Professors Fatemeh Keshavarz and James Morris explore the poetry of Rumi, a famous Islamic scholar and Sufi master whose profound Persian poetry was widely-revered and recited from the Balkans to Western China, and recently became very popular in the United States as well. He is best known for his masterpieces, the Masnavi-i Ma‘navi (The Spiritual Couplets), a six-volume poetic work of around 25,000 verses, dubbed “the Qur’an in Persian,” and the Divan-i Shams, a collection of over 3,000 ecstatic ghazals.
Links and Further Reading/Listening:
Prof. Keshavarz’s Radio Rumi Podcast
“Rumi – The Most Famous Sufi Poet in the World” Let’s Talk Religion
“In OurTime: Rumi’s Poetry” BBC Podcast
“Rumi: Life, Works, and Legacy of a Muslim Poet” Abbasid History Podcast
Masnavi.net (Full text of the Masnavi (complete Persian text (edited by Madhî Azâr Yazdî), English translation by Nicholson): http://www.masnavi.net/
https://www.dar-al-masnavi.org/
Arberry, A.J. The Mystical Poems of Rumi, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Alan Williams, The Masnavi of Jalaloddin Rumi Vol. 1 : A New English Translation with Persian Text and Explanatory Notes. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2020).
Keshavarz, Fatemeh, Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1998).
William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (State University of New York Press, 1984)
——, The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2005)
——. Me and Rumi: The Autobiography of Shams-i Tabrizi, (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2004).
Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi (Oneworld Publications, 2000)
Leonard Lewisohn (ed.), The Philosophy of Ecstasy: Rumi and the Sufi Tradition (World Wisdom Books, 2015)
Schimmel, Annemarie, I am Wind, You Are Fire: The Life and Works of Rumi (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1992)
Links to Performances of Rumi’s poetry: https://sites.harvard.edu/sulaymanibnqiddees/tag/rumi/
Online Collection of Rumi’s Poetry (in Persian): https://ganjoor.net/moulavi
Host: Oludamini Ogunnaike
Guests: Fatemeh Keshavarz and James Morris
Edited By: Alana Bittner, WJTU