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Arabic Literature and Language
Love Is My Savior: The Arabic Poems of Rumi
This new volume of Rumi’s works, the first-ever English translation of his Arabic poems, will be exciting for the newcomer to Rumi’s verses as well as to readers already familiar with his mystical philosophy. The poems take the reader on a journey of spiritual exploration, ecstatic union, cruel rejection, and mystic reconciliation. Rumi reveals his soul and welcomes everyone to his spiritual feast.
This dual-language volume opens a treasury of Rumi’s mystic thought and startling poetry. His verses pulsate with desire and longing, with sensuality, and with ecstatic celebration. Rumi found in his mystic poetry a vehicle for the expression of the endless spiritual bounties of love. He placed love at the center of his faith and doctrine, and he pronounced it to be the goal of his life and the only form of true worship. This collection is stunningly rendered in English by an award-winning poet and a distinguished translator of Arabic poetry.
This dual-language volume opens a treasury of Rumi’s mystic thought and startling poetry. His verses pulsate with desire and longing, with sensuality, and with ecstatic celebration. Rumi found in his mystic poetry a vehicle for the expression of the endless spiritual bounties of love. He placed love at the center of his faith and doctrine, and he pronounced it to be the goal of his life and the only form of true worship. This collection is stunningly rendered in English by an award-winning poet and a distinguished translator of Arabic poetry.
108 pages, Paperback
Published February 1, 2016
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288 people want to read
About the author
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
1,170 books15.7k followersSufism inspired writings of Persian poet and mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi; these writings express the longing of the soul for union with the divine.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī - also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, Mevlânâ/Mawlānā (مولانا, "our master"), Mevlevî/Mawlawī (مولوی, "my master") and more popularly simply as Rumi - was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian and Sufi mystic who lived in Konya, a city of Ottoman Empire (Today's Turkey). His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages, and he has been described as the most popular poet and the best-selling poet in the United States.
His poetry has influenced Persian literature, but also Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, Azerbaijani, Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu, as well as the literature of some other Turkic, Iranian, and Indo-Aryan languages including Chagatai, Pashto, and Bengali.
Due to quarrels between different dynasties in Khorāṣān, opposition to the Khwarizmid Shahs who were considered devious by his father, Bahā ud-Dīn Wālad or fear of the impending Mongol cataclysm, his father decided to migrate westwards, eventually settling in the Anatolian city Konya, where he lived most of his life, composed one of the crowning glories of Persian literature, and profoundly affected the culture of the area.
When his father died, Rumi, aged 25, inherited his position as the head of an Islamic school. One of Baha' ud-Din's students, Sayyed Burhan ud-Din Muhaqqiq Termazi, continued to train Rumi in the Shariah as well as the Tariqa, especially that of Rumi's father. For nine years, Rumi practised Sufism as a disciple of Burhan ud-Din until the latter died in 1240 or 1241. Rumi's public life then began: he became an Islamic Jurist, issuing fatwas and giving sermons in the mosques of Konya. He also served as a Molvi (Islamic teacher) and taught his adherents in the madrassa. During this period, Rumi also travelled to Damascus and is said to have spent four years there.
It was his meeting with the dervish Shams-e Tabrizi on 15 November 1244 that completely changed his life. From an accomplished teacher and jurist, Rumi was transformed into an ascetic.
On the night of 5 December 1248, as Rumi and Shams were talking, Shams was called to the back door. He went out, never to be seen again. Rumi's love for, and his bereavement at the death of, Shams found their expression in an outpouring of lyric poems, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. He himself went out searching for Shams and journeyed again to Damascus.
Rumi found another companion in Salaḥ ud-Din-e Zarkub, a goldsmith. After Salah ud-Din's death, Rumi's scribe and favourite student, Hussam-e Chalabi, assumed the role of Rumi's companion. Hussam implored Rumi to write more. Rumi spent the next 12 years of his life in Anatolia dictating the six volumes of this masterwork, the Masnavi, to Hussam.
In December 1273, Rumi fell ill and died on the 17th of December in Konya.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī - also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, Mevlânâ/Mawlānā (مولانا, "our master"), Mevlevî/Mawlawī (مولوی, "my master") and more popularly simply as Rumi - was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian and Sufi mystic who lived in Konya, a city of Ottoman Empire (Today's Turkey). His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages, and he has been described as the most popular poet and the best-selling poet in the United States.
His poetry has influenced Persian literature, but also Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, Azerbaijani, Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu, as well as the literature of some other Turkic, Iranian, and Indo-Aryan languages including Chagatai, Pashto, and Bengali.
