Sufism Books

The Gift

Hafiz

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 74 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Hafiz, a secret Sufi, came to prominence in his day as a writer of love poems. That love transformed into an all-consuming passion for union with the divine. In The Gift, Daniel Ladinsky bestows on us the impassioned yet whimsical strains of Hafiz's ecstasy. Never forced or awkward, Ladinsky's Hafiz whispers in your ear and pounds in your chest, naming God in a hundred metaphors.

I once asked a bird,
"How is it that you fly in this gravity
Of darkness?"
She responded,
"Love lifts
Me."

Like Fitzgerald's version of Khayyam's Rubaiyat, the language of The Gift strikes a contemporary chord, resonating in the reader's mind and then in the heart. Ladinsky's language is plain, fresh, playful--dancing with an expert cadence that invites and surprises. If it is true, as Hafiz says, that a poet is someone who can pour light into a cup, reading Ladinsky's Hafiz is like gulping down the sun. --Brian Bruya

Essential Rumi

Jalal al-Din Rumi

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Total reviews: 68 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

No translator could do greater justice to the gorgeous simplicity of Rumi's poetry than Coleman Barks has done here. These exquisite renderings of the 13th-century Persian mystic's words into American free verse capture all the "inner searching, the delicacy, and simple groundedness" that characterize Rumi's poetry while remaining faithful to the images, tone, and spiritual message of the originals. Barks's introductions to each of the 27 sections (described as "playful palimpsests spread over Rumi's imagination," and "meant to confuse scholars who would divide Rumi's poetry into the accepted categories") are themselves wonderful achievements of a poetic imagination; searching explanations of unfamiliar concepts and funny stories provide colorful background and frame the selections as no dry historical exegesis could.

While Barks's stamp on this collection is clear, it in no way interferes with the poems themselves; Rumi's voice leaps off these pages with an ecstatic energy that leaves readers breathless. There are poems of love, rage, sadness, pleading, and longing; passionate outbursts about the torture of longing for his beloved and the sweet pleasure that comes from their union; amusing stories of sexual exploits or human weakness; and quiet truths about the beauty and variety of human emotion. More than anything, Rumi makes plain the unbridled joy that comes from living life fully, urging us always to put aside our fears and take the risk to do so. As he says: "The way of love is not / a subtle argument. / The door there is devastation. / Birds make great sky-circles / of their freedom. / How do they learn it? / They fall, and falling, / they're given wings." --Uma Kukathas

The Illuminated Rumi

Jalal Al-Din Rumi

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Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Rise up nimbly and go on your strange journey to the ocean of meanings...

In the mid-thirteenth century, in a dusty marketplace in Konya, Turkey, a city where Muslim, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist travelers mingled, Jelaluddin Rumi, a popular philosopher and scholar, met Shams of Tabriz, a wandering dervish.  Their meeting forever altered the course of Rumi's life and influenced the mystical evolution of the planet.  The bond they formed was everlasting--a powerful transcendent friendship that would flow through Rumi as some of the world's best-loved ecstatic poetry.

Rumi's passionate, playful poems find and celebrate sacred life in everyday existence.  They speak across all traditions, to all peoples, and today his relevance and popularity continue to grow.  In The Illuminated Rumi, Coleman Barks, widely regarded as the world's premier translator of Rumi's writings, presents some of his most brilliant work, including many new translations.  To complement Rumi's universal vision, Michael Green has worked the ancient art of illumination into a new, visually stunning form that joins typography, original art, old masters, photographs, and prints with sacred images from around the world.

The Illuminated Rumi is a truly groundbreaking collaboration that interweaves word and image: a magnificent meeting of ancient tradition and modern interpretation that uniquely captures the spiritual wealth of Rumi's teachings.  Coleman Barks's wise and witty commentary, together with Michael Green's art, makes this a classic guide to the life of the soul for a whole new generation of seekers.

The Subject Tonight Is Love: Sixty Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz

Hafiz

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Divine Hafiz 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

A lifelong fan (dare I say devoted?) to Hafiz and his many works, this book is a must have. Nothing compares to reading Hafiz in Persian, but this book comes very, very close. Hafiz is enlightening, spiritual, refreshing, and above all, very full of wisdom. His works are truly magical, especially considering after all these years, people are still compelled to his work and mystified by his writings. Classic.

