It's universally known that in 13th century, Maulana Jalaluddin Balkhi, better known in the West as Rumi, fled his birthplace, the northern city of Balkh in modern Afghanistan, which was back then a city of poets and scholars within the Khorasan Province of Eastern Persian Empire, and settled in Anatolia Province of Turkish Seljuk Empire, now part of modern Turkey; to escape the invading Mongol Army. As a young Persian refugee, Rumi had also gone through the traumatic and painful process of adaptation and assimilation- a process which is also so familiar to any refugee and immigrant of our days-, in trying hard to integrate into his newly adopted hometown, Konya in central Turkey where he lived the rest of his life and is currently buried.
