Jalal al-Din Rumi - Masnavi Book 4

He not only produced the finest Sufi poetry in Persian, but was also the master of disciples who later named their order after him. Moreover, by virtue of the intense devotion he expressed towards his own master, Shams-e Tabriz, Rumi has become the archetypal Sufi disciple. From that perspective, the unprecedented level of interest in Rumis poetry over the last couple of decades in North America and Europe does not come as a total surprise. Rumi lived some 300 years after the first writings of Muslim mystics were produced. A distinct mystical path called Sufism became clearly identifiable in the ninth century and was systematized from the late tenth and eleventh centuries. The authors of these works, who were mostly from north-eastern Persia, traced the origins of the Sufi tradition back to the Prophet Mohammad, while at the same time acknowledging the existence of comparable forms of mysticism before his mission.

They mapped out a mystical path, by which the Sufi ascends towards the ultimate goal of union with God and knowledge of reality. More than two centuries before the time of the eminent Sufi theosopher Ebn Arabi (d. 1240), Sufis began to describe their experience of annihilation in God and the realization that only God truly exists. The illusion of ones own independent existence began to be regarded as the main obstacle to achieving this realization, so that early Sufis like Abu Yazid Bestami (d. 874) are frequently quoted as belittling the value of the asceticism of some of their contemporaries on the grounds that it merely increased attention to themselves. An increasing number of Sufis began to regard love of God as the means of overcoming the root problem of ones own sense of being, rather than piety and asceticism.