Quello che cerchi sta cercando te

Poet, Sufi mystic, free thinker, propagator, and innovator of a millennial tradition, Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh (present-day Afghanistan), surrounded by the greatness of Persian literature and the magic of Koranic Arabic. But it was the sunset of an era - that of the Baghdad Caliphate, the golden age of Islamic culture - crushed by the invasion of Genghis Khan. It was this violence that Rumi shunned his entire life, ever since he fled Balkh with his father as a young boy.

Beloved throughout the world even today, for Kader Abdolah - who grew up with his poems - Rumi is not just a myth, but a kindred spirit: like him an exile, like him an emissary of a culture so ancient that it survives the whims of bloody power. Like him, he found a new life in exile.

Along the Silk Road, the young Rumi came to know the world: between madrasas and bazaars, he visited Baghdad, Mecca, and Aleppo, learning the Greek of Plato and also Latin. Finally, in his new home in Konya, Turkey, with a wife and children, he discovered love: that of Shams of Tabriz - the 'Sun of Tabriz,' as his name implies - a refuge from an existence of rigid rules and the inspiration for unforgettable poetry.

Love, pain, flight, the meaning of life, the joy of freedom and instinct: between Persia and the Netherlands, humanity is always in search of a truth that it can only find within itself and express only through literature. Abdolah, an exiled storyteller afflicted by nostalgia, recounts Rumi’s journey like a tale from the Thousand and One Nights, adding his own personal versions of over ninety poems and many stories by the great mystic. In doing so, he becomes a bridge between the Persian Middle Ages and contemporary Europe.

Author: Kader Abdolah

Kader Abdolah is an Iranian-Dutch author. He fled Iran in 1988 as a political dissident and settled in the Netherlands. Remarkably, he learned Dutch and began writing his novels in his adopted language, becoming one of the most prominent contemporary Dutch writers.