This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Sultan Walad turned his father Jalal al-Din Rumi's circle of followers at Konya into the formal, institutionally organized Mevlevi Sufi order after Rumi's death in 1273, a documented act of institution building distinct from simply continuing his father's teaching unchanged. Where Rumi himself had left poetry and teaching rather than an institution, a documented gap between a founder's own legacy and any organized structure to carry it forward, Sultan Walad gave the movement the concrete shape it lacked.
That shape included the sema ceremony of ritual turning as a formal rite, a lodge structure, and a line of leadership that descended through his own family for centuries afterward, a documented set of institutional elements distinct from the informal gathering of disciples Rumi's own circle had been. That a founder's son, rather than the founder himself, supplied the ceremony, the lodge and the hereditary leadership that let the Mevlevi order outlast any single generation is documented as the specific division of labor between Rumi's teaching and Sultan Walad's own institution building.
That Rumi's poetry and teaching drew the following while his own son converted that following into a lasting institution, complete with its own rite, its own lodges and a leadership line carried through his family, marks the Mevlevi order's founding as a documented case where a movement's survival depended on an institutional act its own inspiring figure never undertook.