Due to quarrels between different dynasties in Khorāṣān, opposition to the Khwarizmid Shahs who were considered devious by his father, Bahā ud-Dīn Wālad or fear of the impending Mongol cataclysm, his father decided to migrate westwards, eventually settling in the Anatolian city Konya, where he lived most of his life, composed one of the crowning glories of Persian literature, and profoundly affected the culture of the area.
When his father died, Rumi, aged 25, inherited his position as the head of an Islamic school. One of Baha' ud-Din's students, Sayyed Burhan ud-Din Muhaqqiq Termazi, continued to train Rumi in the Shariah as well as the Tariqa, especially that of Rumi's father. For nine years, Rumi practised Sufism as a disciple of Burhan ud-Din until the latter died in 1240 or 1241. Rumi's public life then began: he became an Islamic Jurist, issuing fatwas and giving sermons in the mosques of Konya. He also served as a Molvi (Islamic teacher) and taught his adherents in the madrassa. During this period, Rumi also travelled to Damascus and is said to have spent four years there.
It was his meeting with the dervish Shams-e Tabrizi on 15 November 1244 that completely changed his life. From an accomplished teacher and jurist, Rumi was transformed into an ascetic.
On the night of 5 December 1248, as Rumi and Shams were talking, Shams was called to the back door. He went out, never to be seen again. Rumi's love for, and his bereavement at the death of, Shams found their expression in an outpouring of lyric poems, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. He himself went out searching for Shams and journeyed again to Damascus.
Rumi found another companion in Salaḥ ud-Din-e Zarkub, a goldsmith. After Salah ud-Din's death, Rumi's scribe and favourite student, Hussam-e Chalabi, assumed the role of Rumi's companion. Hussam implored Rumi to write more. Rumi spent the next 12 years of his life in Anatolia dictating the six volumes of this masterwork, the Masnavi, to Hussam.
In December 1273, Rumi fell ill and died on the 17th of December in Konya.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
May 9, 2020
"The price of love is peace and calm!"
January 10, 2021
Quite a text, poems which transcendreligions and cultures. This is where the wisdom of God's love incarcerates in beautifully written verses. I have had the privilege of reading it in both languages Arabic and English.
January 16, 2019
You can't read Rumi with any of the modern Irony or Sarcasm lenses that social media trades in nearly exclusively, even in the poetry world. You have to take your shoes off - probably more than that. Haven't read Rumi since high school and I'm grateful, so grateful I waited until I hurt others and was hurt deeply to enjoy how plainly sincere this felt. Not boring, not without some modern allusions, but like a friend digging down to the marrow of it over a beer, staring off out the window but needing you there to hear it. Drink, Love, God, Pain - all the good stuff is there and the translation I wish I could speak more to, but to know that a human from 1207 CE could move me like this speaks to the power of Nesreen and Anthony. Long live love.
December 26, 2025
The preface to the translated poems showed great promise and intent, of having faithfully translation of the poetry of Rumi from the original Arabic (while most of Rumi’s verses were in Farsi, he was multi-lingual and had Arabic verses and fully Arabic poems as well) to English, that retains both the meaning, feeling, intent, and rhyming structure of the original.
Where I believe this goal fell short is in the limitation of keeping a rhyme scheme in the original English, with very tired, bland rhymes such as “cry die lie”, “grace place”, “wine mine” etc. It sounded elementary. While the introduction criticized Coleman Barks reinterpretation of Rumi’s poems as essentially being too filled with, “New Age spirituality”, and losing the Islamic essence of the original and perhaps not being a faithful translation of Rumi (as he himself knew neither Farsi nor Arabic), his poetry is super to this version, especially as he let go of attempting to rhyme, and focused on getting at the feeling of spirituality that poetry attempts to embody. While I’m not sure if his translations were accurate or inaccurate with the Coleman Barks version (and Coleman Barks keeps many Islamic references in his Rumi poems as well, with references to Muhammad filling certain poems), I do think he did certain things right.
That said, it would be lovely to have maybe have a book/poetry translation project of the entirety of Divan-e-Shams and Masnavi, where the original text is presented, then a literal translation of the meaning of the words into English (including the often odd grammar, as Farsi grammar is different from English, as the ordering of phrases affects the emotional quality of the impact), and then a poetic interpretation a la Coleman Barks that attempts to get closer to the spirit of the text. Therefore, the combined effort can help a non-Farsi and non-Arabic speaker to get both the literal meaning of the poems, along with the poetic meaning. And if there are particular words or phrases which are fully captured in either that help with getting more nuance of the poems themselves, they can be presented as footnotes in the translation.
