Now in paperback, a new translation of the Sufi mystic's verse, hailed as  authentic" and  exquisite." Championed by icons of American pop culture such as Madonna, Donna Karan, and Deepak Chopra, Rumi has won such a following in this country that he was once proclaimed our bestselling poet. But translations that have popularized the work of this thirteenth-century Sufi mystic have also strayed from its essence. In this fresh translation from the Persian, Farrukh Dhondy seeks to recover both the lyrical beauty and the spiritual essence of the original verse. In poems of love and devotion, rapture and suffering, loss and yearning for oneness, Dhondy has rediscovered the Islamic mystic of spiritual awakening whose quest is the key to his universal appeal. Here is at once a great poet of love, both human and divine, and the authentic voice of a moderate Islam a voice that can resonate in today's turbulent, fundamentalist times.

Rumi's poems bring together the divine and the human, the mystical and the corporeal to create a vivid kaleidoscope of poetic images. While many recent 'translations' have sought to give Rumi's poetry a certain hippy sensibility, robbing it of its true essence, Farrukh Dhondy attempts to bring out the beauty and sensibility of the verses whilst imitating the metre of the original. Dhondy's translations provide a modern idiom to the poems, carefully keeping intact their religious context.

Farrukh Dhondy was born in Poona in 1944 and come to England to study in 1965. Here he threw himself into political activism. He joined the Indian Workers Association, and then the British Black Panthers and Race Today, where he worked alongside Darcus Howe, C L R James and leading figures of the liberation movement. In between he was leading squatter strikes in Brixton, hanging with Pink Floyd, and interviewing the Beatles. In the 1980s he started to write and was also made the Commissioning editor of mulitcultural programming and was instrumental in bringing Desmonds, and Tandoori Nights to the screen, as well as ground breaking Bandung File documentaries. His first novel, Bombay Duck, won the Whitbread prize in 1980. In Fragments Towards My Ruin, Dhondy explores his life of moments to salvage against the ruin of age. It is a fascinating portrait of politics, culture, friendship and the determination to break down boundaries. Packed with fascinating stories from why Jeffrey Archer was arrested as well as portraits of figures such as Richard Attenborough, CLR James, Arundhati Roy, VS Naipaul, and Charles Sobhraj.