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Jelāl’s family claimed descent from Abū-Bekr, a father-in-law and the first successor of Muhammed, the lawgiver of Islām. One of the descendants of Abū-Bekr was among the conquerors of the ancient Bactria, when it was first brought under Muslim rule, in about A.D. 650, under the Caliph ‘Ūthmān; and his children had maintained a prominent position in that country, possessed of great wealth, until the time immediately preceding the irruption of Jengīz.

Jelāl was the youngest of three children, two being sons, born of the princess, his mother, in Balkh. The eldest, a daughter, was already married, and remained behind with her husband, when her father and brothers left their native city some time between A.D. 1208 and 1211, in which latter year they were at Bagdād. There is no further mention of Jelāl’s elder brother. Jelāl was five years old when they left Balkh. By way of Bagdād they went to Mekka, thence to Damascus, and next to Erzinjān, in Armenia; thence to Larenda, in Asia Minor. Jelāl’s mother was still with the party. He was now eighteen years old; and was married, at Larenda, to a lady named Gevher (Pearl), daughter of a certain Lala Sherefu-’d-Dīn of Samarqand, in A.D. 1226.2 She bore him two sons there, ‘Alā’u-’d-Dīn (afterwards killed in a tumult at Qonya) and Bahā’u-’d-Dīn Sultān Veled, through whom the succession of the house was continued. She appears to have died rather young; for Jelāl afterwards married another lady of Qonya, who outlived him, and by whom he had two other children, a son and a daughter. (See Anecdotes, Chap, iii., No. 69, for a variant.)