The Masnavi, Book Five

‘If something else can capture your attention
Then it’s not love, but just a trivial passion –
Love is that flame which, once it blazes up,
Burns everything but the Beloved up.’

This is the first ever translation of the entirety of Book Five of Rumi’s magnum opus, The Masnavi, into English. Prior to this verse translation in heroic couplets, translations were either of selected passages or in lineated prose with passages deemed too salacious rendered into Latin, as was the convention in Britain of the early twentieth century. This fifth book of Rumi’s The Masnavi is well-known to contain much sexually explicit content within teaching stories about the path of annihilation of the self in a total and uncompromising way.

Author: Jalal Al-Din Rumi, Jawid Mojaddedi
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 12/03/2022
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.52lbs
Size: 7.73h x 5.13w x 0.57d
ISBN13: 9780192857071
ISBN10: 019285707X
BISAC Categories:
– Literary Criticism | Ancient and Classical
– Religion | Islam | General

About the Author

Jalal al-Din Rumi

Jawid Mojaddedi is Professor of Religion at Rutgers University. Born in Afghanistan, he was a 2014-15 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellow and a 2020-21 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. Dr Mojaddedi’s translation of The Masnavi: Book One (OUP, 2004) was awarded the Lois Roth Prize by the American Institute of Iranian Studies. His previous books include Beyond Dogma: Rumi’s Teachings on Friendship with God and Early Sufi Theories (OUP, 2012) and The Biographical Tradition in Sufism (2001).