Mawlana Rumi Review, vol.5

by Lewisohn, Leonard; Ernst, Carl; Lewis, Franklin; Williams, Alan; Darr, Robert; DeWeese, Devin; Chittick, William

• ISBN13: 9781901383478
• ISBN10: 1901383474
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-10-15
• Publisher: Archetype

Summary

The Mawlana Rumi Review is a new review devoted to the life, thought, poetry and legacy of Rumi, Islam’s greatest Sufi poet and author. Mawlana (‘Our master’) Jalal al-Din Rumi (d.1273) has been the best-selling poet in English in the United States for the last two decades. A publication of the Rumi Institute, Near East University, Cyprus and the Rumi Studies Group at the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies, Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, in association with Archetype, the Review publishes articles, reports and book reviews on Rumi’s art of story-telling, poetic imagery, theology, spiritual psychology, ecumenism, spirituality, pedagogy, hermeneutics, ethics, epistemology, prophetology, metaphysics and cosmology, as well as on the heritage of Rumi’s thought in modern and medieval literary history and interpretation and commentary on his works such as the Mathnawi and Divan-i Shams-i Tabriz.

Author Biography

Leonard Lewisohn is an American author, translator and lecturer in the area of Islamic studies and a specialist in Persian language and Sufi literature. He is the Academic Editor of Mawlana Rumi Review. He is currently Senior Lecturer, and Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow in Persian and Sufi Literaure in the Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, UK. Dr Lewisohn‘s works include Beyond Faith and Fidelity: the Sufi Poetry and Teachings of Mahmud Shabistari (London, 1993), a critical edition of Divan-i Muhammad Shirin Maghribi(Tehran, 1993) and several works of translation on Persian Sufism. He has also edited The Heritage of Sufism in three volumes (Oxford, 1999) and contributed articles to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Encyclopaedia Iranica, and various academic journals.

Carl W. Ernst is a specialist in Islamic studies, with a focus on West and South Asia. His published research, based on the study of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, has been mainly devoted to the study of three areas: general and critical issues of Islamic studies, premodern and contemporary Sufism, and Indo-Muslim culture. He has received research fellowships from the Fulbright program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and he has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His current research projects include an edited volume on Islamophobia in America (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), studies of Muslim interpreters of Indian religions, and a translation of the Arabic poetry of al-Hallaj.

Frankln D. Lewis is an Associate Professor of Persian Language and Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and Deputy Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. He teaches classes on Persian language and literature, Islamic thought, Sufism, Baha'i Studies, translation studies, and Middle Eastern cinema. Professor Lewis studied at U.C. Berkeley and did his graduate work in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His dissertation on the life and works of the 12th-century mystical poet Sana'i, and the establishment of the ghazal genre in Persian literature, won the Foundation of Iranian Studies best dissertation prize in 1995. Prof. Lewis previously taught Persian at Emory University, in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies. He founded Adabiyat, an international discussion forum on the literatures of the Islamic World (including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu) and is former President of the American Institute of Iranian Studies.

Alan Williams is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at Manchester University, UK. His research interests include religious rhetoric of all kinds, in particular that of mystical poetry, and I have recently translated the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi ('Spiritual Couplets') of the 13th cent. Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi into iambic pentameter blank verse.

Robert Abdul Hayy Darr (b. 1951 in California) has, for nearly forty years, been a student of Islamic culture. He has studied Persian and Afghan literature and history, Afghan and north Indian music, and classical Afghan miniature painting. His translation of Mahmud Shabistari’s masterpiece, Gulshan-i raz, published by Archetype in 2007 as Garden of Mystery, has been acclaimed as a new classic.

Devin Deweese is a professor of Islamic and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.He received his PhD in 1985 at Indiana University, and since then has continued to do research on Central Asian Islam, particularly Sufism and its political and social dimensions. He has published major studies of Central Asian religion and history using Persian, Arabic and Turkic manuscript sources he has painstakingly accumulated from collections all over the world. Until 2008, he served as the Director of the Denis Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies at Indiana University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2006.

William C. Chittick is a leading translator and interpreter of classical Islamic philosophical and mystical texts. He is best known for his groundbreaking work on Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi, and has written extensively on the school of Ibn 'Arabi, Islamic philosophy, and Islamic cosmology. Born in Milford, Connecticut, Chittick finished his BA at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and then went on to complete a PhD in Persian literature at Tehran University under the supervision of Seyyed Hossein Nasr in 1974. Chittick is currently Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University.