Product details
- ISBN 9781838601287
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 29 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Jalaloddin Rumi’s Masnavi-ye Ma‘navi, or ‘Spiritual Couplets’, composed in the 13th Century, is a monumental work of poetry in the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism. For centuries before his love poetry became a literary phenomenon in the West, Rumi’s Masnavi had been revered in the Islamic world as its greatest mystical text. Drawing upon a vast array of characters, stories and fables, and deeply versed in spiritual teaching, it takes us on a profound and playful journey of discovery along the path of divine love, toward its ultimate goal of union with the source of all Truth.
The main theme of Book Three of the Masnavi is the strengthening of the spirit through purification of human knowledge in the acquisition of mystical wisdom. Rumi teaches that this mystical understanding is superior to the rational knowledge of the human intellect. By the end of this long book, the half-way point is reached in this mystical treatise of oceanic proportions. It may be said to be the most profound of the six books, in pursuing rational thinking to its very depths.
Translated with an introduction, notes and analysis by Alan Williams and including the Persian text edited by Mohammad Este'lami.
Mowlana Jalaloddin Balkhi (1207-1273), known to the West as Rumi is a Persian poet comparable to the greatest poets of Europe. In 1244, Rumi began the composition of a body (divan) of lyric poems (ghazals) totalling 35,000 verses. In the early 1260s he turned to the composition of his most mature and final work, the mystical masterpiece in six volumes of Persian verses known as the Masnavi-ye Ma‘navi ‘The Spiritual Couplets’.
Alan Williams was born 1953, Windsor, England. He studied Classics, Persian and Arabic at The Queen’s College Oxford, then a PhD in Old and Middle Iranian Studies at SOAS, London, and taught at SOAS, then the Universities of Sussex and Manchester, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion.
