Considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, " The Big Red Book" Is perhaps the greatest work of rumi, the medieval sufi mystic who also happens to be the bestselling poet in America. Rumi was born in 1207 to ...Considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, " The Big Red Book" Is perhaps the greatest work of rumi, the medieval sufi mystic who also happens to be the bestselling poet in America. Rumi was born in 1207 to a long line of islamic theologians and lawyers on the eastern edge of the persian empire in what is now afghanistan.