Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī

A respectable jurist and preacher in Konya until a wandering dervish named Shams walked into his life and undid him. What came out afterwards was the Masnavi — twenty-five thousand couplets of story, argument and complaint — and a form of ceremony in which the body says return by turning.

The tradition's voice, and the door's. He dies in 1273; the Zohar surfaces in Castile around 1280. The same seven years, two ends of the Mediterranean, both traditions producing the book that will define them.