Omid Safi's 'Radical Love' recenters Sufi poetry within Islam

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

Omid Safi’s latest project was a labor of love, in the most literal sense.
Safi lives in North Carolina, where he leads the Islamic Studies Center at Duke University. His fiancée is based in Switzerland. “We had a long-distance romance, a kind of old-fashioned courtship with us exchanging letters every few days,” he said. So he began translating his favorite poetry from Islam’s mystical Sufi tradition to send to her.

With her encouragement, he compiled all the verses he’d translated into a book, “Radical Love,” published in May. It contains more than 200 poems translated from their original Arabic, Turkish, Urdu and Persian, including those by the 13th-century Sufi master Rumi.
The collection situates Safi’s translations of love-drunk Sufi poetry alongside selections from the Holy Quran and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, showing the deep Islamic roots of the writings of Sufi mystics like Rumi and Hafez.

And also,

For a Muslim audience, there is this extraordinary, rich, mystical, spiritual and poetic voice that has historically been the dominant Muslim worldview. In the last 1,400 years of Islamic thought, one would be extremely hard-pressed to think of a Muslim whose teachings and writings have been more influential on more Muslims in more countries in more time periods than Rumi. From India to Bosnia, Rumi was a dominant voice in all these places.

To read more:

https://religionnews.com/2018/06/11/omid-safis-radical-love-recenters-sufi-poetry-within-islam/