The Meeting That Turned Rumi Into a Poet
Quick answer: Rumi was a respected scholar until he met Shams of Tabriz in 1244. How friendship and devastating loss turned a jurist into one of the world's great poets.
In 1248 the most respected religious teacher in Konya could be found doing something his students found alarming: searching. Shams of Tabriz, the wandering dervish who had upended Jalal al-Din Rumi's orderly life, had vanished, this time for good. Rumi wrote letters, questioned travellers, and journeyed twice to Damascus chasing rumours of his friend. He was a jurist and preacher in his early forties, a man whose career had followed the script perfectly, and the script had just been torn up in front of him. Out of that unravelling came tens of thousands of lines of poetry.
The story of Rumi and Shams is one of the most retold in world literature, which means it has accumulated legend the way old ships accumulate barnacles. The honest version, sorted into what is documented and what is tradition, is stranger and more useful to a writer than the greeting-card version: it is the story of a late start, a devastating loss, and a man who discovered his real work at an age when most people have stopped looking for it.
The scholar who had everything settled
Rumi was born on 30 September 1207 in the region of greater Khorasan, in what is now the Afghanistan and Tajikistan borderlands; scholars still debate whether the family home was Balkh or the smaller town of Vakhsh. His father, Baha al-Din Walad, was a preacher and mystic, and when Rumi was a boy the family left home for good, travelling west just ahead of the Mongol invasions that would soon devastate the cities behind them.
The family eventually settled in Konya, in central Anatolia, then the capital of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum, which is where the name Rumi comes from. When his father died in 1231, Rumi inherited his teaching position. He completed his training as a jurist in Aleppo and Damascus and returned to a life that was, by every visible measure, complete: students, sermons, legal opinions, a family, a reputation. By his mid-thirties he was one of the leading religious authorities of a prosperous city. He was not, in any meaningful sense, a poet.
The meeting in the marketplace
In late November 1244, tradition dates it to the 29th, Rumi encountered Shams al-Din of Tabriz, a travelling dervish of fierce intelligence and no fixed address. The famous accounts of their first exchange, Shams challenging Rumi with a question that made him fall from his mule, or throwing his precious books into a fountain, come from hagiographies written decades after both men were dead, above all Aflaki's compendium of stories about the Mevlevi order. They should be enjoyed as tradition rather than trusted as transcript.
What is beyond doubt is the effect. Rumi withdrew from teaching and spent months in intense retreat and conversation with Shams, to the bafflement and then fury of his students. The sources strain to describe the friendship's depth: Shams was mirror, provocateur and beloved teacher at once. The city's resentment grew until Shams left for Damascus in 1246. Rumi's grief was so severe that his son, Sultan Walad, was sent to bring Shams back, and did. The reconciliation did not last. In 1247 or 1248 Shams disappeared permanently. Tradition holds that he was murdered, possibly with the connivance of members of Rumi's own household who resented his influence; historians regard the murder story as plausible but unproven. No grave has ever been confirmed.
Grief becomes a second life
What happened next is the reason the story matters. Rumi did not recover his old life; he replaced it. The disciplined jurist began composing ghazals, lyric poems of love and loss, in enormous quantities, often while turning in the whirling meditation that his followers would later formalise. And he did something almost without parallel in literary history: he signed thousands of these poems not with his own name, as ghazal convention required, but with the name of Shams. The great collection of his lyric poetry is called the Divan of Shams of Tabriz for exactly this reason. The grieving man wrote himself into his lost friend, poem after poem, until the two names were permanently fused.
In time the storm settled into steadier companionship, first with Salah al-Din Zarkub, a goldsmith with no literary training, and then with his student Husam al-Din Chalabi. It was Husam, tradition records, who urged Rumi to compose a long teaching poem for his disciples. The result, dictated over roughly the last dozen years of Rumi's life, was the Masnavi: six books and around twenty-five thousand couplets of stories, parables, jokes, scripture commentary and sudden lyric flight, opening with the image of a reed flute cut from the reed bed, whose music is the sound of longing for the place it was severed from. Rumi died in Konya on 17 December 1273. It is widely reported that his funeral was attended by Muslims, Christians and Jews together, and his followers still commemorate the date as the Shab-e Arus, the wedding night, his reunion with the beloved.
