Konya

Jalal al-Din's family left Balkh in the east while he was a child, travelling west ahead of the Mongol advance, and settled at Konya under the Seljuk sultans of Rum, which is where the name Rumi comes from. He inherited his father's position, taught law and preached, and by his late thirties was an established and entirely conventional religious scholar.

The change came in 1244 with the arrival of a wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, who asked him a question in the street and with whom he then spent months in seclusion. The teaching stopped, the disciples resented it, Shams left, was fetched back, and finally disappeared, quite possibly killed. What came out of that loss was poetry: a vast collection of lyrics that Rumi published under his friend's name rather than his own, and then the Masnavi, some twenty five thousand couplets dictated over years to his disciple Husam al-Din, on walks, at night, while walking round a column, whenever the words came.

The Masnavi is a teaching poem that works by story: fables, jokes, obscene tales, arguments with the reader, all bent towards the single theme of separation and return, announced in the opening lines by a reed cut from the reed bed that cries for it. Later readers in Persian and Turkish called it the Quran in the Persian tongue, which was meant as praise and not as a claim of equal status. He died in December 1273, and the night is called his wedding night, the night of union. The funeral, according to the early biographies, was attended by the city's Christians and Jews as well as its Muslims.

Rumi founded no order. His son Sultan Walad organised his father's followers into one after his death, built the lodge around the tomb, and established the succession of masters that ran in the family for centuries. The green tiled cone over the grave is the emblem of Konya, and the complex became a place of visit rather than only of burial.

The Mevlevis developed the turning ceremony into a fixed liturgy with a sequence that has been kept for centuries: a eulogy of the Prophet, an improvisation on the reed flute recalling the opening of the Masnavi, a slow processional greeting three times around the floor, then four sections of turning separated by pauses. The dress carries the meaning openly, the tall felt hat read as a gravestone and the white skirt as a shroud, and the turner holds the right palm upward to receive and the left downward to pass on, so that nothing is kept. Training was long and domestic: a novice served in the lodge kitchen for a thousand and one days before being counted a member.

The Turkish Republic closed all dervish lodges and dissolved the orders by law in 1925, and the Konya lodge became a museum the following year. The ceremony was permitted again from the 1950s as a cultural performance, which is the legal basis on which it is still presented, and it was added to the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage in 2008. Every December the anniversary of Rumi's death fills the city, and the tension between a devotional practice and an authorised performance of one is visible to anybody who attends.