Born on October 18, 1953 in Paris to a Swiss-German mother and an Alsatian father, Julien Weiss, a guitarist of classical training which he learned from École Normale de Musique de Paris as a student, had fallen in love with Arabic music in 1976 when he met Munir Bachir, the Iraqi grand master of the oud (oriental lute). He then embarked on the study of this instrument and of the refined laws governing oriental micro-tonal music. Abandoning the oud for the qanûn, a sort of oriental zither which he had learned from great masters in various countries of the Middle East, Julien Weiss had founded in 1983 the instrumental ensemble Al-Kindi conceived as a takht (grouping of soloists) devoted to music of the Arab world.[2] Three years later, in 1986, he converted to Islam and took the name Julien Jâlal Eddine Weiss as a homage to Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī.