Rūmī, in full Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, also called by the honorific Mawlānā, (born c. September 30, 1207, Balkh [now in Afghanistan]—died December 17, 1273, Konya [now in Turkey]), the greatest Sufi mystic and poet in the Persian language, famous for his lyrics and for his didactic epic Mas̄navī-yi Maʿnavī (“Spiritual Couplets”), which widely influenced mystical thought and.

The historian S Irfan Habib’s conviction is that Maulana Azad was a great man whose ideas can serve as an ideological blueprint for us today. Habib, a brilliant historian who has held the Maulana Azad Chair at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, clearly intended his slim volume to be a paean to his hero.