The Meeting

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207-1273) was a respected Islamic scholar and theologian in Konya, Turkey, when he met Shams-i-Tabrizi in 1244 — a wandering mystic who challenged everything Rumi thought he knew. Their friendship was so intense and transformative that Rumi's students grew jealous. Shams disappeared, possibly murdered by them.

The devastation of this loss became the engine of Rumi's greatest poetry. The absence of the beloved became the presence of the divine — grief transformed into a doorway to spiritual experience. Rumi did not write his poetry down himself; according to tradition, he whirled and spoke it aloud while scribes wrote it down.