Ms.Wines writes this book in such a way that makes it so enjoyable. She seems to be a writer that any group can grasp her point. What a splendid book.

Rumi: A Spiritual Biography is that rare thing, a thoughtful, richly textured short biography that can appeal to a very broad audience. A delightful look at one of the world's greatest poets and humanists--Wines provides us with an insightful and precise portrait of a riveting historical figure. Her writing is intelligent, readable, and thought-provoking. I can't think of a more stimulating book about Rumi; the book is both informative and a wonderful read that not only sheds light on the nature of Rumi's spirituality and mystical endeavors and creativity, as well as his dramatic literary achievments but also elucidates the modern reader's strong appeal to and identification with Rumi.

As the critic Edwin Muir noted in 1926 of Lytton Strachey, Strachey (whose works became the touchstones for modern biography) did 2 things for biography: he humanized it by irony, he gave it form. He went out in search not of great figures and noble character, but of human nature, and he always found. So too does author Leslie Wines in Rumi: A Spiritual Biography.

Wines's biography of Rumi is rich with good storytelling and marvelous irony and, like Strachey, with just a little touch of sardonic wit. How else to approach the incredible legends and hagiographers of Rumi? But her approach is never disrespectful or irreverent. While critical of the hagiographic trend of Rumi's contemporaries, as well as most future historians, Wines does not simply and tediously recount these legends but, while wading through such ushers in a fresh and bold imagining of this great poet with a critical contemporary eye. Ultimately Rumi comes to life on the pages of this short literary biography like he never has before.

Wines humanizes Rumi. In short, Wines shows how Rumi's work responds to an increasing need many of us have for an instinctive and mystical response to life, and for a more joyful daily exiistence. She shows us how Rumi's very broad appeal--even to those who are not particularly interested in spiritual writings or even poetry--derives from his very genuine cosmopolitan nature and character. Like Rumi's own work there is little sentimentality for its own sake in the author's examination of her subject, which very convincinly sheds light on Rumi's contemporary relevance and dazzling creative appeal and our mystic identification with this great humanist. And she shows us how Rumi's meditations on love and the chaotic nature of poetry and life, along with the extraordinary social, cutural and politically tumultuous times (not unlike our own)of his life resonate with the modern reader and transcend medieval times to our own present day.

at first, I was put off by coleman barks' gruff voice, didn't seem appropriate to the words. but then it grew on me and now it seems like I can hear his love of the subject.
all in all, pretty good.

This collaboration of Coleman Barks reading Rumi, the tabla drum, the flute and sitar is such a perfect marriage of expressive music and delicious Rumi. It brings Rumi's words to life so well, I get levels of understanding and joy from the spoken words that reading them on the printed page alone seldom delivered.

These songs are not for the quick, the ephemeral, the here and now. Lay back. You're in a hurry, but there is time. There is distance between what you think you have to do, and what needs to be done. There is distance between you. And you. Lay back and come together. Listen . . . Hear it? You can hear yourself coming together. Like a suture.

If you don't have time for this book, let it bleed.

As one with a lifelong interest in mysticism, I have been reading Rumi for forty-five years now. Unfortunately, I cannot yet read the originals, and I have had to intuit the sense in some rather bloodless interpretations. Harvey, however, seems to hit it just right. To the degree that we can speak of these things during a person's lifetime, he seems to me to be a genuine mystic himself, passionate and full-blooded as the real thing usually is. Six months ago, I gave a copy of this to a much younger friend who had discerned the via negativa with no external guidance before we met. He rejoices in the book and is delighted to find words that exactly mirror his own untaught discoveries. I do not normally gush over such books. I was rigorously trained in Catholic theology and philosophy, hold a graduate degree in East Asian religion and identify myself as a Christian. I am not expert in Islam, though I know far more than the average reader, having edited one work on Rumi. So I tend to cast a jaundiced eye over most work like this. But if I were forced to reduce my library to a scant hundred volumes, The Way of Passion would still find an honored place. Rumi, though heterodox like all mystics, spoke powerfully not only to the Sufis of his time but to orthodox Muslims, Jews and Christians. Though Harvey certainly does not rank with Rumi, his interpretation can speak meaningfully to all persons of good will who do not barricade themselves behind denominational lines. On the basis of this book alone, I would read anything that Harvey writes.

The Divine Love, Divine Passion, Divine Power, and Divine Truth of Rumi are all explained here by Andrew Harvey. True to the book's title, Harvey has truly created a delightful celibration of Rumi and his works. If you are on your path, or even if you have wondered off the path into the dark forest, Harvey has provided a clear roadmap to the next level of transformation. This map comes repleat with warnings of speed traps, and roadsigns - telling of Rumi and Shams "wildness, violence, and ferocity" as they traveled down their path, drinking wine, and going ever onward, toward the Sun. Just enjoying moments of Divine Grace.

