the divan

For more than seven hundred years, Jalal al-Din Rumi has been especially loved by poetry readers all over the world. Rumi was a respected Muslim teacher and cleric when he met Shamsh, a wandering dervish who turned his world upside down. Full of inspiration and at the same time deeply disturbed by the meeting with him, Rumi is driven almost involuntarily to create these love songs for the divine friend.

In these early poems, Rumi reveals that all the ecstasy and joy, and all the pain and grief that his lover caused him, are nothing more than grains of wheat to be ground, kneaded and baked into bread, to be served to anyone who is hungry. His poems form a bridge between a universal understanding of spirituality and between the personal and intimate dimensions of love, and encourage us to enter the depth of our being, more and more.