What actually changed him, honestly
It is tempting to tell this as pure lightning: stranger arrives, scholar becomes poet. But the lightning struck a very tall tree. Rumi had four decades of immersion in scripture, Persian and Arabic literature, law and mystical practice before he wrote a single ghazal. The learning did not make him a poet; it meant that when the emotional detonation came, there was an enormous store of language and story for it to ignite. His images move so freely between kitchens, courtrooms, caravans and scripture because he had spent a lifetime in all of them.
The other honest ingredient is loss itself. The poetry did not come from the friendship; it came from the friendship being torn away. That is an uncomfortable fact about a great deal of literature: the work was grief, metabolised daily for thirty years. He is also a corrective to the cult of the early start. The most beloved poet in several languages, whose verses are sung from Istanbul to Delhi, effectively began at thirty-seven.
What a working writer can take from this
First, your accumulated life is not wasted time; it is unlit fuel. If you are coming to poetry late, from law or teaching or accounts, you are following the Rumi pattern, not deviating from it. Write toward the thing that broke you open, and let your professional decades supply the vocabulary. Second, notice the mechanics of his output: the Masnavi exists because Husam asked for it, took dictation, and kept the sessions going for years. Find your Husam. A reader who reliably says 'continue' is worth more than a shelf of craft books.
Third, a caution for the modern reader: Rumi is now so popular in English that many circulating versions are loose paraphrases, sometimes with the Islamic frame quietly removed. If a quotation sounds like a fridge magnet, check it against a scholarly translation. The real Rumi, rooted in his tradition and his grief, is far more interesting than the decaffeinated one.
Where to start reading
Begin with Book One of the Masnavi, ideally in a translation with notes; Reynold Nicholson's complete scholarly version remains the reference point, and several modern translators have made the poem more approachable. For the lyric Rumi, seek out selections from the Divan that print the Persian alongside. Franklin Lewis's biography is the standard one-volume account of the life and sorts legend from evidence with great patience.
Read the reed flute opening slowly, then read it again as a writer: a poem about longing that begins by explaining why poems exist at all. Seven and a half centuries later, it still holds the door open.
What poets can take from this
- Stop treating a late start as a handicap; Rumi began composing poetry in earnest around age thirty-seven.
- Bank your life experience deliberately: read widely and work deeply now, so there is fuel when the spark arrives.
- Find one trusted listener who prompts you to continue; the Masnavi was dictated to such a person for years.
- Write directly toward your largest loss instead of around it; evasion produces smaller poems.
- Check popular quotations against scholarly translations before quoting them; much internet Rumi is paraphrase.
- Try Rumi's signature move once: write a poem in the voice of someone you miss, and sign it with their name.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in which you speak as someone you have lost, describing yourself from their point of view. Sign the poem with their name instead of yours and notice what that permission changes.
Questions
Who was Shams of Tabriz?
Shams al-Din of Tabriz was a wandering Persian dervish who met Rumi in Konya in 1244. Their intense spiritual friendship transformed Rumi from a conventional scholar into a poet. Shams disappeared in 1247 or 1248; tradition says he was murdered, though this has never been proven.
When did Rumi start writing poetry?
Not until his late thirties. Rumi was a respected jurist and preacher in Konya with no poetic career before meeting Shams in 1244, when he was thirty-seven. Nearly everything he is famous for, the Divan and the six-book Masnavi, was composed in the final three decades of his life.
What is the Masnavi?
The Masnavi is Rumi's long teaching poem, six books and roughly twenty-five thousand couplets of stories, parables and mystical instruction, dictated to his student Husam al-Din over about the last twelve years of his life. It is often called the most influential Sufi poem ever written.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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