now a museum, and on each 17 December Mevlevi dervishes mark the day of his death by turning.