Luminous soul food! 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Hafiz is, together with Rumi, simply one of the greatest poets to have walked on this earth (in my opinion), and Ladinsky's translations bring them to English speakers in a way that we can easliy and deliciously assimilate. This book of enlightening poems will make your soul glow and shiver with delight, if only you let it...

Editorial Review:

To Persians, the fourteenth-century poems of Hafiz are not classical literature from a remote past, but cherished love, wisdom, and humor from a dear and intimate friend. Perhaps, more than any other Persian poet, it is Hafiz who most fully accesses the mystical, healing dimensions of poetry. Daniel Ladinsky has made it his life's work to create modern, inspired translations of the world's most profound spiritual poetry. Through Ladinsky's translations, Hafiz's voice comes alive across the centuries singing his message of love.

A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

Coleman Barks

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Mediocre 2 out of 5 stars.
29 of 38 people found this review helpful.

While Coleman Barks is to be commended for introducing many people to Rumi, his renditions of Rumi's poems scarcely reflect the original Persian. Barks, who does not speak Persian (another word for Farsi), took much better translations for AJ Arberry, and rephrased them for his books. In the process, he lost much of the accuracy and most of the character of the original poetry. Those interested in better translations of Rumi should get a hold of Reynold Nicholson's or AJ Arberry's translations.

Editorial Review:

Coleman Barks has played a central role in making the Sufi mystic Rumi the most popular poet in the world. A Year with Rumi brings together 365 of Barks's elegant and beautiful translations of Rumi's greatest poems, including fifteen never-before-published poems.

Barks includes an Introduction that sets Rumi in his context and an Afterword musing on poetry of the mysterious and the sacred. Join Coleman Barks and Rumi for a year-long journey into the mystical and sacred within and without. Join them in recognizing and embracing the divine in the sublime, in the ordinary, and in us all.

The Forbidden Rumi: The Suppressed Poems of Rumi on Love, Heresy, and Intoxication

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The first collection of poems translated into English from the forbidden volume of the Divan of Rumi

• Presents Rumi’s most heretical and free-form poems

• Includes introductions and commentary that provide both 13th-century context and modern interpretation

After his overwhelming and life-altering encounters with Shams of Tabriz, Rumi, the great thirteenth-century mystic, poet, and originator of the whirling dervishes, let go of many of the precepts of formal religion, insisting that only a complete personal dissolving into the larger energies of God could provide the satisfaction that the heart so desperately seeks. He began to speak spontaneously in the language of poetry, and his followers compiled his 44,000 verses into 23 volumes, collectively called the Divan.

When Nevit Ergin decided to translate the Divan of Rumi into English, he enlisted the help of the Turkish government, which was happy to participate. The first 22 volumes were published without difficulty, but the government withdrew its support and refused to participate in the publication of the final volume due to its openly heretical nature. Now, in The Forbidden Rumi, Will Johnson and Nevit Ergin present for the first time in English Rumi’s poems from this forbidden volume. The collection is grouped into three sections: songs to Shams and God, songs of heresy, and songs of advice and admonition. In them Rumi explains that in order to transform our consciousness, we must let go of ingrained habits and embrace new ones. In short, we must become heretics.

The Mysticism of Sound and Music (Shambhala Dragon Editions)

Hazrat Inayat Khan

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The wave-like aspect of Life, not just about music 5 out of 5 stars.
24 of 25 people found this review helpful.

Other reviewers already dealt with the music side of the book, so i won't elaborate on that. There is in addition the purely sound-related aspect of reality. All words, thoughts, and emotions, carry on some power due to their vibratory nature. Everything, whatever it is can be seen as a wave. So don't think it is just about what you hear. All there is can be described in that way.

This book is of interest not for its esoteric nature, but rather to give the reader an intuition of what mystics perceive of reality, which is everything but magic. Science is currently concerned with a part of reality, namely those frequencies that can be detected and thus measured through physical (material) instruments. But the vibratory nature of the world goes beyond that. You as humans have access to more than the physical realm (mental, emotional, and let's say "spiritual" to give a rough picture). This books hints at those aspects captured by the concept of "sound", that are of utmost importance for all humans to uncover the possibilities life has given them. Everything you think, say or feel has an impact on you and your surroundings, so reading this book can help you to realize how important every single event of our life has, through its wave-like aspect. This book is about your very life.

