Poetry · a Light

Rumi called the night he died his wedding night

Jalal ad-Din Rumi died in Konya on 17 December 1273. He had told those around him not to mourn, because he understood death as a meeting rather than an ending, and the anniversary is still called Sheb-i Arus, the wedding night. The early accounts of his funeral describe Christians, Jews and Muslims in the same procession, each group reading from its own scripture, and say the crowd took most of a day to reach the grave. He wrote in Persian, some 25,000 couplets in the Masnavi alone, and his son organised his followers into the order later known in the West as the whirling dervishes. Konya still marks the date every December.

Konya · 17 December 1273