The Masnavi of Rumi
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Translator
Jawid Mojaddedi
Description
- This is the first unabridged verse translation of the Masnavi for more than a hundred years. Skilfully rendered in rhyming couplets, the translation is an attractive and faithful representation of the original.
- The Masnavi is Rumi's greatest work, described as 'the Koran in Persian'. It consists of roughly 26,000 verses, divided into six books, and describes man's predicament in his search for God
- The translation is based on the best critical edition and includes an introduction and invaluable notes, making the edition the ideal introduction to Rumi for the non-specialist reader.
- The poem draws on sources from sacred history to folklore and fable, is full of stories, and often funny.
'The pen would smoothly write the things it knew
But when it came to love it split in two,
A donkey stuck in mud is logic's fate -
Love's nature only love can demonstrate.'
Rumi's Masnavi is widely recognized as the greatest Sufi poem ever written, and has been called 'the Koran in Persian'. The thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Rumi composed his work for the benefit of his disciples in the Sufi order named after him, better known as the whirling dervishes. In order to convey his message of divine love and unity he threaded together entertaining stories and penetrating homilies. Drawing from folk tales as well as sacred history, Rumi's poem is often funny as well as spiritually profound.
Jawid Mojaddedi's sparkling new verse translation of Book One is consistent with the aims of the original work in presenting Rumi's most mature mystical teachings in simple and attractive rhyming couplets.
ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Readership: Readers of poetry, mysticism, Rumi. Students of Sufism, Islamic civilization, Middle Eastern history, comparative literature, Persian studies, religious studies
About the Contributor(s)
About the author
Rumi: Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (604–672 AH / 1207–1273 CE), known across the Persian world as Mawlana ("our master"), was a poet, Hanafi jurist, and Sufi master whose verse remains among the most beloved in any language. He was born in the region of Balkh in greater Khurasan, then a center of Islamic learning, and as a boy traveled west with his family, the scholar Baha al-Din Walad among them, as the Mongol armies advanced. After years of movement they settled in Konya, in Seljuk Anatolia (the land the Arabs called Rum, hence "Rumi"), where he became a respected teacher of law and theology. His life changed in 1244 with the arrival of the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz. Their intense companionship, and the grief of Shams's later disappearance, awakened in Rumi a torrent of poetry. From this came the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi, his collection of lyric odes, and above all the Masnavi (Mathnawi-yi Maʿnawi), a six-book spiritual epic of some 25,000 couplets weaving Qurʾan, hadith, parable, and teaching into a single tapestry, long honored as "the Qurʾan in the Persian tongue." Rumi died in Konya in 1273. From his circle arose the Mevlevi (Mawlawiyya) order, the "whirling dervishes," whose turning dance embodies his vision of love as the path to the Divine. His influence on Islamic spirituality and on world literature endures to this day.
About the translator
Jawid Mojaddedi: Jawid Mojaddedi (b. Kabul, Afghanistan) is a scholar of early and medieval Sufism, best known for his complete English verse translation of Jalal al-Din Rumi's Masnavi. Raised in Britain from the age of five, he completed his doctorate at the University of Manchester in 1998, served for a time as an editor for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, and joined Rutgers University, where he is a professor in the Department of Religion teaching across the field of Islamic Studies. He has also chaired the department and directed its Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His research began in Sufi historiography, producing The Biographical Tradition in Sufism: The Tabaqat Genre from al-Sulami to Jami in 2001, and later turned to Rumi's thought in Beyond Dogma: Rumi's Teachings on Friendship with God and Early Sufi Theories in 2012. His landmark project is the Oxford World's Classics translation of the Masnavi, issued book by book from 2004 to 2025, rendering Rumi's didactic couplets into readable English verse. Book One earned the Lois Roth Prize from the American Institute of Iranian Studies, and his work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among contemporary translators of Persian Sufi poetry, he is valued for combining scholarly precision with sensitivity to the music and meaning of the original.
Specifications
EAN 13 / ISBN
9780199552313
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Rumi
Pages
1568
Translator
Jawid Mojaddedi
Year Published
2014
Size
W-5 in | H-7.7 in | D-1 in
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