#73: Is the Rumi You Know Even Rumi? | 25 Years Translating the Masnavi — Jawid Mojaddedi

Is the Rumi quoted on Instagram the same Rumi who wrote the Masnavi?

For 25 years, Rutgers scholar Jawid Mojaddedi has been doing something no one had ever done before: translating all six books of Rumi's 26,000-verse masterwork, the Masnavi, into English verse — faithfully, completely, and for the first time ever unabridged. In 2025, he finished it.

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka sits down with Professor Mojaddedi to talk about what it actually took to finish a quarter-century translation project, what the Masnavi is really saying beneath its most famous opening image — the reed flute crying out in separation from its source — and why the "Rumi" beloved by millions of English readers may be further from the original than anyone realizes.

We talk about:

The Song of the Reed: the opening passage that unlocks the entire 26,000-verse poem

Why the Masnavi has been called "the Qur'an in Persian" for centuries

Rumi as a trained Islamic theologian and jurist — not just a mystic

What was lost, and what wasn't, in the West's most popular versions of Rumi's poetry

Twenty-five years, six books: what changed in Mojaddedi's own understanding of Rumi along the way

The Sufi doctrine of "friendship with God" (wilaya) and how it shaped Rumi's teaching

Book Six and fana: what the poem — and the translation — resolves toward at the end

This is a conversation about translation, fidelity, longing, and what it means for a 750-year-old Persian poem to still be the best-selling poetry in North America.

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