Rumi’s Poetry

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poetry of Rumi, the Persian scholar and Sufi mystic of the 13th Century. His great poetic works are the Masnavi or “spiritual couplets” and the Divan, a collection of thousands of lyric poems. He is closely connected with four modern countries: Afghanistan, as he was born in Balkh, from which he gains the name Balkhi; Uzbekistan from his time in Samarkand as a child; Iran as he wrote in Persian; and Turkey for his work in Konya, where he spent most of his working life and where his followers established the Mevlevi Order, also known as the Whirling Dervishes.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Alan Williams 2 episodes
  British Academy Wolfson Research Professor at the University of Manchester
• Carole Hillenbrand 3 episodes
  Professor of Islamic History at the University of St Andrews and Professor Emerita of Edinburgh University
• Lloyd Ridgeon No other episodes
  Reader in Islamic Studies at the University of Glasgow

Reading list

• Tales from the Masnavi
  A. J. Arberry (Routledge, 1993) Google Books →
• Persian Sufi Poetry: An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Poems
  J. T. P. de Bruijn (Routledge, 1997) Google Books →
• The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi
  William C. Chittick (State University of New York Press, 1984) Google Books →
• Ruins of the Heart: Selected Lyric Poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi
  Kabir Helminski (T Threshold Books, 1981)
• Rumi: Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi
  Franklin D. Lewis (Oneworld Publications, 2000) Google Books →
• The Philosophy of Ecstasy: Rumi and the Sufi Tradition
  Leonard Lewisohn (ed.) (World Wisdom Books, 2015) Google Books →
• The Mathnawi of Jalalu'ddin Rumi
  R. A Nicholson (Luzac and Co. vols. I-VIII, 1925-1940) Google Books →
• The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi
  Annemarie Schimmel (first published 1980; State University of New York Press, 1993) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to Sufism
  Lloyd Ridgeon (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Google Books →
• The Masnavi
  Rumi (trans. Alan Williams) (I. B. Tauris, forthcoming 2017-2020) Google Books →
• Mystical Poems of Rumi
  Rumi (trans. A. J. Arberry) (first published 1968; University of Chicago Press, 2009) Google Books →
• Look! This is Love: Poems of Rumi
  Rumi (trans. Annemarie Schimmel) (Shambhala Publications, 1991)
• Signs of the Unseen: The Discourses of Jalaluddin Rumi
  Rumi (trans. W.M. Thackston) (Shambhala Publications, 1999)
• Spiritual Verses: The First Book of the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi
  Alan Williams (Penguin Classics, 2006)
• The Vision of Rumi: Revealing the Masnavi, Persia's Great Masterpiece
  Alan Williams (I. B. Tauris, 2017) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b06ztx2w

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ztx2w

Auto-category: 891.5511 (Persian poetry)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. The Sufi writer and teacher Rumi is so important in the Islamic world that four modern countries claim him for their own.