JALÄL-UD-Din RUMÏ, jà-lal' ud-dên' (1207-73).
A Persian philosopher and poet, and the greatest of
all the mystics of the Orient. He was born at
Balkh, in Khorasan, of noble and wealthy parents,
and under the careful training of his father, Baha
ud-Dïn, a scholar of wide repute, early became a
visionary and a mystic. He subsequently studied at Aleppo
and Damascus, and in 1231 succeeded his father as the
head of the college at Iconium (Konya), in Asia Minor.
He came for three years under the influence of a
wandering dervish, Shams-ud-Dïn of Tabriz, whose
mysterious death in 1247 he commemorated by founding
the Man- law Order of Dervishes, a Sufistic sect. For
them he wrote the Mathnawi, a collection of
tales and moral precepts 'containing 40,000 couplets,
in six books, in imitation of similar poems by Senayi
and Farid-ud-Din Attar. This didactic work, which
surpasses its models, has been partly translated into
English by Redhouse (London, 1881) and Whinfield (London,
1887), and into German by Rosen (Leipzig, 1849).
Another work, the Diwan, a collection of
lyrics of high poetic merit and great originality,
has also been preserved, and was published, with a
translation and notes, by Rosenzweig (Vienna, 1838).
Of all the Persian Sufis, Jalal-ud-Din is the most
important. To him the Ego, the world, and the Divine
are one (see Sufiism), and in his works for the
first time in Persian mysticism we find the doctrine
of transmigration taught. Consult Ethe,
"Neupersische Literatur," in Geiger and
Kühn, Grundriss der iranischen Philologie, vol.
ii. (Strassburg. 1896).
From The New International Encyclopaedia
edited by Daniel Coit Gilman, Harry Thurston Peck,
Frank Moore Colby 1911
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Apparently that, too, was quoted
from Rumi's works. Though I never
took the poems Mollagul taught me during my
childhood seriously, I discovered they had ...
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Ali Shir Navai relates a similar
horse pursuit game in which he himself played
during his youth with a Rumi
(meaning, Anatolian) Turk named Sari-Tula: ...