Jalaledin Rumi is of one the most read poets in the West.
On September 30, 2002, Time Magazine published an article entitled ‘Rumi Rules!’ in which they identified this Muslim mystic as the best selling poet in the United States.
The Essential Rumi, was published by HarperCollins in 1995. With more than 250,000 copies in print, it is easily the most successful poetry book published in the West in the past decade.
Rumi, founder of the Mevlevi Sufi order, was born in the city of Balkh in modern day Afghanistan in the year 1207. It is said that it was his encounter in 1244 with Shams Tabriz that initiated an inner spark, of which his poetic genius was but one outcome. Rumi’s most famous works include the Mathnawi, the Ruba’iyyat, and the Diwan-i Shams-i Tabrizi, the latter consisting of approximately thirty-six thousand verses.
Rumi’s masterpiece, the Mathnawi, is a fantastical, oceanic mishmash of folktales, philosophical speculation and lyric ebullience in which the worldly and the otherworldly, the secular and the sacred, blend constantly.
Source:Time Magazine on Rumi
http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501021007-356133,00.html
Ismailimail 