Author: Rumi

Rumi was a jurist and teacher in Konya, in what is now Turkey, until he met a wandering dervish called Shams of Tabriz in 1244 and stopped writing prose. The friendship lasted a few years, Shams vanished and was probably killed, and the grief produced tens of thousands of lines of Persian verse, the Masnavi among them. His followers formed the order that became the Mevlevi, the whirling dervishes. He is often called the best-selling poet in America, which is true of the versions circulating there rather than of him: the popular English renderings by Coleman Barks rework other people's translations, since Barks does not read Persian, and they leave out most of the Quranic material.