Quote by Sultan Walad: “Music is the food of the soul; let it play and the soul will live.”

The soul has its own kind of hunger — not for food or comfort but for beauty, feeling, and transcendence. Music satisfies this hunger in a way that nothing else quite can, feeding something in us that would otherwise go empty.

Sultan Walad organised the Mevlevi Order after his father Rumi's death in 1273, during which the ritual of the whirling sema — music, poetry, and movement as spiritual practice — became a central form of Sufi worship in Anatolia. The Mevlevi tradition would go on to flourish under Ottoman patronage.

Persian Sufi poet born in 1226 in Larende, son of Rumi, who helped to systematise and spread his father's teachings and founded the Mevlevi Sufi order formally. His own poetry, though less celebrated than Rumi's, extends many of the same themes of divine love and spiritual longing.