Mowlana Jalaloddin Balkhi (1207-1273), known to the West as Rumi is a Persian poet comparable to the greatest poets of Europe. In 1244, Rumi began the composition of a body (divan) of lyric poems (ghazals) totalling 35,000 verses. In the early 1260s he turned to the composition of his most mature and final work, the mystical masterpiece in six volumes of Persian verses known as the Masnavi-ye Ma'navi 'The Spiritual Couplets'.


Alan Williams was born 1953, Windsor, England. He studied Classics, Persian and Arabic at The Queen's College Oxford, then a PhD in Old and Middle Iranian Studies at SOAS, London, and taught at SOAS, then the Universities of Sussex and Manchester, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion.