Rumi

Jalal al-Din Rumi was a respected scholar and teacher in the city of Konya, settled and learned, until a wandering dervish named Shams crossed his path and set his orderly life aflame. From that friendship — and from the grief of losing it — poured a river of poetry unlike anything before it, verses spun out while spinning in dance, addressed to the divine and to the beloved as if they were one.

He wrote of longing and union, of the reed torn from the reed-bed crying to go home, of a love so wide it dissolved the borders between faiths and peoples. His great Masnavi runs to more than twenty-five thousand verses and is still called the Quran of the Persian language. Eight centuries later his lines are read at weddings and at gravesides, by mystics and by skeptics, in tongues he never spoke.

When he died, Konya wept together — Muslims, Christians, and Jews walking in the same procession, each certain he had belonged to them. We honor him as the poet who turned heartbreak into welcome, who insisted that beyond every quarrel of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field where we can simply meet.