Sangtuda

Sangtuda (Сангтуда; Сангтӯда, ) is a village and jamoat in Tajikistan. It is located in Danghara District in Khatlon Region. The (jamoat) has a total population of 12,686 (2015).

Located on the East bank of the Wakhsh River, a major tributary of the Amu Darya (or Oxus River), the place was known as Wakhsh in the Medieval period.

History
Sangtuda was the birthplace of the Persian poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, whose father, Muhammad ibn Husayn Khatibi, better known as Baha al-Din Walad, lived and worked in the town, then known as Wakhsh, as a jurist and preacher until 1212, when Rumi was around five and the family moved to Samarkand.Annemarie Schimmel, "I Am Wind, You Are Fire," p. 11. She refers to a 1989 article by Fritz Meier:"Tajiks and Persian admirers still prefer to call Jalaluddin 'Balkhi' because his family lived in Balkh, current day in Afghanistan before migrating westward. However, their home was not in the actual city of Balkh, since the mid-eighth century a center of Muslim culture in (Greater) Khorasan (Iran and Central Asia). Rather, as Meier has shown, it was in the small town of Wakhsh north of the Oxus that Baha'uddin Walad, Jalaluddin's father, lived and worked as a jurist and preacher with mystical inclinations. Franklin Lewis, Rumi : Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings, and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rumi, 2000, pp. 47–49." Lewis has devoted two pages of his book to the topic of Wakhsh, which he states has been identified with the medieval town of Lêwkand (or Lâvakand) or Sangtude, which is about 65 kilometers southeast of Dushanbe, the capital of present-day Tajikistan. He says it is on the east bank of the Vakhshâb river, a major tributary that joins the Amu Daryâ river (also called Jayhun, and named the Oxus by the Greeks). He further states: "Bahâ al-Din may have been born in Balkh, but at least between June 1204 and 1210 (Shavvâl 600 and 607), during which time Rumi was born, Bahâ al-Din resided in a house in Vakhsh (Bah 2:143 [= Bahâ' uddîn Walad's] book, "Ma`ârif."). Vakhsh, rather than Balkh was the permanent base of Bahâ al-Din and his family until Rumi was around five years old (mei 16–35) [= from a book in German by the scholar Fritz Meier—note inserted here]. At that time, in about the year 1212 (A.H. 608–609), the Valads moved to Samarqand (Fih 333; Mei 29–30, 36) [= reference to Rumi's "Discourses" and to Fritz Meier's book—note inserted here], leaving behind Baâ al-Din's mother, who must have been at least seventy-five years old."

The town of Sangtuda is identified as the medieval town of Wakhsh or Lêwkand by Franklin Lewis.