He is often referred to as Mevlana, which is his epithet and title, though some texts refer to him as Al-Balkhi, after his birthplace. Jalaladdin Muhammed Rumi was born in 1207 in the city of Balkh in Khorasan, now a province of Afghanistan. Based on both the Sunnism and Sufism of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, the Mevlevis have for centuries continued their peaceful rituals, which never implied a deviation from the Sunni tradition, with Rumi becoming an icon of peace, love and faith all over the world.
The Mevlevi order is perhaps the best example of such a bridging. As for Anatolia, besides “heterodox” Sufi orders – such as the rather more extreme Qalandariyya – the Sunni Sufi orders created a bridge between the heart and the mind, between Sunni orthodoxy and mysticism. There had been many Sufis who drew from the madrasah tradition, including Al-Qushayri and Al-Ghazali, both great Sunni scholars of the Seljuk Empire and Sufi authors in their own time.
However, the distinction between Sufism and scholarly Islamic interpretation was not always an ontological clash. This sometimes led them to run into problems, even causing political unrest between madrasah scholars and the Sufis. Ordinary Islamic scholars could only reach out to the hearts and minds of the literate, while Sufis could make connections with everyone, from the elite to the ignorant, relying on their verbal understanding of Islam and their imagery in communicating it. The latter of the social strata to proliferate in Anatolia after the Turkish conquests, the mystics – or Sufis, to be precise – were those who spread Islamic beliefs and thoughts most widely, especially to the illiterate populace.
Jalaluddin rumi poem full#
Köprülü portrays the Ottoman Turks as a full set of societal establishments, the initial Turkish social order having been based on a stratum of producers, warriors, administrators, scholars and mystics. Not all of the Turks moving to Anatolia were ghazis, which brings us to the thesis of Mehmet Fuat Köprülü suggesting that Turks mostly managed to conquer Anatolia owing to their social superiority as an ascending society in every regard. For instance, according to Paul Wittek, an Austrian orientalist, Turks conquered Anatolia and other places depending on their ideology of "gaza," or holy war, which neglects the social transformation of Anatolia.
Academics in the field, both from Turkey and abroad, have tried to paint an image of the conquerors of Anatolia in line with their historical perspective, sociological evaluations of Anatolian civilization and typologies of Turks in history. The evolution of society following the conquest and Turkification of Anatolia has been much debated by historians over the last century.
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