Rumi to Bahá'u'lláh: Persian Exile, Mystical Love, and the Birth of Universal Religion

This preprint argues that Rumi and Bahá’u’lláh should not be linked through prediction, ownership, or reduction, but through inheritance and transformation. Rumi gives Persian Islam one of its most powerful languages of divine love and longing; Bahá’u’lláh later enters that inherited Persianate-Sufi vocabulary, directly engages Rumi-linked metaphysics and poetic form, and redirects mystical longing toward recognition, moral distinction, community, law, and the oneness of humanity. The article also introduces “displaced sacred biography” as a careful modern bridge between medieval migration, nineteenth-century exile, and contemporary forced-migration discourse.