The Tomb of Rumi

The lodge and the law

Rumi died at Konya on 17 December 1273. The Mevlevi order formed around his tomb and his teaching, and the lodge there was its mother house for six and a half centuries.

In 1925 the Turkish Republic closed every Sufi lodge in the country under Law No. 677, part of the same programme that abolished the caliphate and the religious courts. Sufi orders were dissolved, their titles prohibited, their properties taken.

Ataturk directed in April 1926 that the Konya lodge become a museum. It opened as one in March 1927.

That legal position has never been reversed. The orders remain formally illegal in Turkey and operate in a long-tolerated grey zone.

The ceremony

The sema (the turning ceremony, one palm raised to receive and one turned down to pass on, performed to the ney and to sung poetry), survives officially as cultural heritage rather than as worship. The annual commemoration of Rumi's death each December, Seb-i Arus (the wedding night, because he understood death as union with the beloved), is organised by state and municipal bodies and staged in a sports arena for a ticketed audience, with television coverage.

Practitioners have made the obvious objection for decades: a rite performed on a stage, to a schedule, by paid performers, for spectators who have bought seats, is not straightforwardly the same act as the rite performed by initiates in a lodge as part of a disciplined religious life. The state's framing preserved the form when the substance was outlawed, and it is genuinely unclear whether that counts as rescue or as taxidermy. Both views are held by people with a real stake in the answer.

The poet in translation

Rumi is among the most widely read poets in the world, and the version of him that circulates in English is frequently detached from the man who wrote.

The Masnavi is a work of Quranic exegesis in verse by a Muslim jurist and preacher, dense with scripture and hadith. Several of the popular English renderings are not translations at all, their authors do not read Persian and work by reshaping earlier scholarly translations, and they routinely remove the Islamic vocabulary, so that Quranic citations become generic references to the divine and a Muslim theologian is presented as a spiritual writer without a religion.

This is a live scholarly complaint rather than a pedantic one, and it is worth registering at the tomb, because the person buried here would not recognise the poet the tomb is now visited for.

Rumi's death is still marked as an anniversary of celebration rather than mourning, since his followers hold that dying was, for him, a reunion rather than a loss.

From Khorasan to Konya

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi was born in the region of Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan, and his family fled westward ahead of advancing Mongol armies in the early thirteenth century, eventually settling in Konya. There he met the wandering mystic Shams of Tabriz, a relationship widely credited with transforming Rumi from a conventional religious scholar into the poet whose verse, especially the Masnavi, became central to Persian mystical literature.

Shab-e Arus

Rumi died in Konya in 1273, and the anniversary of his death is marked by his followers as Shab-e Arus, the wedding night, understood as the night his soul was reunited with the divine rather than as an occasion for grief, a framing that shapes the tone of the annual commemorations held at his tomb to this day.

A tomb under a green dome

Rumi's mausoleum, topped by a distinctive tiled green dome, sits within a complex that also houses a museum of Mevlevi Sufi order artefacts, manuscripts and musical instruments, preserving the order's material culture even though the order itself was formally banned from operating as a religious institution in Turkey in 1925.