Tulips, Tessellation, Translation: The Ethos of Harmony

Featured / November 29, 2023 Tulips, Tessellation, Translation: The Ethos of Harmony The photograph before me is from a summer morning in 1982, from an album of that year’s Eid ul Fitr congregation. Taken with our very basic snapshot camera, the Kodak Tele-Instammatic 608, it lacks the sharpness and vivid colours we are so used […]

Translating Amir Khusrau’s ‘Zihaal-e-Miskeen’, The Ghazal Of Ghazals

Featured / November 27, 2023 Translating Amir Khusrau’s ‘Zihaal-e-Miskeen’, The Ghazal Of Ghazals ‘Zihaal’ is a paradox: it combines two disparate languages so successfully in the ghazal form that they eventually became one language. On the other hand, this ghazal defies text, it defies a satisfactory interpretation of its gestures without oral rendition. Poetry often […]

Rumi And The Clock Of Shams Tabrizi

Rumi / November 22, 2023 Rumi And The Clock Of Shams Tabrizi A tree in the vicinity of Rumi’s tomb has me transfixed. It isn’t the tree, actually, it is the force of attraction between tree-branch and sun-ray that seems to lift the tree off the ground and swirl it in sunshine, casting filigreed shadows on the […]

Rumi, Adab, And the Beauty Of Boundaries

Featured / November 8, 2023 Rumi, Adab, And The Beauty Of Boundaries I was so excited to meet Azra Bayru Kumcuoğlu, Rumi’s granddaughter (23rd generation) for breakfast on my latest visit to Istanbul— that I wore my pearls early in the morning and popped into a salon across from Boğaziçi University campus where I had […]