The Life and Spiritual
Milieu of Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi
In the last decades of
the Twentieth Century the spiritual influence of Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi is
being strongly felt by people of diverse beliefs throughout the Western world.
He is being recognized here in the West, as he has been for seven centuries in
the Middle East and Western Asia, as one of the greatest literary and spiritual
figures of all time.
Different qualities of
Rumi have been brought forth by a variety of new translations that have
appeared during the nineteen-eighties. He has been presented as both refined
and sensual, sober and ecstatic, deeply serious and extremely funny, rarefied
and accessible. It is a sign of his profound universality that he has been so
many things to so many people.
Rumi’s Life
Jalâluddîn Rumi was
born in 1207 in Balkh in what is today Afghanistan. At an early age his family
left Balkh because of the danger of the invading Mongols and settled in Konya,
Turkey, which was then the capital of the Seljuk Empire. His father Bahauddin
was a great religious teacher who received a position at the university in
Konya.
Mevlâna’s early
spiritual education was under the tutelage of his father Bahauddin and later
under his father’s close friend Sayyid Burhaneddin of Balkh. The circumstances
surrounding Sayyid’s undertaking of the education of his friend’s son are
interesting: Sayyid had been in Balkh, Afghanistan when he felt the death of
his friend Bahauddin and realized that he must go to Konya to take over
Jalâluddîn’s spiritual education. He came to Konya when Mevlâna was about
twenty-four years old, and for nine years instructed him in “the science of the
prophets and states,” beginning with a strict forty day retreat and continuing
with various disciplines of meditation and fasting. During this time Jalâluddîn
also spent more than four years in Aleppo and Damascus studying with some of
the greatest religious minds of the time.
As the years passed,
Mevlâna grew both in knowledge and consciousness of God. Eventually Sayyid
Burhaneddin felt that he had fulfilled his responsibility toward Jalâluddîn,
and he wanted to live out the rest of his years in seclusion. He told Mevlâna,
“You are now ready, my son. You have no equal in any of the branches of
learning. You have become a lion of knowledge. I am such a lion myself and we
are not both needed here and that is why I want to go. Furthermore, a great
friend will come to you, and you will be each other’s mirror. He will lead you
to the innermost parts of the spiritual world, just as you will lead him. Each
of you will complete the other, and you will be the greatest friends in the
entire world.” And so Sayyid intimated the coming of Shams of Tabriz, the
central event of Rumi’s life.
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