
Rumi's world

Discourse of Rumi; A Selection, Part 2
The son of the Amir entered. Rumi said: Your father is always occupied with God. His faith is overwhelming, and reveals itself in his words. One day your father said,…

Discourse of Rumi: A Selection – Part One
The Amir, surprised by an unexpected visit from Rumi, said: “Master, how gracious of you to honor me in this way. I never expected this. It never even entered my…

Shams al-Din of Tabriz: A Brief Introduction
The turning point in Rumi’s life came about the year 1244, when he met in Konya a mysterious wandering Sufi called Shamsoddin of Tabriz. Shams, as he is most often…

Rumi’s First Encounter with Shams
Rumi’s life seemed to have been a fairly normal one for a religious scholar: teaching, meditating, helping the poor, until in the late fall of 1244 when he met a…

Edward Granville Browne
Edward Granville Browne (1862-1926), Professor of Persian at Cambridge University, displayed a remarkable interest in the metaphysical thought of the Iranians. Browne is best known for his four-volume magnum opus,…

R. A. Nicholson
R. A. Nicholson (1868-1945) in all his years of the study of Persian and Arabic never once visited the Middle East and never learned to speak the languages, whose literatures…

Abd Al-Hossein Zarrinkoub
“Abd Al-Hossein Zarrinkoub” (1922-1999) is probably the most important literary figure, writer and translator whose wide range of research and works in the fields of Rumi and literary studies are…

Annemarie Schimmel
Annemarie Schimmel (1922-2003), who spent most of her life reading and living with Islamic and particularly Sufi texts from the perspective of a believer and an academic, introduced the thoughts…

Afzal Iqbal
Afzal Iqbal (1919-94) was born in Lahore, attended the Government College there and then the University of the Punjab. After the partition of India, he became a Pakistani citizen. Afzal…

Arthur John Arberry
Arberry is a public intellectual, well known in the Anglo-American world. Born into a poor and puritanical Christian family, A. J. Arberry (1905-69) lost his faith largely as a result…