Rumi and the Poetics of Mystical Love

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh, in the region of Khorasan (in present-day Afghanistan), into a family of religious scholars headed by his father, Baha al-Din Walad, a preacher and jurist. Fleeing the advancing Mongol invasions that devastated Central Asia from the 1220s onward, the family undertook a long westward migration — traditionally said to have included a stop in Nishapur, where legend holds the young Rumi met the Persian poet Attar — before eventually settling in Konya, capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia, then a relatively secure and cosmopolitan center under Seljuk patronage. Rumi succeeded his father as a respected teacher of religious law and theology in Konya, a comfortable and conventional scholarly career that gave no early indication of the poetic transformation to come.