Rumi is one of the greatest spiritual mystics and poets who we can read today. This book is a wonderful guide, both through some of Rumi's poetry, and in gaining insight into Rumi's life. This book is one of my favorite books in my library. Andrew Harvey has clearly experienced the passion of Rumi himself, and is able to guide the reader through profound waters with skill. I found his commentary to be a bonus to the experience of reading Rumi.

I have one comment. I wish the translators of Rumi's works would know a little more about the language, history, and culture in which Rumi has created his works. I think this helps translation. Rumi's work is not just text books in mystics or others. It is a result of a civilization, understanding, and Love. Let's learn that.

This Rumi book ranks, to me, with Coleman Barks translations -- clear, lovely, insightful, beautiful. Star has great translation skills (as evidenced by several of his other books), and his selection of Rumi poems are exceptional. I have given many copies of this book away as gifts -- from weddings and showers to graduations and birthdays -- and I consistently hear back from people that this book has become one of their favorites, too. And the packaging is nearly as exquisite as the content. Highly recommended.

I actually haven't read the English version of this book, but I am a fan of the author and I've read some of his Persian works. I am concerned that some of your readers might consider "Rumi" as an Arabic poet and writer. He is Persian and he is one of our most famous pioneers in spirituality from almost 8 centuries ago.As a matter of fact, after Arab invasion to Iran 14 centuries ago, our language and literature were effected by them. That's why a lot of writers and scientists of that time have some books in Arabic.

I enjoyed reading this book as it reminded me of lighter times in my life. If I would have to pick somethhing that I liked best, I would go for the allegory of the 2 birds... read the book and you will understand.

I really enjoyed this book after stumbling on it among the new editions. The author seems to have used the contrasting themes (different religions, geography, world views, political complications) well to get his point across. I remember finishing my reading on a single, long night. The suspense mentioned in the preview also kept me going. Having visited Istanbul and Konya one time, I can tell you that his descriptions of these specific cities are pretty accurate. I also found myself visualizing some of the concepts he describes (such as being deprived of all senses for an extended period or the restlessness the young man constantly feels). There were some short cuts to obvious problems (no language problems for once), but overall the book provides a wealth of information for the reader about the old world, its cultures, its religious and philosophical concepts. This is one of those books that makes you question the decisions you made in life.

Rumi, Coleman Barks, and Michael Green have collaborated on the most beautiful book I have ever seen (and I have seen a lot). Rumi's poetry trancends the artificial boundaries of religion, and speaks to anyone sincerely on the spiritual path. He captures the burning, the longing for the end of separation from God.

When I first became aware of Rumi's poetry, I was sure that it was about earthly love between humans here on earth. As I absorbed it more completely, I came to realize that all of his poetry, even his love poetry (which is very suitable for passing on to a loved one) is communicating with God.

Coleman Barks has done an amazing job of giving Rumi's work an accessable voice. He has truly given a gift for which we owe a huge debt of gratitude. Rumi provides the music, Coleman's translations provide the instruments.

Michael Green was obviously inspired by his collaborators to reach his own level of genius in the illustrations. I love the way he combines images from different cultures, different times, and from different disciplines both scientific and artistic! A desert oasis with a photo shot by the Hubble Space Telescope for the sky... The juxtaposition of fractal geometry with images from cultural art... I would gladly hang any of the original art from this book on the walls of my living room.

This book has been and continues to be my favorite gift to people who "get it," and I've probably handed out over 20 copies in the last two years. Do yourself a favor and buy it. I bet you'll be back for more copies.

This is an incredible journey into the most humanly rendered exploration of what it means to be surrendered/searching/dancing with the great mystery. Rumi is--what?-- a fully enlightened mystical poet who somehow speaks through Coleman Barks right to our ragged twentieth century hearts; The wonderful art takes it into a realm beyond words. Are there prints available of his work? Should be.

This translation is better then other translations of Rumi that I have read. I have read this book several times and each time I discover something that I haven't seen befor. I would recomend this book highly.

I appreciate the author's attempt to revive a phenomena which has been dead for a few centuries now. The fact is that suffism never had a useful role in the everyday life of moslems and with all their claims of greatness they could not foresee the collapse of Islamic world, and with it of course the collapse of suffism. We appreciate "romantic" writings of sufis but it would have been more useful if they had engaged in some sort of reform movements in order to possibly prevent the fall of Islamic world. Sufis never bothered with more relevant and practical aspect of human life, they never advanced any political theory to help Islamic world rid of itself from tyrany of authoritarian rulers and indeed it seems as if they approve of such a system and political structure. At anyrate, suffism as we know it, rose to its peak, like Islamic civilization itself, and then declined and died away. Suffism today is a name without a reality, just as Islam is a name without a reality, or if it has a reality it is a confused and confusing reality. It would be interesting to see if authors like Mr. Chittic will be able to breath life into a dead phenomena by romanticizing it.

