A great benefit in writing about Rumi is being refreshed daily by his wise statements and life advice. Early on I was taken with one such line from a ghazal, which became a compass needle in the travels both geographic and literary that have engaged me for nearly eight years: “Sit close to someone with a big heart, sit in the shade of a tree with fresh leaves.” Fortunately, Rumi tends to attract scholars, curators, translators, tour guides, devotees, religious leaders, librarians, artists, musicians, and close readers with big hearts. To all of them, who are finally too numerous to name, I owe a debt of gratitude for the extended experience of sitting in the shade of this tree with fresh leaves.
Rumi’s was a big life, and the world of interest that has grown around him in over eight hundred years is immense. My predecessors in studying the life and work of Rumi include writers and scholars of such accomplishment that I could only hope their contributions register however faintly in my own language and thought. The contemporary American scholar who has devoted himself most exhaustively to Rumi is Franklin D. Lewis, chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His Rumi: Past and Present, East and West was my authoritative source for many of the facts of Rumi’s life. I am also grateful to Professor Lewis for taking time to have a conversation over lunch when he was in New York City. Of bygone Rumi scholars of similar stature, I am indebted to the great editor Badi al-Zaman Foruzanfar, of the University of Tehran, and to the vibrant books on the subject by Annemarie Schimmel, formerly Professor of Indo-Muslim Studies at Harvard.
Writing this biography has required many meetings with experts, several of whom have been extraordinarily generous, ignoring any impulse to territoriality in sharing their knowledge—a testament to them and, again, perhaps, to Rumi. Standing out among these is the Iranian-American novelist and essayist Salar Abdoh, codirector of the Creative Writing MFA program at the City College of New York. Dividing his time between Tehran and New York City, Salar was invaluable in finding books for me in the original Persian that were unavailable in the United States. For securing the remainder of such elusive texts through interlibrary loan, I am grateful to W. Gregory Gallagher, the diligent librarian of The Century Association. For other such guidance, I thank: Ahmad Ashraf, managing editor of Encyclopedia Iranica, Columbia University; Mohammad Batmanglij, publisher of Mage books; Dick Davis, the excellent translator of Hafez and other Persian poets; and research specialist David Smith, formerly at the New York Public Library.
As Rumi wrote and spoke in Persian and most of the contemporary accounts of his life are in Persian as well as some of the most fascinating scholarship, much still not translated, the initial phase of this project involved learning the language. For leading me through the beauties and peculiarities of Farsi my greatest debt is to the writer and native Persian speaker Maryam Mortaz, my first tutor. As the project grew, so did her role, as she was my collaborator on the translations of Rumi and other sources from the original Persian used in this biography. At the University of Texas in Austin, where I took part in the Summer Persian Language Institute in 2011, my talented instructor was Blake Atwood, with whom I subsequently studied in an online graduate-level Persian language course. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where I attended the Arabic Persian Turkish Language Immersion Institute in the summer of 2012, I am similarly indebted to Seyede Pouye Khoshkhoosani, Parvaneh Hosseini Fahraji, and Mehrak Kamalisarvestani. For seven years I have also studied on-and-off in the collegial evening classes of Persian taught by Fahimeh Gooran Savadkoohi at the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies. For guiding me to all of these programs, and for our stimulating discussions of Persian poetry over coffee, I acknowledge the esteemed literary critic and Iranologist, Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami, clinical professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.
Traveling in the lands known to Rumi requires expert help and guidance. Among those who made my travels both possible and most rewarding: the Harvard Museum of Natural History Travel Program; Dmitry Rudich at MIR Corporation in Seattle; and my guides Muzafar Ibragimov in Tajikistan, Mahmood Daryaee in Iran, and Üzeyir Özyurt in Konya, Turkey, where I was also shown around by the highly informed Dr. Naci Bakirci, associate director of the Mevlana Museum, and Dr. Nuri Şimşekler of the Selçuk University of Konya. Of helpful friends, I wish to thank: Saadi Alkouatli for his part in arranging my trip within Syria; for her advice on traveling in Central Asia, Dr. Emily Jane O’Dell; Dr. Robert Finn, formerly the United States ambassador to Afghanistan; Frederick Eberstadt; Omer Koç, for his hospitality in Istanbul and for providing me with an introduction to Esin Celebi Bayru, Rumi’s granddaughter from the twenty-second generation; and Joshua W. Walker. I am also grateful to Richard David Story, the editor in chief of Departures magazine, for commissioning the article “Turkey’s Magical Mystical Tour.”
For interviews kindly granted either in person, through email, or on Skype, I wish to thank: Coleman Barks; William Chittick, professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University, to whom I was kindly introduced by his student Behrooz Karjooravary; Kabir Helminksi; Ahmet Karamustafa, professor of History at the University of Maryland; Jawid Mojaddedi, associate professor of Religion and director of Graduate Studies, Rutgers University, and translator of The Masnavi; Asma Sadiq, M.D., director of the Division of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics, Beth Israel Medical Center; Professor Dr. Kelim Erkan Türkmen; travel writer and linguist Bruce Wannell; and Professor Ehsan Yarshater, founder of The Center for Iranian Studies, and Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Columbia University.
For invaluable ongoing advice on the writing of this book, I wish to thank my perceptive friend and longtime “first reader” Barbara Heizer for her generous and characteristically insightful responses. I relied as well on my two resourceful research assistants Mariam Rahmani and Jacob Denz, and on the cartographer Anandaroop Roy for designing the accompanying maps. For expert readings of later versions of the book, I am indebted to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, chairman of The Cordoba Initiative, Joel Conarroe, and Daniel Rafinejad. I cannot imagine this book existing in its present form without the influence at critical moments of my editor at Harper, William Strachan, as well as the early, bold, and continuous support of my publisher, Jonathan Burnham, and the tiger in my corner, my agent, Joy Harris, whose passion for this project has never wavered.
Rumi’s name will always be synonymous with love. He is the poet of love and, as he put it, “the preacher of love.” Nowhere has love been more real to me during the writing of this book than in my family, a kind of team of love. I could never decide whether my partner, Paul Raushenbush, was the Rumi in my life or the Shams, but he was certainly the loving and listening collaborator and fellow traveler in the creation of this book in more ways than I could ever spell out. The miracle of love, who happily arrived during the last year of Rumi’s Secret, our son, Walter, has by now made everything new, including writing, and the sort of reading that takes place on cardboard pages, bringing to life for us Rumi’s essential line, “Your love claps its hands, creating a hundred worlds.”