As Bill Moyers reported in a PBS special, Rumi has become the best-selling poet in the United States. Jalaluddin Rumi was a 13th-century Persian and Turkish mystical poet and teacher who lived in Konya, Turkey. Known for the Whirling Dervishes and for mystical poetry that touches hearts deeply, Rumi remains one of the most revered and quoted saints in the world. This year in Chapel Hill, Rumi will be honored with The First Annual Chapel Hill Rumi Festival: A Celebration of Peace, Love, and Unity on the Birthday of the Great Mystic Poet Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, a cultural and spiritual celebration beginning on Rumis birthday, Wednesday September 30, and running through Sunday October 4.

In 13th-century Konya, Turkey, the Persian and Turkish poet and teacher Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) led a Sufi community celebrated for its inspired music and dance and for a spirit of ecumenism and tolerance at the vanguard of its day. (This community is known popularly in the West as the Whirling Dervishes.) Rumi honored, and was honored by local Jewish and Christian communities of his time. After a transforming encounter with his teacher Shamsuddin Tabrizi, Rumi embraced poetry, music, and whirling as supreme expressions of the love and ecstasy at the heart of a personal experience of God. In the last 30 years of his life, Rumi produced 70,000 verses of exalted poetry, established a teaching tradition which integrated music and ecstatic whirling, and advised the Seljuk Sultante (based in Konya), in a way which inspired later Ottoman policies of religious and political tolerance. In the first three generations of the movement, and again in this century, women have practiced alongside men. Rumis 26,000 couplet work, the Mathnawi, has been honored with the titles The Koran of Mysticism and The Inner Truth of the Koran. In the West, Rumis life and work have been honored by Hegel, Goethe, Rembrandt, and Pope John XXIII. Rumis whirling has been incorporated into theater and dance performances by Robert Wilson and Ted Shawn. Recently, thanks to the translations of Coleman Barks, Rumi has become the best-selling poet in America and the Barks translations have entered the prestigious Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.

The 4-day Chapel Hill First Annual Rumi Festival is hosted by the local Sufi community, the Rifai-Marufi Order of America, with participation and support by other groups, including: The UNC Carolina Seminar for Comparative Islamic Studies, Silk Road Tea House, The Mevlevi Order of America, The Sufi Order of the West, The Regulator Bookshop, Music of the World, and the Dances of Universal Peace.