The Life of Rumi in Rare Islamic Manuscript Paintings from the 1590s
A handful of Persian accounts of Rumi’s life have been written, most famously the first by his son and the third, focusing on Rumi’s moralizing miracle stories, ordered by Rumi’s grandson and written by the dervish Shams al-Din Ahmad, called Aflaki (d. 1360). In 1590, some three and a half centuries after Aflaki’s writings, the Ottoman sultan Murad III ordered a Turkish translation of a 1540 abridged version of Aflaki’s text entitled Tarjuma-i Thawaqib-i manaqib (Stars of the Legend). Two illustrated copies of the Murad translation survive — one, dated 1599, is held by Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace and features 22 miniatures; the other, a more lavish manuscript dating to the 1590s and including 29 miniatures, is held by New York’s Morgan Library.
From The Morgan Library’s collection of Islamic manuscript paintings comes this remarkable glimpse of the rare manuscript, which captures the illustrated “life and miracles”” of Rumi with equal parts visual poetry and deep respect.
See larger selected images here.
See the full selection here.
Rumi's Circle 
Reblogged this on Syeda Abeer Fatima's Blog. and commented:
Life of Rumi
Thanks for sharing Syeda!
“Rumi and His Friends: Stories of the Lovers of God”–a beautiful rendering of Aflaki’s text, translated by Sh. Camille Helminski and Susan Blaylock, was recently published by Fons Vitae and is available from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rumi-His-Friends-Stories-Lovers/dp/1887752889/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391544642&sr=8-1&keywords=rumi+and+his+friends
Thanks Sadat.
We also have extracts from the book here:
https://rumiscircle.com/2013/10/03/rumi-and-his-friends-stories-of-the-lovers-of-god/