On Omid Safi's Radical Love

Omid Safi, an Islamic Studies scholar at Duke University, joins a conversation with Aysha Khan at Religion News Service about how he decided to compile a book of love poetry in translation called Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition. Khan explains, "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." From there: 

“You know, you should publish this,” she told him after a few years. “It touches my heart, and I bet it would touch other people’s hearts as well.”

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.

In a time when most headlines about Muslims revolve around violent extremism, Safi says one of his aims is to show non-Muslim readers that they can’t divorce Rumi’s popular poetry from Islamic scripture and tradition. But, perhaps more important, he also wants to re-educate Muslims to show them the forgotten Islamic roots of these mystical works.

Read on at Religion News Service.