Shams-i Tabriz, dedicated to Shams al-Din Tabrizi
and totaling over 35,000 lines of poetry, and a col-
lection of rhymed couplets called the Mathnawi-i
maanawi (also known as the Masnavi), which
includes more than 25,000 lines of Persian verse.
Rumi’s lectures and conversations were collected
in a work called Fihi ma fihi (In it is what is in
it). Important themes in Rumi’s poetry include
the spiritual quest, the search for the inner sig-
nificance of words and practices, the unity of
existence, and especially divine love.
After Rumi’s death, his followers formed the
mevlevi sUFi order, which eventually became
famous as the “whirling dervishes” for its stan-
dardized version of Rumi’s ecstatic samaa. The
order also perpetuated Rumi’s memory through
recitation of, and commentary on, the Math-
nawi. Rumi’s poetry has been immensely popular
throughout the Muslim world, especially in Tur-
key and Iran. He has also recently enjoyed great
popularity in Europe and the Americas due to
translations and interpretations of his poetry in
an accessible free verse style. Rumi’s poetry of love
continues to touch people everywhere.
See also dhikr; persian langUage and litera-
tUre; sUFism; tUrkey.
Mark SoileauFurther reading: Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi Past and
Present, East and West (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000); Jalal
al-Din Rumi, The Masnavi, Book One. Translated and
edited by Jawid Mojaddedi (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004); Annemarie Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun:
A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi (London: East-
West Publications, 1978).
Rushdie, Salman (1947– ) award-winning
author who was forced into hiding from 1989 to 1998
due to a death sentence issued by Ayatollah Khomeini
Salman Rushdie is an acclaimed novelist and
critic who became a household name after his
1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, drew protests from
numerous Muslims and Muslim groups because of
its treatment of mUhammad, his wives, and com-
panions. Ayatollah rUhollah khomeini (d. 1989),
iran’s conservative religious leader, pronounced
a FatWa (legal opinion) in 1989 that sentenced
Rushdie to death, and, as a result, Rushdie was
forced into hiding from 1989 to 1998. As of this
writing, Rushdie lives in the United states, divid-
ing his time between Los Angeles, Atlanta, and
New York City.
Rushdie was born to Muslim parents in Bom-
bay, india, and educated at the Cathedral School
there. In 1961 he left India to attend Rugby, a
prestigious boarding school in England. Rushdie
then attended King’s College, Cambridge, where
he wrote a paper on Muhammad and the origins
of Islam for the first part of his history exami-
nations. Early literary influences on Rushdie
included the Arabic classic The Thousand and One
Nights (also known as the arabian nights) and
the Urdu (an Indian language which is the official
language of Pakistan) poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (d.
1984), a family friend.
Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus (1975), a varia-
tion of the medieval Sufi (mystic) poet Farid
al Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, was a
commercial and critical failure. His second novel,
Midnight’s Children (1981), about the lives of
1,001 children born at the stroke of midnight on
India’s independence from Britain, won him criti-
cal acclaim, including the 1981 Booker Prize. In
that book Rushdie’s satirical portrayal of India’s
leader Indira Gandhi resulted in a lawsuit that was
resolved when a sentence considered particularly
hurtful by Gandhi was omitted from subsequent
editions of the novel. His third novel, Shame
(1983), satirized Pakistani politics (and politi-
cians such as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto [d. 1979] and
General Zia al Haqq [d. 1988]) in the way that its
predecessor had satirized Indian politics. Clearly,
Rushdie knew much about Islam, Muslims, and
South Asian politics and culture.
The Satanic Verses (1988) was Rushdie’s fourth
novel, and it dealt with the theme of migration,
of being brown in England, and the multipleK (^594) Rushdie, Salman