This is a good book on explaining some of the poems of the great mystic Rumi. I somewhat disagree with the authors choice of title. many great sufis refrained calling themselves sufi, after the movement became popularized and took a different color. Sufi orders sprung up like mushroom and every group claimed to follow a great mystic figure, like Rumi. one often wonders if Rumi and his like would have approved of notions like "Sufi order" which seems like "feudaliztion" of the movement. Many great mystics avoided " orderization" of their path. Their "order" was simply Islam and the path to realization was sharia itself. To many, becoming a sufi is nothing more than repeating certain names of God about a zillion times and whirling around till one gets dizzy or as one of my modern day sufi friend puts it " one becomes natural high". And that dizziness or " natural high" is interpreted as " self disclosure" of God. It doesn't take much to " unveil" God, does it?

To be very precise this book is full of intoxication and ecstacy of GOD

Whether you are new to Rumi or a devotee, whether you are a seeker of truth and wisdom, or you would simply enjoy a book of wonderful poetry, this is a book you should buy.
First if all, I should explain that I love Rumi and recite Rumi, and do it well enough, that listeners often ask me which book should be chosen. Since the publication of The Soul of Rumi, I find myself saying that if one were to choose two books that are the best of Rumi, the first is the Soul of Rumi, and the second is the Illuminated Rumi. Coleman Barks translations of Rumi have a spirit and beauty that truly reflect Rumi's vision and clarity. Coleman's accompanying dialogues give us a glimpse into Rumi, 13th century Turkey, and Shams, Rumi's mystical friend and teacher.
Coleman makes it easy to understand Rumi's poetry; not just as a translation from the 13 century, but for the wisdom and guidance it offers to all of us, living in the 21st century. The poems in the section on Human Grief were one of the ways I managed to get through this last September.
What is most wonderful for lovers of Rumi, is the order and sections that Coleman chose in this book. This presentation is a wonderful format to help the reader understand the passion and the soul of Rumi. The sections are divided into 'wisdom categories' (my interpretation). The names of the sections communicate the viability of Rumi for today's important life questions. For example, "Living as Evidence", and "The Banquet - This is Enough was Always True", and "The Joke of Materialism". Some sections reflect Sufi concepts like Fana (Dissolving beyond doubt..) and Baqa (reentry into the world, " the Arabic word for living within, ...life lived with clarity and reason, ...the absorbing work of this day"). And for those of us, like myself, who recite Rumi, it is very helpful to have the arrangement by what, in effect, is topics. This book offers insight into Sufism, which in turn can help in the understanding of Islam. But as always, Coleman skirts the links of Rumi's poetry to a particular belief system, and in so doing, keeps Rumi's message in a form most appropriate for today. Rumi himself claimed he bore no label - "Not Christian, Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddist, Sufi or Zen".
And there are so many poems that even I, who usually would sit and devour a Coleman Barks translation, in a day, must go slowly, must savor every moment; and I am so grateful to Coleman for his work and his gift of the Soul of Rumi.
Buy a few copies, the book is beautiful and would make a great gift.

In this new collection of his poetry, as the "moon and evening star do their slow tambourine dance to praise this universe" (p. 201), Rumi tells us, "it's time now to live naked" (p. 32). I've revisited Coleman Bark's popular collection of ESSENTIAL RUMI many times after it was first published in 1997. It became one of my favorite books of poetry, and offered a good introduction to Rumi's intensely spiritual poetry. With this new, equally stunning collection, Barks triumphs again in sharing the ecstasy of reading Rumi.

These days many people associate Afghanistan with terrorists rather than spiritual poets. Born in Afghanistan (p. 3), Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-73) was a thirteenth century Sufi master, and a devout scholar. It was the work of his dervish community, and the aim of his poetry to "open the heart, to explore the mystery of union, to fiercely search for and try to say the truth, and to celebrate the glory and difficulty of being in a human incarnation" (p. 4). Barks' translations succeed in capturing the divine spirit and earthly joys of Rumi's ecstatic verse. In the "forty sections" of poetry collected here, we observe the mystery of gnats becoming buttermilk (pp. 8, 113, 200), chickpeas disappearing into the flavor of soup, a dead mule decaying into the desert, an infant turning to the breast, and moths transformed into candle flames (p. 124). "The same way a branch draws water up many feet," Rumi observes, God is pulling our spirits along (p. 204). He encourages us to polish our hearts with meditation and quietness. "When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy" (p. 79).

Rumi's poetry will appeal to anyone interested in what it means to be fully alive and fully awake, and the poems contained within this new 425-page collection soar from their pages just as high as the poems in Barks' previous bestseller.

