My other site (RumiSite.com) is dedicated to famous Persian poet, best known as Rumi. The site has all his poems in Persian language. |
Needed Background:To better understand Rumi’s belief system and where his point of views comes from, it is a must to know Islam. An English translation of Koran is provided here. This is the most accurate and easiest to understand translation I have found so far. This copy is in PDF format so you can easily save it to your computer or mobile device for reading and listening. |
Book of Fihe Ma Fih:Unfortunately a very small portion of Rumi’s poems and writings have been translated properly into English. Rumi has 2 famous poetry books Masnavi and Divane Shams. A less famous, but easier to understand book, which is a collection of some of his sayings is called “Fihe Ma Fih”, which is available here as a PDF file for your reading. Click on the following link to view this file: |
Book of Masnavi:Masnavi is a collection of about 30,000 lines of poetry, which Rumi used as the delivery means for his spiritual teaching to his chosen student (Hosam Al Din). Almost all these teachings are placed inside stories. Rumi uses these stories as containers for his spiritual teachings. A certain level of familiarity with Islamic spirituality, Irfan which simply means awareness, is needed for understanding his lessons. Unfortunately most translators of Masnavi (Persian or non-Persian) don’t have this familiarity. That is why most translations only give the easy to understand version of the story, but omit the harder to grasp spiritual lessons that follow that story. |
Book of Shams:Divane Shams is also a collections of over 3,300 of his poems, with each poem having around 10 lines on the average. Rumi wrote most of these poems to express his spiritual journey and his love for his spiritual teacher (Shams Tabrizi). These poems are the ones best known in the west due to numerous references to “love”. Here is an English translation of one of these poems: Poem #636 Here are a few sites who are collecting English translations from this book: |