Sultan Walad

(also Sultan Valad or Muhammad bin Calal ad-Din). Born 1226 in Karaman; died 1312 in Konya. Turkish poet. Son of Jalal al-Din Rumi.

Sultan Walad was reared among Sufis and became the sheikh of the Mevlevi order of Sufis. All his works were devoted to popularizing the life, work, and teachings of his father.

Sultan Walad wrote a divan of Persian poetry and the long narrative poem The Book of Walad, consisting of three independent parts: “The Book of the Beginning,” “The Book of the End,” and “The Book of the Rubab.” The first and third parts contain the large verse fragments known as the “Seljuk poems” (1301), written in the Turkic Konya dialect; they are among the earliest precisely dated Turkish poems written in Asia Minor. Sultan Walad also wrote the treatise The Book of Knowledge.