Overview
Rumi is, by some measures, the most translated and most widely read poet in the contemporary English-speaking world. He is also, in his actual texts, almost completely unknown to most of his readers. The Rumi who circulates on social media — the inspirational quotes, the love-and-light affirmations, the curated sentences that fit on a small white square — bears only loose relation to the poet who wrote the Mathnawi in thirteenth-century Konya.
I write this not to scold the popular Rumi. The fragments that circulate are often beautiful, even when loose, and they have brought genuine readers to the actual work.
Evidence summary
I write it because the actual work is something different from what most of his English-language readers understand it to be, and the actual work — engaged seriously — is one of the most extraordinary inner-work resources human civilization has produced. This article is about Rumi as practice.
About the Mathnawi as the spiritual textbook that, for seven centuries, has been used by the Mevlevi order and by readers across the Islamic world for the deepest forms of inner work. About what it means to read him not as inspirational supplement but as ongoing practice.
Care considerations
Who Rumi actually was Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207–1273) was a Persian-language poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi master who lived most of his life in Konya, in what is now central Turkey. He was, by his early forties, a respected scholar and teacher in the orthodox Islamic tradition. Then, in 1244, he met Shams of Tabriz — a wandering Sufi master — and the encounter transformed him.
The poetry that followed, including the massive Mathnawi (some 25,000 verses across six books) and the Divan-e Shams (his collection of ghazals), is the record of that transformation and the teaching that emerged from it. Rumi was not, in his own context, primarily a poet. He was a teacher in a specific spiritual lineage.
Next steps
The poems were teaching texts — designed to do work on the reader, to convey states of consciousness, to instruct in the practice of becoming. They sit in a particular tradition of Sufi contemplative work that took the inner life with extraordinary seriousness. His followers founded the Mevlevi order — known to the West for the whirling dervishes, the sema practice of turning meditation that has been practiced in the order for seven hundred years.
The poems are connected to this practice. They were and are read aloud, recited, memorized, contemplated, returned to across years. They are practice texts. The translation problem Several issues with Rumi in English worth knowing: The popular translations are loose.