What I am personally disappointed in the Coleman Barks and this version is how the poems are separated out of the Rumi’s whole work. The two books that he wrote/were his transcribed words, at least in English, are never presented in translation work under their original titles such as “Masnavi” and “Divan-e-Shams”. If Rumi is a master poet, and by all accounts, he is, then one ought to be faithful to the original, even if it’s lengthy. And one should avoid adding elements into the reading that aren’t there.
This feels like taking snippets of Tolstoy or Nietzsche’s work, and then jumbling up their books together in translated snippets. Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina and Kingdom of God is Within You combined together in translated to English snippets as opposed to their full original as separate works, or combining Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with Ecce Homo and Human, All Too Human, when each individual work was a separate mental construct by the original author.
Where I believe this goal fell short is in the limitation of keeping a rhyme scheme in the original English, with very tired, bland rhymes such as “cry die lie”, “grace place”, “wine mine” etc. It sounded elementary. While the introduction criticized Coleman Barks reinterpretation of Rumi’s poems as essentially being too filled with, “New Age spirituality”, and losing the Islamic essence of the original and perhaps not being a faithful translation of Rumi (as he himself knew neither Farsi nor Arabic), his poetry is super to this version, especially as he let go of attempting to rhyme, and focused on getting at the feeling of spirituality that poetry attempts to embody. While I’m not sure if his translations were accurate or inaccurate with the Coleman Barks version (and Coleman Barks keeps many Islamic references in his Rumi poems as well, with references to Muhammad filling certain poems), I do think he did certain things right.
That said, it would be lovely to have maybe have a book/poetry translation project of the entirety of Divan-e-Shams and Masnavi, where the original text is presented, then a literal translation of the meaning of the words into English (including the often odd grammar, as Farsi grammar is different from English, as the ordering of phrases affects the emotional quality of the impact), and then a poetic interpretation a la Coleman Barks that attempts to get closer to the spirit of the text. Therefore, the combined effort can help a non-Farsi and non-Arabic speaker to get both the literal meaning of the poems, along with the poetic meaning. And if there are particular words or phrases which are fully captured in either that help with getting more nuance of the poems themselves, they can be presented as footnotes in the translation.
What I am personally disappointed in the Coleman Barks and this version is how the poems are separated out of the Rumi’s whole work. The two books that he wrote/were his transcribed words, at least in English, are never presented in translation work under their original titles such as “Masnavi” and “Divan-e-Shams”. If Rumi is a master poet, and by all accounts, he is, then one ought to be faithful to the original, even if it’s lengthy. And one should avoid adding elements into the reading that aren’t there.
This feels like taking snippets of Tolstoy or Nietzsche’s work, and then jumbling up their books together in translated snippets. Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina and Kingdom of God is Within You combined together in translated to English snippets as opposed to their full original as separate works, or combining Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with Ecce Homo and Human, All Too Human, when each individual work was a separate mental construct by the original author.
December 9, 2018
While I’m used to Rumi talking about love in erotic analogies, measuring one type of love just as great as another, what I’m not used to is him talking about heartbreak.
This book pulls largely from Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, named for his spiritual mentor, Shams. Shams and Rumi were crazy close, delving into the mystical aspects of Islam together, and perhaps loving each other in the way some of the more erotic poetry suggests. In the 1200s, when Rumi lived, there weren’t really as many prescribed lines surrounding sexuality. Heteronormativity was much weaker.
I did enjoy the book, but I have to admit, reading Rumi’s writings on heartbreak was…a little heartbreaking. I’m used to his words lifting me up and enlightening me. I’m used to reading about absorbing and producing love wherever we can find the means to do so. So it was discombobulating to read words that focused so strongly on his attachment to Shams, and the gut-wrenching pain he endured because of it.
Eventually, he learned to find an extension of that same love with his students. By working with them, he was connecting to the current of love that had flowed between him and Shams. The pure love of enlightenment.
But most of this book is a lament.
I didn’t hate it. Rumi is brilliant regardless of his mood. It just wasn’t what I was expecting.
https://femmefrugality.com/around-the...
This book pulls largely from Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, named for his spiritual mentor, Shams. Shams and Rumi were crazy close, delving into the mystical aspects of Islam together, and perhaps loving each other in the way some of the more erotic poetry suggests. In the 1200s, when Rumi lived, there weren’t really as many prescribed lines surrounding sexuality. Heteronormativity was much weaker.
