Where to start with Sufi poetry
English versions of Rumi give you the music first; the Masnavi restores the stories, theology, and sustained argument around it.
Rumi has reached you as detached lines about love, and you want to hear the Islamic tradition and Persian poem those lines came through.
Reading the Essential Rumi as if Rumi were a wellness poet, missing that every poem is sitting inside a serious thirteenth-century religious tradition. Or going straight to the Masnavi cold — six volumes of teaching poetry, full of stories, parables, and arguments — and concluding the deeper Rumi is impenetrable.
Books in order
- The Essential Rumi — Read a few poems at a time, slowly, aloud. Coleman Barks's versions are not literal — they are the Rumi most modern English readers have loved, and they are honest about being versions rather than translations. Use them as the door, not as the destination.
- Masnavi-ye Ma'navi — The deep-end Rumi — six volumes of teaching poetry, full of stories about merchants, parrots, lovers, and saints. Read in a modern translation with the stories preserved. Take it slowly, a book at a time. The argument is the form: every parable is doing the same work the lyric poems were doing in miniature.
Further reading
- The Divan of Hafiz — The other towering Persian Sufi poet, the lyric companion to Rumi's teaching voice. Not in this catalog yet, but the natural companion when it arrives.
- The Conference of the Birds — Attar's long allegorical poem about the birds searching for their king. Often paired with Rumi as the third great Sufi text. Not in this catalog yet.