The best-selling poet in modern America is a 13th-century Islamic jurist who fled the Mongol invasions as a child. This episode follows Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi from his 1207 birth in Wakhsh, in present-day Tajikistan, through his family's flight westward via Baghdad, Mecca, and Damascus to Konya in Anatolia, the former Roman province that gave him the name Rumi, and into his early career as a respected orthodox theologian issuing legal rulings and delivering sermons.

The turning point arrives in 1244 with Shams-i Tabrizi, a wandering dervish who pulled Rumi away from the outer law toward the inner mystical path and the ego-shattering concept of fana. We discuss Shams's disappearance in 1248, the theories of murder involving Rumi's jealous followers and possibly his own son, the grief-driven search in Damascus, and the twelve years dictat ...