RUMI AND SUFISM - Softcover

Vitray-Meyerovitch, Eva De

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Softcover

ISBN 10: 0942996089 ISBN 13: 9780942996081

Publisher: The Post-Apollo Press, 1987

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Nonfiction. Rumi is one of the great mystics of Islam. He founded in the XIIIth century a brotherhood in the Turkish city of Konya, famous for the use of music in the context of spiritual experience. To understand Rumi is to enter the world of Islam in its true sense: known as a "Sufi," Rumi is on par with the spiritual Masters of all great religious traditions. Written by Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, a French scholar who became a believer in Islam through her works on Sufism, this book is the best initiation not only to Rumi, but to Islamic thought: it is clear, elegant, scholarly, beautiful. It is an excellent tool for serious students of Islam as well as for the general public who wants to approach Islamic civilization with the respect and competence it requires. It should be on the program of any studies dealing with Islam, comparative studies of religions, the values and politics of the Islamic world. It is a key to the underlying world-view which it is impossible to understand without comprehending its spiritual roots. But this book is also about the life and writings of one of the great poets of the world.

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From the Publisher:

Although there are a great many books of poetry by Rumi, studies and expositions of his life and work are not readily available. Rumi and Sufism is an accessible yet scholarly introduction to Sufism and to what Rumi represents.

A man of his times and of all times, that was Djalal-od-Din Rumi, a living and brotherly presence throughout the Islamic world with its 800 million inhabitants. From Cairo to Tangiers, from Djakarta to Lahore, in the humblest villages of India, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, his poems are chanted by the crowds during the pilgrimages. As far away as Bosnia-Herzegovina his memory is still revered. In Istanbul there is a cemetary near which the "lovers of Rumi" want to be buried. There were at least a hundred thousand disciples before World War II, with monasteries throughout the Orient and into the Balkans, and chairs where, for seven centuries, his doctrine has been taught. It is acknowledged by the Orientalists that he is the greatest mystical poet of all times and by Easterners that he is only second to the Koran. He was a seer who wrote, at the time of Saint Louis, that if one cut an atom one would find in it a solar system in miniature, and who knew, three centurie! s before Copernicus, not only that the earth turned around the sun, but that there were nine planets, a discovery not made in the West until 1930...

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