The Rumi we quote is not the Rumi who wrote

Rumi, the 13th-century mystic, philosopher and poet, has become an unlikely patron saint of modern romantic heartache. He is quoted endlessly, and misquoted almost as often.

Yet beneath the Instagram aphorisms and pastel quote cards, the real Rumi remains magnificently alive.

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Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, who was born on September 30, 1207, was no itinerant dispenser of spiritual bromides.

He was a scholar and theologian, a respectable pillar of the Konya establishment, until a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz arrived in 1244 and, in effect, detonated him. Shams vanished a few years later, probably murdered, and the grieving scholar became a poet.

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Rumi's mysticism was not an escape from religion. It was an intensification of it. His Divan and the vast Masnavi, are not merely a collection of beautiful thoughts about love, but some 25,000 couplets sprawling mystical epic of stories, parables, allusions from holy scriptures, theological arguments, jokes, erotic metaphors, philosophical excursions and spiritual instruction.

Even the name he is popularised with is a small lesson in itself -- "Rumi" means "of Rum", the Anatolian lands that the medieval Islamic world still thought of as Rome. He was born far to the east, in the Persianate world of present-day Afghanistan, and was carried west as a boy by his family, ahead of the Mongol hoard.

The persona that the West has been introducing arrives largely through the versions of a few American poets, chiefly Coleman Barks, who did not read Persian and worked from older, stiffer English renderings, polishing them into free verse of great warmth. The results have sold in the millions but they have also quietly removed the God from the poem.

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The "Beloved" of his lines is, first and last, divine. Strip out the scripture, and one is left with a sage who sounds rather like a very well-read therapist.

Scores of lines circulate online with no discoverable source in anything Rumi wrote. The most famous, about a field beyond right-doing and wrong-doing, is a free spirit of a passage whose Persian ancestry scholars have struggled to establish. The internet, it seems, has done to Rumi what a village does to a rumour -- it has improved him until he is unrecognisable.

Rumi's love poems are closer to something more dangerous -- the belief that the human beloved is a doorway, and that the point of a doorway is to walk through it. Love, for Rumi, is not a comfort but a demolition. It takes down the house of the self and does not always offer a refund.

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And yet, the mis-readers are not wholly mistaken. We are all, in some measure, severed from a place we cannot name. And this is why Rumi resonates -- at a moment of thin belief and thick loneliness, when institutions of meaning have lost their credibility and the market has offered wellness in their place.

Rumi promises transcendence without the paperwork, or so the packaging suggests. The real Rumi is less convenient. He demands discipline, a teacher, a tradition, even the whirling of the dervishes, which is less performance than method -- a body taught to give up its centre.

Poetry has always lived by being betrayed in translation, and the Persians themselves have been improving each other's verses for centuries. The lesson is to read with a little less aesthetics and a lot more empathy.

The real Rumi is stranger, more difficult, more religious, more mischievous and considerably more profound than the Rumi of quotation cards. He does not merely tell us to love. He asks what must die within us before love becomes possible.