Rumi's Mathnawi (selections) Week 6: Middle East - Assignments - Reading - Resources - Images

Resources

Rumi Resources: Audio

There is an NPR interview about Rumi with Coleman Barks (8 minutes), which is an excellent brief introduction to Rumi.

The Canadian Broadcasting Company's program Tapestry is an hour-long audio discussion of Rumi's poetry, with many readings by Coleman Barks. (recorded at a festival of Rumi's poetry in Toronto).

WBUR's Connection series has an hour-long show on Rumi, with an accompanying webpage. This presentation is a call-in radio show, with Coleman Barks as the guest.

Rumi Resources: Websites

Khamush.com provides a wealth of Rumi resources, including a Life of Rumi, as well as a Daily Poem, with selections taken from a variety of translators. There is a section which includes the Persian text of Rumi's poetry, transliterated into the Latin alphabet, with a Persian vocabulary list below the text.

Sunlight is a Yahoo! Group that sends out an email everyday with a Rumi poem, featuring many different translators and translation styles. You can also see an archive of all the poems they have sent out previously.

Dar-al-Masnavi.org is an "Internet school" for studying Rumi's Mesnevi. You will find selections from the various books of the poem, often with many different translations of the same portion side-by-side.

TurkishMusic.org provides streaming audio files of prayers and music. BelovedMusic.com has excepts in MP3 format from the songs written by and inspired by Rumi on their latest Beloved Music CD.

Mevlana.net is a website maintained by the Celebi family, who are distance descendants of Rumi. You will find information and illustrations here of the "sema", or the dance of the whirling dervishes.

Persopedia.org has a Persian-text version of the Mesnevi online.

Other Islamic and Sufi Resources

You can find other important collections of Sufi legends and tales by Attar, Sa'adi, and others at the Omphaloskesis Ebooks page (all in pdf format).

For more poetry, you can read several editions of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (together with the translation by Whinfield) online at ELF. The MIT Classics Archive has a single text-file version of Fitzgerald that is easy to download.