Notes on Contributors 

Robert (Abdul Hayy) Darr travelled and lived in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1980s. He was introduced to Sufism in the 1970s through the works of Idries Shah. By 1985 he left the Shah groups and began working in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan and making overland trips inside of Afghanistan. In the ensuing years, he befriended a number of Sufis in the region. Darr spent the next couple of decades studying traditional Sufism along with specialized disciplines such as abjad (Islamic numerology). He has been for almost two decades the stu- dent of the Afghan Sufi, Raz Mohammed Zaray. For a decade, he studied miniature painting with Afghanistan’s great miniaturist, Homayon Etemadi (died 2007). Darr is the author of The Spy of the Heart (2007), a personal autobiographical account of initiation into a Sufi order in Afghanistan, and several books on Islamic mysticism (Sufism), including a translation of the Quatrains of Khalilullah Khalili (2002), and a translation of The Garden of Mystery: The Gulshan-i raz of Mahmud Shabistari (2007).

Shems Friedlander is a professor at the American University in Cairo and has studied with Sufi shaykhs throughout the Middle East: in Mecca, Medina, Cairo and Istanbul. He is the author of many books including Rumi: The Hidden Treasure, and Rumi and the Whirling Dervishes as well as the acclaimed When You Hear Hoofbeats Think of a Zebra. He has held many exhibitions of his photography and paintings and has won more than 30 awards, including the Silver Award of the New York Art Directors’ Club for graphic design. He has also directed and produced several short films, including Rumi: The Wings of Love.

Ibrahim Gamard is a Shaykh in the Mawlawi (Mevlevi) Order of Sufism, authorized by Faruk Hemdem Çelebi, the 22nd generation direct descen- dent of Mawlana Rumi and the international leader of the Mawlawi tradition. His affiliation began when he was initiated as a Mevlevi whirler (semazen) in 1976. He converted to Islam in 1984 and went on the pilgrimage to 240 contributors

Mecca in 1999. Dr Gamard is a psychologist by profession, but his main passion has been studying Mawlana’s poetry in Persian. He began teach- ing himself to read Persian in 1981 for the sole purpose of reading Mawlana’s works. In 1985, he met Dr Rawan Farhadi, an Afghan scholar who was teaching Persian literature at the University of California in Berkeley; that was when Dr Farhadi suggested that they translate the nearly 2,000 quatrains attributed to Mawlana. After collaborating in their spare time and adding many improvements, their work was finally pub- lished as The Quatrains of Rumi (2008). Dr Gamard is also the author of Rumi and Islam: Selections from His Stories, Poems, and Discourses (2004), translations of verses in which Mawlana praised the noble virtues of the Prophet Muhammad. In 2001, he began a website (www.dar-al-masnavi. org) with translations, commentary, and transliterations from Mawlana’s works, plus articles related to the Mawlawi tradition.

Terry Graham is a writer, journalist and filmmaker, as well as transla- tor from French, Persian, Russian, German, Spanish and Italian. A graduate of Harvard University in History and Literature, he has done postgraduate work in Persian literature at Tehran University. He has spent twelve years in Iran, working for Iranian television and English- and French-language newspapers. He has written numerous articles, lectured on Sufism in English, Persian and Italian, and translated the 16-volume Persian termi- nological compendium Sufi Symbolism and other works by the late Sufi master, Dr Javad Nurbakhsh. Before his retirement, he served four years in the US army, leaving as sergeant with bronze star for merit, followed by a spate of globetrotting, working as a merchant seaman on Scandi navian ships, as a logger in the northwestern United States, and as a mineworker and ranch-hand (station hand) in Australia, among other enterprises.

Roderick Grierson is Mentes‚ezade Research Fellow and Director of the Rumi Institute at Near East University, Nicosia, Cyprus. He has recently edited and written an introduction to Deviant Histories: New Perspectives on Turkish Sufism, a translation of Ahmed Yas‚ar Ocak’s Türk Sufîlîg˘ine Bakıs‚lar, which has been published by Near East University Press. He has also edited and prepared an introduction and bibliography for a revised version of The City of the Heart, the first translation into English of the complete text of Yunus Emre’s Divan according to the edition published in 1961 by Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı. In 2009, he delivered the Süha Faiz Memorial Lectures, which will be published as The Road to the City of the