Rumi was a respected Islamic law professor in thirteenth-century Konya when a wandering mystic named Shams-i-Tabrizi walked into his life and shattered everything. The encounter transformed a conventional scholar into the most ecstatic poet in the Persian language — and, seven centuries later, the best-selling poet in the United States. The man Americans quote on Instagram was a medieval Muslim jurist whose work has been translated, simplified, and sometimes distorted beyond recognition.

This episode traces Rumi from his Central Asian origins through the encounter with Shams, the poetic explosion that followed, and the modern Western appropriation that has made him famous for reasons he might not recognize.

• Rumi’s scholarly family and his respectable career as an Islamic jurist in Konya
• The encounter with Shams-i-Tabrizi and the spiritual transformation it triggered
• The Masnavi and the Divan — the massive poetic output that followed Shams’s disappearance
• The modern Western translations, the Instagram quotes, and the debate over cultural appropriation