G. Merritt

Jelaluddin Rumi has become familiar to Western readers who seek out ecstatic poetry, as more and more translations and commentaries are offered on perhaps this greatest of mystical writers. But as they say, it takes one to know one, and Coleman BarksÕ masterpiece is the obvious product of an attuned heart and poetic soul.

This volume is one of the clearest and most vibrant illustrations of the Ôwild heartÕ Rumi was and is. It is difficult to find superlatives which do justice to the beauty and towering vision this work contains. Every verse, every line seems to open, in some disarmingly simple way, vast new vistas of possibilities for the human spirit.

How good is this book? The highest accolade that can be given Barks is that his brief section introductions, frequently fodder in other volumes exploring Rumi, here are powerful and transformative in their own right. Each one sets up the following verses in a natural and seamless flow. BarksÕ light shines brightly, even in the rarefied company he keeps.

Get this volume and devour it. Then get another copy and give it to someone who is ready for the infinite freedom it open-handedly offers...

Rumi's mystic is the mystic of love which doesnt have beginning and end,wherever you start from , it does represent a portion of flood-wise that sweep out all conventional understanding.Neither Rumi nor Hafez represent any certain culture but LOVE that emerge in forms of paradoxical verses depend on your preception.I respect Rumi's Masnawi as encyclopaedia of mysticism,but I would ruther love Shams valume that has alot to do with human soul,even verses of blasphemous.Masnawi needs more study-background whereas Shams interduce you to the gigant mainstream of love.

This is a highly practical yet lighthearted guide for traversing the spiritual path. Liberally interlaced with Rumi's sublime poetry, Denise Breton and Christopher Largent make the transformational journey comprehensible and alluring offering the reader illuminating insights and beautiful prose. Highly recommended!

I thought I liked Rumi. After reading this tour de force by Breton/Largent, I not only appreciate Rumi, I love Rumi. This book helps us bridge appreciation of Rumi as an artist and spiritual master, and actually apply his perceptions to our own lives in a practical, accessible way. I now read Rumi completely freshly. In fact, Breton and Largent's explanations of Rumi's poetry contain so much wisdom that even without the poetry as a bonus, I would have gotten more than my money's worth. This is the one that is on my bedstand!

Professor Thackston has done admirably with this translation of "Fihi ma fihi." Especially since, in my opinion, this is the hardest of Rumi's works to translate.

In his poetry, Rumi is sublime, and accordingly difficult to translate, but any translator can only do so much with a poem. If you miss some nuances, it's just the tradeoff that the translator of poetry must make. The "Masnavi", on the other hand, is a lengthy work, but it has a coherence that makes the translator's life relatively easy and compels the reader on.

"Fihi ma fihi", however, very often seems to ramble off in a thousand directions. Indeed, sometimes it's hard to escape the feeling that this book was Rumi's attic, all full of jumbled odds and ends, many of them beautiful, but not necessarily in any coherent order. In fact, however, a second reading can reveal that the book is a great deal more than that. If you have been under the impression that Rumi is a sort of Omar Khayyam for the New Age, this book can convince you that just possibly he belongs in company with Shakespeare, Goethe and Pushkin.

This translation is eminently readable and even prods the reader on. Professor Thackston has certainly succeeded in translating Rumi's infallible knack to make us look at the world through different eyes. The one sacrifice was Rumi's elegant rhetoric, which just can't be translated. For that you'll have to learn Farsi. In the meantime, this book is to be enjoyed.

Rumi's discourses are really not so different from his poetry. In each he tries to make the listener (because his style is essentially teacher speaking to apprentice) understand that it is LOGICAL to see how much God loves each person. Because it is more difficult for the rest of us to see what is obvious to those so touched with delight by the intimate presence of God, he uses emotions to convey what to him is the logic. He thus uses poetic language to convey the message, since we find it easier to "understand" an emotive content. Much as Christ spoke in what must have seemed to many impossibly hard-to-understand metaphors, Rumi's discourses do often require an extraordinary "letting go" to sense the logic in his argument. An important work for all the ages.

It is the translation of Fihi Ma Fihi, which is full of Rumi's discourses. It sort of dispells all notions of "sufism vs islam" rather sufism is Islamic Mysticism in the truest sense and Rumi explains why the outter conformity to the Sharia (Sacred Law)is very important (i.e. the religous dispensations that are given to mankind through the last of the revalatory Porphet, according to Islam; Prophet Muhammed saws). He himself was a Hanafi (one of the four schools of law within the Orthodox Islam).

The book really clarifies his thoughts and ideas behind the poems. Lot of western readers of his poems tend to use his semantics and syntex to project their own meaning to it rather than discover the deep insights and the Reality he is trying to point toward.

"I am the servant of the Qur'an While I am still alive.

I am the dust on the path of Muhammad, the Chosen One."

(Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi) http://www.jerrahi.org/writings_english/invitation.htm