Editorial Review:

Music, according to Sufi teaching, is really a small expression of the overwhelming and perfect harmony of the whole universe—and that is the secret of its amazing power to move us. The Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), the first teacher to bring the Islamic mystical tradition to the West, was an accomplished musician himself. His lucid exposition of music's divine nature has become a modern classic, beloved only by those interested in Sufism but by musicians of all kinds.

The Sufis

Idries Shah

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Caged Indian Bird 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

A woman owns a talking parrot from India. She's going to visit India, and asks the bird if he'd like her to do anything. He asks for his freedom, but the woman says 'No.' So he asks her to find his relatives and tell them he's a prisoner.

When she gets back, the bird asks about his relatives. She says, "I'm so sorry. When I told them you're in a cage, one of them dropped dead at my feet on the spot."

At this, the parrot stiffened, twirled on his perch, and dropped dead at the bottom of the cage. The woman picked him up, saw no signs of life, and laid his limp body on the windowsill--and the bird snapped to life and flew to freedom in a nearby tree.

He turned to his mistress and said, "You thought you were bringing bad news from my relatives--but in fact, you carried a message from them that told me how to escape."

The Sufis say that humans are "caged," too, but have a real self that is naturally free. This self is chained by "jealous owners," so the means of escape must be signalled in a way that is obvious, but disguised and subtle: rather like an "open secret" that can slip past (and even be delivered by) the guards, but be recognized and put to use by those who are watching for it.

"The Sufis" contains many things, and people see it in many ways. Some praise, some dismiss. The book itself says Sufi teaching can provoke scorn and praise, irritation and delight--even in the same reader--but such reactions are irrelevant. The real question is, "Can the intended reader use and gain from the material?"

As the Indian Bird said, "You thought you were bringing bad news, but in reality, you gave me the hint I needed to escape."

Editorial Review:

A unique and little-known religion, Sufism follows a mystical teaching and a way of life that has had an enormous though largely unrecognized impact on both the East and West for four thousand years.  This authoritative book fills a colossal gap in Western documentation of Eastern subjects.

The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The headlines are filled with the politics of Islam, but there is another side to the world's fastest-growing religion. Sufism is the poetry and mysticism of Islam. This mystical movement from the early ninth century rejects worship motivated by the desire for heavenly reward or the fear of punishment, insisting rather on the love of God as the only valid form of adoration. Sufism has made significant contributions to Islamic civilization in music and philosophy, dance and literature. The Sufi poet Rumi is the bestselling poet in America. But in recent centuries Sufism has been a target for some extremist Islamic movements as well as many modernists. The Garden of Truth presents the beliefs and vision of the mystical heart of Islam, along with a history of Sufi saints and schools of thought.

In a world threatened by religious wars, depleting natural resources, a crumbling ecosystem, and alienation and isolation, what has happened to our humanity? Who are we and what are we doing here? The Sufi path offers a journey toward truth, to a knowledge that transcends our mundane concerns, selfish desires, and fears. In Sufism we find a wisdom that brings peace and a relationship with God that nurtures the best in us and in others.

Noted scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr helps you learn the secret wisdom tradition of Islam and enter what the ancient mystics call the "garden of truth." Here, liberate your mind, experience peace, discover your purpose, fall in love with the Divine, and find your true, best self.

Tales of the Dervishes

Idries Shah

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Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A mysterious chest is buried unopened. A wondrous caravan brings fortune to a simple cobbler. An outcast princess creates a new life in the wilderness. Some of the 78 tales in this remarkable book first appeared in print over a thousand years ago, others are medieval classics. Yet, each has a special relevance for us in the 21st century. All are told with Idries Shah's distinctive wit and grace and the author's own commentary notes.

Although enormously attractive as sheer entertainment, dervish tales were never presented merely on the level of fable, legend or folklore.

They stand comparison in wit, construction and piquancy with the finest stories of any culture, yet their true function as Sufi teaching stories is so little known in the modern world that no technical or popular term exist to describe them. For centuries, dervish masters have instructed their disciples by means of these tales, which are held to convey powers of increasing perception unknown to the ordinary man.

These are teaching stories in the Sufi tradition. Those who probe beyond the surface will find multiple meanings to challenge assumptions and foster new ways of thinking and perceiving.

Sold all over the world in many languages, this is deservedly a classic and an essential reading for anyone interested in Sufi thought, the significance and history of tales, or simply superb entertainment.