Rumi is and essential guide to the new mystical renaissance that is struggling to be born today. He is the spiritual inspiration for the 21st century.

--Andrew Harvey

It seems almost unbelievable in the world of 9/11, Bin Laden and the Clash of Civilizations, but the bestselling poet in the US in the 1990s was not any of the giants of American letters--Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens or Sylvia Plath; nor waas it Shakespeare or Homer or Dante or any European poet. Insteat, remarkably, it was a classically trained Muslim cleric who taught the Islamic Code of Law in a madrasa in what is now Turkey.

--William Dalrymple