Abdolhossein Zarrinkub’s book on Rumi’s life story published in Bosnian

TEHRAN – Iranian litterateur Abdolhossein Zarrinkub’s book “Step by Step Up to Union with God” (“Stepen po stepen do susreta s Bogom”) has been published in the Bosnian language.

Buybook, a publishing house in Sarajevo, is the publisher of the book, which is about the life, thoughts and spiritual journey of the celebrated 13th-century Persian mystic and poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi.

Elvir Musić has rendered the book from its Persian edition first published in 1980.

With his great expert initiative, Zarrinkub illustrates the poet’s life and spiritual journey from childhood, travels with his father at the age of thirteen from Khorasan and Baghdad to Anatolia, to eventually settle in Konya.

Zarrinkub also scrutinizes the revelation Rumi experienced in his childhood, the God-fearing and the adulation he praised, the years spent in search of knowledge in various traditional schools of that age, until the moment when he decided to leave everything behind and totally dedicate himself to a spiritual journey where he would finally write the Masnavi, an overwhelming masterpiece of Sufi literature that would perpetuate him as the greatest mystical poet of the Islamic world.

An English translation of “Step by Step Up to Union with God” by Majdeddin Keyvani was published by Mazda Publishers in the United States in 2009.

Zarinkub was a prominent scholar of Iranian literature, history of literature, Persian culture, and history. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tehran in 1955 under the supervision of Badiozzaman Foruzanfar, and held faculty positions at prestigious universities such as Oxford University, Sorbonne and Princeton University, among many others.

Due to his pioneering works on Iranian literature, literary criticism and comparative literature, he is considered as the father of modern Persian literature.

Zarrinkub’s solid research works made him a world-class Iranologist and the undisputed master of Persian literature and poetry.

The Bosnian publisher Buybook has previously published books by other Iranian writers, including Reza Amirkhani.

His novel “His Ego” (“Njen Ja”) was published last November.

Mostafa Mastur’s novella “Pig’s Bone and Leper’s Hands” (“Svinjska kost u leproznoj ruci”) was also published by Buybook in 2018.

Courtesy of Tehran Times