I did enjoy the book, but I have to admit, reading Rumi’s writings on heartbreak was…a little heartbreaking. I’m used to his words lifting me up and enlightening me. I’m used to reading about absorbing and producing love wherever we can find the means to do so. So it was discombobulating to read words that focused so strongly on his attachment to Shams, and the gut-wrenching pain he endured because of it.
Eventually, he learned to find an extension of that same love with his students. By working with them, he was connecting to the current of love that had flowed between him and Shams. The pure love of enlightenment.
But most of this book is a lament.
I didn’t hate it. Rumi is brilliant regardless of his mood. It just wasn’t what I was expecting.
https://femmefrugality.com/around-the...
February 28, 2023
Rumi incredibly encapsulates the integrity of love and what it means to walk through life with compassion and kindness in your pockets.
If ever you feel lost, doubtful or unloved in whatever phase you are now, knock on Rumi's door. I'm quite sure he'll let you in with a smile and a warm hug. He'll tell you triumphant stories and uplifting poems while serving you tea or lemon water on a clear afternoon. He'll listen to your plights and struggles and make you feel comforted and heard. He'll teach you a life that is centered on what truly matters at the end of everything; and that is love. To everyone and to yourself.
It was because of my fiancé that I started to read more Arabic poetry, so thank you my love!
If ever you feel lost, doubtful or unloved in whatever phase you are now, knock on Rumi's door. I'm quite sure he'll let you in with a smile and a warm hug. He'll tell you triumphant stories and uplifting poems while serving you tea or lemon water on a clear afternoon. He'll listen to your plights and struggles and make you feel comforted and heard. He'll teach you a life that is centered on what truly matters at the end of everything; and that is love. To everyone and to yourself.
It was because of my fiancé that I started to read more Arabic poetry, so thank you my love!
April 18, 2022
3.5 stars ? not too sure
I was so excited to read this because it included the original arabic poems beside the translation but the arabic is too 13th century and I didn't understand like 90%
tho the translation was nice, even if sometimes i felt like it didn't match what the arabic was saying, and i love how the translator managed to still make it rhyme
even tho a bit of the beauty of poetry is lost the translation doesn't disappoint
Read in an hour,it's reallly short, I'm not gonna count it towards my reading goal because I'd feel bad 🦧
I was so excited to read this because it included the original arabic poems beside the translation but the arabic is too 13th century and I didn't understand like 90%
tho the translation was nice, even if sometimes i felt like it didn't match what the arabic was saying, and i love how the translator managed to still make it rhyme
even tho a bit of the beauty of poetry is lost the translation doesn't disappoint
Read in an hour,it's reallly short, I'm not gonna count it towards my reading goal because I'd feel bad 🦧
July 18, 2020
I always have a problem with translated poems, which made this edition the perfect introduction to Rumi's work. It's a collection of his poems written originally in Arabic, accompanied by an English translation. Wasn't a fan of the style of the translation, but needed the extra help understanding the more difficult Arabic words. I absolutely loved the poems, no surprise there.
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July 20, 2024This book includes thirty-three Arabic poems and fragments, taken from the first 1010 poems in Rumi's Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi.
most of the poems of this divan probably date from around 1248 C.E. and the years that followed until Rumi had overcome his grief over the loss of Shams. [With some composed up to early 1270s?]
most of the poems of this divan probably date from around 1248 C.E. and the years that followed until Rumi had overcome his grief over the loss of Shams. [With some composed up to early 1270s?]
January 30, 2021
see on hästi omapärane lugemine tausta arvestades - aga ilusaid pärleid leiab kaunisti!
November 27, 2021
It was okay, I didn’t love it.
December 4, 2021
Most beautiful poems that seep into your heart to cleanse your soul to make you feel light..💜💜
October 21, 2023
Loads of wine
December 8, 2023
stole my breath. but the wine metaphors were a bit too much for me lol.
July 12, 2025
nice. like this site: http://www.arabic-poems.com
December 26, 2025
A master of Arabic language and poetry. A man who was madly in love.
March 16, 2020
This Eye
Love is my Savior
Longing
Your Wine Lights the World
Love is my Savior
Longing
Your Wine Lights the World
January 10, 2017
Apparently this is the first time Rumi's Arabic poems have been translated into English. The introduction is excellent giving, among other things, reasons why Rumi wrote a few poems in Arabic. Beautiful bi-lingual edition.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews